On writing
in which we toil and agonize and push and push and push, but for what?
Lately I’ve struggled with writing this Substack. Maybe some of you have noticed.
The creative process is not fun. It can be incredibly rewarding, cathartic, sublime — an end in and of itself, not a means to an end. But it is not fun.
That’s because there’s often a big disconnect between the nature of the creative process and the reason for the pursuit of it. Even though the act of writing itself is supposed to be the goal (à la NaNoWriMo, Artist’s Way, etc.), people like me tend to have ulterior motives: praise, success, acclaim.
Ambition is a scary thing. We don’t talk about it enough. At a certain point in life, it becomes embarrassing. Like, I don’t want to admit to everyone that I want to be a published author. I don’t want to say out loud, “I covet literary fame.”
Ew! So cringe. These types of declarations were cute in high school or college, even in our 20s. But now, it feels gauche. Nearly a decade out of college, it feels like we should either be making significant headway on our pipe dreams, or letting them go in favor of peace, contentment, and being generally well-adjusted.
I have plenty of peace and contentment in my life. My job, as exhausting and stressful as any job, is actually a lot of fun. I go to parties, am often surrounded by beautiful clothes, rub elbows with Important People in the Industry, and I get to write about topics like why thotty clothes go on trend, or whether people actually care about sustainability — and I get paid for it.
Remember that quote from Sex and the City? “New York women are always looking for either a boyfriend, a job or an apartment,” Carrie says.
Not me. I have all three, and a delightful little cat named Boris.
But for whatever inexplicable devastating reason, I can’t seem to shake off this desire for something more. Is it ego? Is it existential malaise? A godless edacity for whatever else life has to offer? Probably all of the above.
And so this year, I began writing this newsletter. It’s supposed to help me get into the habit of writing, so one day, when I’m ready to embark on my great American novel, I’d be able to command the creative tenacity to put pen to paper, and keep going.
I’m not there yet, and I’m already flailing. It’s hard to choose this — this right now, as in hunching over my laptop on a Saturday afternoon — instead of being at lunch with a glass of wine, or a pilates class, or catching up on Top Chef.
I was chatting with a friend earlier this week, another fashion journalist. We were at Sartiano’s, at a dinner hosted by Equinox, noshing on rigatoni pomodoro and commiserating about the state of media.
We got on the topic of book publishing as either a natural trajectory for us or wishful thinking. “My last editor wrote her book on the subway,” she told me. Apparently, this woman would whip out her laptop during her 45-minute commute from Brooklyn every morning, and by the end of the year, she had a manuscript.
“Another former colleague would get up at 5 a.m. everyday to write for an hour, before her kids got up,” my friend told me. “Can you imagine?”
No, I really can’t. I am so, so so far away from having the discipline to have a routine like that. This morning I sat down to write, and immediately got sucked into an impassioned text conversation about whether the Housewives franchise has value for society. The answer is unequivocally yes, Joey!!!!
Maybe ambition is scary and dirty because I haven’t quite figured out how to channel it into action. Maybe I just need to trust the process. And maybe it is possible to reconcile the sacred creative process with its potential outcomes, however vain or capitalist or whatever, because we can’t separate ourselves from the individualist mores under which we’ve been conditioned to chase validation.
Or maybe I’m taking it all too seriously. I’m still just a girl with a dream, making sense of the world, one silly little essay at a time. And that means sometimes giving up a weeknight hang and spending extra time indoors.
It could be that ambition and the creative process are the same thing, or at least for me. They’re hard to talk about, because both require a level of sacrifice, and that sacrifice doesn’t always pan out.
It’s fucking hard to write habitually. But now that I’m at the end of this essay, it seems that everything could be copy after all — even my writer’s block.