The Grasshopper #78: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

I’m on a roll, but it’s a weird one

Photo by Frank Weichelt on Unsplash

Last week I launched The Remarkable, a newsletter I never could have imagined doing only a few months ago. By now I guess my readers here know what it’s all about, but check it out. And I’m still doing about five pieces a week on Medium, a love hate thing. Plus this, The Grasshopper, which still seems new but is creeping towards its second anniversary.

As you might imagine, there is a juggling act going on in my head and my Google Docs file, which now has a weird naming scheme so I can keep track of what has been published, where, and what is in the pipeline. 

It’s fun but I wonder if someday my readers in the addiction recovery space might accidentally be presented with some political rant intended for another place. Unlikely but…

On top of this, I republish select Medium articles each week in The Witness Chronicles, which is what Substack calls a Section, a sort of subspecies of The Grasshopper.

The interesting thing about all this writing, editing, and publishing is that it is all my own doing. My checking account says I should be out there beating the bushes for freelance work but I have not been able to marshal the enthusiasm that requires. Maybe, when the depths of winter make me nuts, I’ll go after that.

All of this is intensely gratifying as a writer, though financially it is not really paying off. Medium made changes this past summer that ostensibly were to help writers but really have been nothing more than a way to pay us less, a lot less.

That was a financial hit, but in the middle of it my actual life intervened and I now find myself rebuilding the rest of my life, in addition to managing all this self-inflicted writing. 

And so far I’m loving it. 

The one casualty here is I’m not reading as much as I want, particularly fiction, in part because I’m not sitting on any great recommendations. Yes, you are welcome to suggest novels that rocked your world. I think the last one I read that did that was Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land.

It’s just a great story, which is what any novel should be. A crackin’ good tale that makes you think in different ways about things. Plus it is an ode to libraries and books and time.

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Some fanatical Indian nationalist is seeking to go after novelist and activist Arundhati Roy for things she wrote ten years ago. It’s a real sign of an autocracy when they go after artists years after the fact, for speaking truth to power.

A reminder that words can be dangerous. If Trump takes over, which I do not think will happen, those of us who write opinions might find his lackeys scouring the Internet and locking people like me up. If they send Stephen Miller here I hope to get a chance to punch him in the face before they take me away.

That might make it all worth it, but the Buddhist in me says, yeah, right. And Kurt Vonnegut echos with “so it goes”.

The shallow but intense morning sun is conspiring to make seeing my iPad a challenge this morning but I can’t complain. Darkness is coming and I need to focus on the fact that time passes faster than ever.

If you’re writing but it’s going slowly, I have a suggestion that might irritate but that I know works. Write some stuff that is intensely personal, overdoes the honesty, and is an experience or story someone else can relate to in ways you can’t imagine. Then publish it, just as you wrote it (no, don’t leave typos in or run-on sentences, they just scare readers away).

Then see if anything happens. You might be surprised.

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Brutal honesty

Writing is a time machine. I sit down, starting writing, and when I stop somehow a chunk of time has gone.

I am neither a philosopher or a physicist so speculating about the nature of time is not my area of expertise. I just know it goes somewhere when I write, but only if I am being as honest as possible in my writing, brutally honest. That’s when the flow state kicks in.

My experiences of the past months with breaking my lifelong addiction have been predicated on honesty about where I was, where I find myself, and what I want from the rest of this life. I made a choice regarding honesty about all of that and so far it is definitely the right path.

But it got me thinking about the role of honesty in our writing. Hemingway famously sought each day to write one true sentence, a mantra of purity he certainly did not always follow.

In fact, he wrote an intentionally terrible novel (Across the River and Into the Trees, a pretty good title, but a bad book) just to break a publishing deal. So much for artistic purity.

But purity implies a kind of pristine clarity and simplicity and honest writing is more likely to be messy and a little disorganized, not unlike real life. But great prose artists are very good at cleaning up that messiness without removing its bloody pumping heart.

Hunter Thompson comes to mind. He conveyed a kind of raw anarchy but it flowed like a roaring river after snowmelt, sweeping us into his chaotic worldview. When you read his work, understand the degree of editing and skill it took to maintain this level of truth without it appearing worked on.

When we manage to write something we know to have this level of truth, the temptation is to polish, to refine, to make elegant. Resist this. Too much cleanliness creates sterility, which is death to vibrant, honest writing.

Don’t polish your edges off, sharpen them. That’s one way to find your voice.

This whole topic has been the guiding principle of a big piece I’ve been working on, cataloging the things I’m learning as I find myself changed, a weird experience. I’ve logged twenty thousand words these past six or seven weeks trying to honestly capture an experience.

I have no idea where it goes or what I will do with it, but it was the germ of The Remarkable, where I find myself, improbably, sent out on a quest for enchantment, by unknown forces.

That’s a very writerly way to view a new experience, to turn it into a quest, which I guess makes me a hero, if you are Joseph Campbell. I can’t be heroic but I can be honest with myself.

And with my readers. Thanks. 

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A lot of writing going on, probably a bit too much, but it’s my filter for understanding the world, both at a macro level with issues like politics and climate, and at a micro level as I look at my changing relationship with the world. 

The Grasshopper may have gotten a little more touchy-feely recently but it reflects where my mind is these days. Just a natural progression. 

I see a lot of writing online that seeks to conform to a norm. This moment the norm is ‘overnight success’ and a lot of it looks like scams to me. This morning I read a piece called something like, ‘I’m Building a Six Figure Newsletter Business’.

Since I now have three newsletters I thought I’d check it out. What I found was a little sickening. First, the writer had not even started his first newsletter (so much for six figures). And he had a ‘brilliant’ concept: put out a newsletter with just two sentences promising a path to success with newsletters.

The sentences would link to other people’s articles on the topic. Voila, work done. Just steal other people’s work and call it curating, then charge a lot for it. He was practically bending over backwards congratulating himself on his genius.

This stuff depresses me to no end because it is so delusional, both for the sap who wrote it and any unfortunate soul who bothers to read it (like me). 

I’m quite sure that writer has real experiences that might resonate with readers. Or maybe he lives in a shallow land I am not familiar with. Sorry dude.

Ok, end of rant. 

Did you write today?

Martin

1396 words

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