Fried

On recovering creatively from disappointment, burnout, and... joy?

Like many of us, I woke up last Wednesday morning to what I considered to be truly depressing election news. I say I “woke up,” but really I had barely slept, and I had barely slept the night before either, because I had spent Election Day working the polls, a 16-hour shift that requires getting up at 4am.

I spent most of Wednesday in something between a furious daze and a numb misery. I fantasized about becoming a recluse and simply living out the rest of my days deep in the woods somewhere. Or maybe moving to France. More than anything I was mad, and disappointed in my country for reelecting a man so clearly unfit for the job, with zero interest in helping anyone but himself, when they had a woman right in front of them with real plans to make things better. I told my students the next day that it felt like the nation had just taken an open book test, and failed. I’d knocked doors, given money, patiently persuaded reluctant friends to vote, and followed every in and every out of the campaign… only to lose worse than I’d even anticipated we might.

The other night, my daughter asked to see some photos of herself as a baby, and I brought up images from early 2017 without realizing at first that I was summoning back memories from the beginning of the first Trump presidency. It was the metaphorical glass of cold water in my face.

My strong reaction was to think that, this time, I wanted to handle it all differently. Needed to.

Last time, not only was it so much more of a shock, but my life was in a very different place. We were about to have a baby, we had just bought a house in the suburbs—ending a 14-year stretch in the city and my whole adult identity as a New Yorker. My agent and I had just gone out on submission with my third novel, LOOPS, a week before the election… expecting a big hit and instead entering the first of three long and draining cycles of rejections that would carry me well into 2017.

I wasted that year, creatively. I was doomscrolling on social media and watching the news like a hawk, engrossing myself in hours per day of Resistance podcasts and reports on investigations into Russian interference and on and on and on. I was barely sleeping, trying to readjust to life with an infant, trying to be a good parent to my first child, and wasting the precious few hours I might have spent in creative mode by dwelling on the ongoing trauma of the first Trump presidency.

Looking back, I don’t regret being engaged or taking serious threats seriously. But I do regret not balancing it better with time to restore myself creatively and emotionally. Certainly the hours I spent learning about which Russian oligarch’s planes had been spotted at which airports, and exactly what Paul Manafort was doing in Prague, and a million other such things that I can’t even remember anymore… I could have used that time better. And been happier for it, and the world would have been no worse off in the end.

I don’t think the answer to our problems is sticking our heads in the sand. Of course not… but wasting hours on keeping up with every Breaking News Alert won’t help anyone either.

My dream for this election was that as we all entered at last into the death of Trumpism and the beginning of some new, better age. That by now I’d be putting all my energy into renewed creativity… writing something big and audacious and fun and powerful and dazzling over the next few years.

Since the first part is now not happening, I thought I should start thinking about how best to ensure the second part still does.

How do we maintain creativity in times of stress and anxiety?

On top of everything else, I’m wrapping up a year of book promotion—actually make that dual book promotion—and so I’m not just burned out on politics right now.

I’ve been doing events, pitching essays, preparing for interviews, on and on, every week since the summer. It’s all exciting stuff, but as I’ve written about before, when the author hat goes on, the writer hat comes off, at least temporarily. Being “on” in that way sometimes takes a lot out of me and certainly it eats up a lot of time in the week. It’s hard to maintain the habits that help sustain a new creative project when you’re always interrupting yourself to be a salesman for the last one (or two).

And a final point there—I want to really stress this, too… the experience of publishing both of these books has been a really incredible and joyful one.

In 2017 when I was dealing with the failure to publish LOOPS, I faced the prospect that my career as an author could be over. It took a while to get to a place where I could see that, so long as I kept writing, and trying, it would never be over… that no one else gets to tell you that you’re done but you. (This epiphany is helping me now as well with my feelings on Trump 2: The Failure Strikes Back.)

So I have felt, over the past six months, an incredible amount of pride and relief in that comeback, and I really have experienced joy in publishing two books in one year… my fourth and fifth books in just over ten years. It’s all much more than I could have expected, and more than I ever knew I could do.

But as I wrote about a while ago, Joy can be exhausting in its own right.

In her essay on “Joy,” Zadie Smith writes, “A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you just have to go a little farther down the track. That has not been my experience […] And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did.”

Smith talks about the way that joy can overtake you, and even burn you up. She talks in her essay about the overwhelming nature of joy when it hits you, like a passionate new love, or a euphoric drug experience, or finishing a novel… these are not simply happy pleasures, she opines, but deeper and rarer experiences which require some time afterwards to reset and recover.

