unimportant important things
i don't know how you're supposed to write
I’m subscribed to this newsletter written by that woman who was the internet’s supporting character for like, a day because she hates her husband, or something like that. (She wrote a book about marriage. In the book, she called her husband mean names. The hosts of the View got mad about it. Unimportant.)
But her August 15 newsletter starts like this:
“One of the best qualities a writer can have is the conviction that not every thought that passes through her head is interesting or useful or entertaining or worthwhile. This is also a quality that makes it very difficult to write. If you return to the same default of questioning the value of your words… well, you have to be writing a lot of words to publish any of them.”
I think it’s probably, as a standard, Really Good to question the value of your words, to ask yourself if what you have to contribute is important or how it’ll impact others who don’t have the same brain you do. We’re all important, we’re all special, but we’re also not important and special. And this is what, I think, makes it hard to write. Because wanting to write, or maybe more so wanting to write and to have people read what you write, implies believing in your words, believing that at least a fraction of a fraction of the thoughts passing through your mind are special or interesting or useful enough to matter to somebody, while also reminding yourself that very little of what you’ve ever thought carries meaning outside of the moment in which you thought it.
Earlier this month I really wanted to Write and couldn’t think of anything to Say, and I ended up with this:
“If words are the paint, then language is the painting, but it’s also the painter, and the easel, and the canvas, and the hours it took to spread the paint over the canvas. It’s what the painter ate for breakfast that day and what they last thought of before picking the first color. And it’s also, maybe most importantly, the viewer who sees the painting and how they react to it.
Sometimes it feels like I’m a painter, several tubes sprawled out in front of me, with a blurry image in my head of what I imagine the canvas, once complete, to look like, but I seem to have lost my brushes, and I wonder, if someone placed one in my hand, would I even know how to hold it?
I was watching a documentary about Arthur Miller recently, because I had just watched a documentary about Marilyn Monroe, where I learned they’d been married before she died, and I wanted to confirm if he was as dick-ish as the Marilyn Monroe documentary led me to believe.
He described writing one of his later plays like this: “I’m relying on the fact that inside my head there is a structure whose outlines I can’t detect at this point, but whose emotional sound and weight and color I feel very strongly.”
Sometimes, when I’m brushing my teeth, or sweeping the floor, or combing my hair, I can feel the weight of a sentence in my head, the existence of a structure. But if I try to pull out my phone to write anything down, the structure collapses. Sometimes, it’s like it can only exist as it is in my head – a heavy, but edgeless and incomplete structure – and by trying to pull it out, I ruin it entirely. Words, instead of acting as paint, act as an erasure for whatever unreachable thing I thought and felt compelled to try and box up in words and commas and gerunds and similes. Words, a not insignificant amount of the time, seem to be needless, unimportant tools in what feels like, contradictorily, the most necessary and important task, of extracting the structure from my head, of writing.
So then what?”
Maybe the problem, though, is assuming that whatever you’re writing, whatever structure that’s taking shape in your head, is important. Maybe by writing it, you’re just making it real and that’s where it ends! It’s a contained and palpable thing that dervies its only “value” or “worth” from the fact of its existence. What importance does it need to have to you, or to anyone else? Is its existence just enough? The structure is a structure is a structure is a structure. It just is. Maybe it’s the process of assigning the weight of meaning that causes the structure to collapse when I try to pull it out of my head, like stacking too many dictionaries on a wobbly table. I could just let the table stand on its own, as a decorative piece of furniture.
If I think about writing this way, by abandoning the notion that everything has to mean something, there are some unimportant things that, recently, have felt special to me — not that I feel like I’ve made them important by putting them in words, quite the opposite, but moments that have felt worth observing, just because they’re structures in my head, and they exist. They’re not imbued with meaning beyond whatever they meant in the moment I noticed them:
there are these little flies all over my room that only fly around in the afternoon when it’s sunny, and only on certain days of the week. they keep me company! i’ve given up trying to kill them because they outwit me.
at work the other day, the elevator smelled exactly like the inside of a pencil case, the hard plastic box kind that were so obnoxiously and unnecessarily large. i think this is what they call a proustian memory, where a sense (smell, sound, touch) makes the past slip and slide all over the present. how fun!
on my recent TRIP TO NEW YORK CITY, i visited the botanic garden, and i watched a giant coy fish circle a cluster of little white flowers. the fish was gulping at the surface of the pond, making bubbles and looking for food, and i knew it was going to swallow the flowers — and it did! and i knew that the fish would probably spit up the flowers, and sure enough, a few seconds later — it did! spurt! right back into the pond. i thought it’d be funny if one of the other large coy fish did the same thing, and sure enough, a few seconds later — one did! and that coy fish also threw the flowers back up, spurt! back into the pond. the whole time, though, the flowers didn’t change shape or form. this whole thing felt somehow related to The Rehearsal, but maybe i’m thinking too hard about it.
writers love the month of august. everyone wants to write about its endings and its slowness or its speediness or its wetness or its humidity or its heaviness or its lightness. i don’t like this month, but it’s nice to see that so many people have written poems about it. did they think those poems were important? or original? or worthwhile? maybe my issue is thinking that “original” and “worthwhile” are mutually exclusive.
the phrase “loving because of” and the phrase “loving in spite of” seem to mean the same thing. or i hope if that was my love, or someone’s love for me, they would.
I don’t know if I’ve painted a picture with any of this. It seems, somtimes, once you’ve figured out how to hold the brushes and you start painting, the blurrier the vision of the final painting in your mind becomes anyway.
If Arthur Miller, a real writer, read any of this, I don’t know if he’d understand what I’m trying to say. I’m not sure if he’d be able to see the painting. But maybe that doesn’t matter. The painting, the structure, exists. Does it matter if the painting is on a canvas, or if that canvas is hung in a hallway, or a bedroom, or a gallery? Is the essence of the painting still the same, even if all I’ve done is take the tubes of paint and smatter them on the floor? Is the table going to stand up fine on its own, regardless?
I don’t know! Maybe none of this makes sense. I know they teach classes on how to write, but I have taken some of those and I don’t think they answered these questions. Or, more realistically, I just hadn’t thought to ask them.
thanks 4 reading!
ps. if you’ve ever tried to write and felt like this please talk to me! i’m really struggling lol