The Grasshopper Sunday Edition: Experience

A ‘day in the life’ sort of thing

[This was my office in 2019. Photo Author]

Last April, while experiencing vertigo as a weird side effect of Covid (I am vaxxed), I fell and cracked vertebrae in my lower back. Which I definitely do not recommend. But that injury put a dent in my mobility and travel plans for the past year. It is now much better and I am working out to build muscle strength that was lost through inactivity.

The only reason I’m sharing this is its impact on my work as a writer and a lesson I’m taking away from that immobility. It might help to understand my routine and changes I’m about to make in it.

I write between one and two thousand words a day, most days of the week. That may sound like a lot of work, but for me it is pure pleasure, a pleasure that helped me get through those months of relative inactivity. And it is my profession by choice. A typical morning is to get up, warm up the espresso machine, read a wide variety of news, have a coffee, and write something about news that gets my attention.

This involves sitting on the couch tapping away at my iPad in a Google doc, exactly what I am doing right now. To complete this picture, understand that I am a one finger typist, which has worked for me through nine books and hundreds of thousands of words of other kinds of writing.

When I was a software marketing exec, my typing was a great source of amusement to coders, who typically can type like demons. I never learned.

So, in the past nine months or so, I’ve been limited to my neighborhood (I no longer own a car), but now, with winter upon us, I am planning some travel, likely train trips.

I need to replenish my experience, the true source of writing.

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Internal and external experience

There are people in this world whose experience is limited to their internal life, that day to day existence I describe above. It can be a comfort zone and I get that. After my back injury, as soon as I could, I started walking. I’ve always been a walker and it turned out to be essential to me even when it was limited to going to the end of the street and back.

So my bank of internal experience is full right now. I actually considered writing a novella about the flock of birds that live in my neighbor’s tall hedge, after walking by it daily. It was a strange idea, one that would require creating a language for those birds. It still intrigues me, but like many ideas probably will remain where it is.

So, though this newsletter is titled experience, what it really is about is ideas, ideas powerful enough to demand being put to words and explored. Without them, your writing will be empty or too introspective. And ideas come from doing stuff. 

One of the interesting things about doing this newsletter is entering the Substack universe. The platform does a great job of helping writers share their experiences building their subscriber base and finding their voice on a regular basis, in my case twice a week most of the time. It is a community.

The reason I mention this is that experience and ideas come from interaction with the world. A conversation with a stranger can initiate a story, often many months or years later. On some level every experience is saved, possibly forgotten, but has the potential to appear when it becomes relevant. 

The newsletter community, along with my Medium community, is a source of experience as other writers offer a glimpse into their view of life. If you’re reading this, you are getting a little view into my world, a world that I intend to expand in the coming months.

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“And part of the value of a work of art (we have to believe) is that it creates effects and communicates wisdom in ways that are irrational or that exist beyond conventional rationality – that there’s a kind of magic that goes on in the creation and absorption of a work of art that is irreducible and can’t be quantified or rigorously defended (and don’t need to be).”

George Saunders, from his newsletter Story Club with George Saunders (recommended!)

I’m a big believer in the magic George refers to. I think any writer who sticks to it and keeps their mind open, will eventually experience times when the writing seems to go on autopilot and something completely unexpected emerges. Those are exciting moments. While writing both of my novels these unexpected things almost always were the scenes that pushed the narrative ahead.

But most of my writing is topical opinion and observation. Do these moments occur in that more pragmatic writing? I think they do. Once I’ve assembled my thoughts about the subject I’m going to write about, whether it’s politics or this business of writing, I get started and let myself run with it, trying to stay in the moment of the writing and letting it unfold organically.

Much of the time I write away furiously and then, reaching a conclusion, feel like I’m swimming out of deep waters and back into reality, whatever that is. I can’t really analyze where I went during the process and I typically set the draft aside for awhile to give myself some distance from it, before editing and publishing.

When I do get back to it, I’m often surprised by what I read, usually a good thing. 

The funny thing about these trancelike moments is you cannot force them. I think they come with practice and as you mature more as a writer and learn to trust the universe to do a decent job.

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A bit of a ramble, but that is kind of the nature of the Sunday Grasshopper. See you next Wednesday! M

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