You Can Make Anything By Writing
“When my graduate students write labored work out of some misplaced sense of obligation, I tell them to write after pleasure and relief; to…
“When my graduate students write labored work out of some misplaced sense of obligation, I tell them to write after pleasure and relief; to let writing come to exist as a byproduct of pure need; and not to let an idealized end product twist them away from what they must write, or what they’d write anyway, without a teacher or even a reader — in other words, to be the writers they already are.”
— Sarah Manguso, NY Times
In a year as overwhelming as the last, sitting down to write felt like an abrogation of responsibility. An indulgence. A far-off dream.
That was a correct view in the same way that being ‘too busy to exercise’ is a correct view. It simply missed the point.
Ever since I started writing music reviews for street press a little more than 10 years ago, writing has been the thing I most need to do. And yet, I’ve dipped in and out of it with depressing regularity.
To understand what I think, I need to write it down.
And as a partner at a venture capital firm, understanding what I think might be the first and most important job that I have.
Over the Christmas break, I took some time to start documenting my principles and values and came up with, what I thought were, many new ones. I also took some time to summarise the best writing I’d done in recent years, and, in doing that, realised that almost all my principles and values weren’t new at all. They were often things I’d already written about. Simple things like:
In 2015, I wrote 100 things in 100 days and that experiment remains one of the best I’ve done.
That daily cadence is probably unsustainable, but so is writing as little as I have lately.
I have nothing to say, what I have to say isn’t interesting or insightful, the quality bar is too high… these are all the thoughts that hold me back from writing.
Which is to say, as I write more, often it will say nothing, be uninteresting, lack insight, or lack quality.
But that isn’t the point.
We are what we repeatedly do, and I am a writer.
Time then to write.