And so, with all that in the mix right now, I’m looking to the future. I have over a hundred (very jumbled) pages of a new novel to begin sorting through. I have four different outlines that don't line up at all. I have five new short stories that need editing and then to be submitted. I’d like to finish assembling a collection of all my stories l, and I’d like to begin assembling another craft book inspired by these newsletter posts. There’s so much to do that it feels impossible to begin, especially when I’m feeling, well, fried.

How do we get unfried? Well, let’s start with this:

1. PURPOSE - One thing I’ve heard from a number of fellow writers in the wake of the election they’re asking themselves a lot of questions: What good will writing do? Who will it help? Whose minds will be changed? In short, they’re questioning the usefulness of their aims to make art in tough times.
   
   To that I say… good, actually. I think we always must question the usefulness of art, which isn’t to say I think it is useless. But my determination to write doesn’t come from a lack of time spent pondering it. Rather, I think having to return, over and over, to the question of why fiction, of all things, matters to the world (today or any day) is the only way to recharge our belief in it.
   
   What are the answers? Well, I’d first ask what’s really changed in terms of your purpose this week, from a week ago. Yes, the world is in serious trouble with Trump back in the White House. Yes, we are still divided as a country. And no, I can’t think of a single novel or short story that has ever united a people or to undone the consequences of a bad election. But then, that was true a week ago as well. We’re in an emergency now, and so if you think you’ve got abilities or talents that can help us remedy that… by all means, please remedy it with my unending gratitude. Maybe you want to run for school board or local office—I applaud it. (Though I know some folks who did it after 2016 and left the journey with mixed feelings.) But if that's the trade, please make sure you really go and do some civic duty. Just don’t do what I did, and abandon your creative work to free up lots of time for ragetweeting and doomscrolling and depression. If that’s the alternative, then why not see creativity as a thing you can do to at least keep yourself sane and undespairing? That counts for a lot—in fact to my mind it counts for everything.

   There’s an old parable I heard once at synagogue… a man gets it in his head to save the country and so he tells the rabbi he’s going to run for President. “President is good, but is everything in your own state so wonderful that you should run the whole country?” “OK,” the man says, “Then I’ll run for Governor.” And the rabbi says, “And in your town? Is it all so perfect that you should run the state?” And so the man agrees to instead run for mayor. “And what about in your family?” the rabbi says. “Is it all so wonderful at home that you can dedicate yourself to a whole town?” And the man admits, no, he could be a better father, son, brother, etc. “And what about inside you?” the rabbi asks at last. “Are you so perfect that everyone in your family should look up to you?” And of course, no, it isn’t, and they shouldn’t—so that is where the man agrees to start. That, by the way, is also the place where fiction helps us all, the most.

   And ask yourself how many times, in the last eight years, did a story or a novel make you feel a little better, or compel you to reckon with the complexities of life, or strike you in awe at the beauty of the world? Or a song, or a film, even. Did these works of art make you laugh, cry, hope? If they did, then there’s some value in making something like that for someone else—always.

2. METHOD - OK, so how about it then? Literally, how? Start by reclaiming what time you can from the current miasma—if you’re anything like me you can get a few hours back in your week by simply cutting down to one podcast from three, or committing to checking the news once a night instead of ten times an hour. Delete social media apps from your phone so you can only access it from a laptop at certain times a day. Even if you’re only freeing up a half hour a day, or fifteen minutes, you can use that time more effectively.
   
   For a year now I’ve been waking up slightly earlier, so I have an extra half hour to myself before my kids wake up. I meditate, do Duolingo, the Wordle. Make coffee, watch the birds at the feeder. I read about 15 pages of something.

   Just from that, I almost doubled the amount of books I read this year over last year… 15 pages a day, every day, really adds up. It’s allowed me to read several biographies and other research materials that I normally wouldn’t have thought I had time for, to help me reinforce my novel-in-progress. And, if I cut back on the podcasts, I can probably sleep in once and a while now.

   On that front, the same incremental work can help when it comes to writing. I aim to write 3000 words a week. That's 500 words a day, times six. It takes me between 15 minutes and a half hour… that’s one or two doomscrolling sessions. That’s enough to be hundreds of new pages by the end of the year—not all of it very good, but sometimes helpful in getting bad ideas out of the way, or stumbling onto unexpected things during the hunt. Doing it with some kind of regularity makes me not only more productive, but makes me feel less despair—at least at the end of the day I have something I can point to as an accomplishment.

   It's pretty rare that any writer gets the chance to just sit down and bang out a whole book, or even a whole chapter. Incremental work is the only way it happens. When I was growing up, the longest book I’d ever read was Stephen King’s The Stand (1,150 pages) and at some point I got curious about how he’d done all that and I read a little introduction he’d written at the opening of the book.

   When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “One word at a time,” and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time. But I’ve read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

   

   Maybe it was just the cursing, but it made a big impression on me as a young guy… and all these years later I look at everything I’ve managed to make in this life so far, and I know that he’s, of course, exactly right.

3. CARE & FEEDING - More and more I’ve come to accept that, at least as a middle-aged guy with two kids and a full-time job, I need to look after myself physically if I want my brain to work right. This has been a hard truth to accept, and I miss the days in my twenties where I could drink to excess, pull all-nighters, eat nothing but carbs, and just sit down at my desk and fire off a twenty page story for workshop in a few hours.

   

   You can adjust this as needed, but perhaps it is better podcasts, new films, a TV show you’ve heard is great but have never tried. Maybe it is getting out to hike in places nearby you’ve never been before, or cooking something out of your wheelhouse. I think it all helps, just to wake us up to the possibility of new ideas out there.
   

   But no more, for sure. Today I need some regular exercise, to cut back on drinking, to eat better, to sleep more, go to therapy—to have even a chance to write well. C’est la vie. Getting older beats the alternative, as my dad always says.

   But on top of all that normal self-care I’ve realized that another big thing has to happen. When I was young I would find myself exposed to inspiration all the time, almost by default. There were always great movies to see, cool museum shows to explore, incredible music to listen to… and time with my friends always left me buzzing with new ideas coming from all the awesome things they’d been doing and seeing and hearing. Now I find that I need to go looking for inspiration, it doesn’t just find me. I’ve had to become more intentional about it, and I’ve begun thinking about my time differently. Garbage in, garbage out, as my teachers used to say. Well… if now it’s “doomscrolling, the same old bingewatches, the same old music, political podcasts” in, then… garbage out. But I’ve found that if I’m even just a bit more thoughtful about expanding my horizons, fresh inspiration still comes readily.

   This year I’ve taken up gardening, and watching this show about British gardens as a way to relax. It not only works on that level, but it’s given me a ton of new ideas for my novel (which, as it happens, revolves around a garden.) I bake and cook. I run and hike. As I mentioned before, I’ve started really reading more widely (going A-Z in authors over the course of the year… full report begins on Dec 1 on Instagram). And I’ve just begun reading Year of Wonder, a new book on classical music that suggests a new composition to listen to each day. For next year I have a new challenge in mind, which I'll share more about here soon, but it's something I'm already finding very fun.

4. FUN - Yeah, yeah… it wouldn’t be my newsletter if it didn’t come back to this in the end. But I’m going to tie it back to the election and our possible future living under scary, autocratic rule, too… give me a moment.
   
   On the first note, I’d say this—if we can find our way back to the fun in our writing, the fun that got us interested in the first place (often when we were just children) then not only will we get more enjoyment out of writing, but we will produce writing that is more enjoyable to read… and what else do we need right now more than that?
   
   On the second note, I want to remind you that fun is not frivolous. In fact, fun can be very serious stuff. Fun is a way to persuade people, a way to subvert ideas, a way to break through. Long ago I taught a class on children’s literature and we read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. In my Norton Critical Edition, there was an essay by a scholar named Robert Polhemus about the importance of fun and play in Carroll’s seemingly silly stories… which, for all their humor and zaniness, still manage to feel relevant and central to our culture today, 159 years later (Dear God…)

   

   Anyway, here is the quote that I’ve never forgotten from that essay:
   
   The way to go forward in looking-glass land is to go backward — back to origins, first principles, early years, early pleasures, and premoral states — in order to see with fresh clarity what, through habit and social repression, we have come to accept as absolutely the truth and to find in a place of make-believe that make-believe is the essence of our fate and being. […] The intention that comes through in Through the Looking Glass is, in effect, the meaning of mankind’s comic capacity, and it is this: I will play with and make ridiculous, fear, loneliness, smallness, ignorance, authority, chaos, nihilism, and death; I will transform, for a time, woe to joy.
   
   That’s the power of fun, right there. The power of fiction, right there. It’s why they want to ban our books, it’s why they depend on the less well-informed to vote for them. It’s why they want to eliminate the Department of Education. Because we, humble fiction writers, are something they cannot control, capable of doing something which can reduce them to nothingness, when done right.
   
   So, let’s do it right. Let’s get ourselves unburnt-out and let’s write for our lives. Let’s have fun doing it. And let’s come out stronger, and better for it.