making things is hard

being stuck in the middle

Cecily Brown, Untitled (The Call of the Hunting Horn), 2019

There is so much mystique around the creative life. It’s fetishized and coveted and seen as mysterious even by the people who inhabit it. We have a cultural script that says: There’s too much consumption, not enough creation! If you want to be a [tasteful/interesting/admirable/happy] person, you should make more things. But then also: Social media has lowered the bar to creation too much. We’re drowning in terrible content. You should be ashamed if you put mediocre things into the world!

I notice a lot of “how to be a writer/how to be a better writer/how to start making things” content out there. Which totally makes sense to me: when I started writing more, I very much was like, how does one do this? Are there are a set of instructions? I read The 90-Day Novel, I read about daily routines of various writers, I read Paris Review interviews. Highbrow, lowbrow, whatever, I was just curious about how people did it. What I found confused me.

Everyone’s process is different, which makes it hard to unpack. Some people feel like the words are spilling out of them, some people have to eke every word out. Some people write one book easily, and then struggle for years to complete a second one. Some people write a novel a year for 50 years. Some people write first thing every morning, some people write whenever the urge strikes them.

Long before I started writing I fantasized about writing, about making things. I’d wanted to be an author since I was a little kid because I loved books. I felt effortlessly creative as a kid. As an adult, especially once I started working a non-writing job, writing felt impossible. I felt like I couldn’t write even 400 words unless inspiration struck, and inspiration didn’t strike more than twice a year.

That changed in 2020 when I made space in my life to write. I’ve talked about how that began—I started working on a book, and forcing myself to write 1000 words a day, and then I started the Substack on a whim and that became its own thing. It all felt magical. At the same time, I was constantly wracked with intense self-doubt. I feel like every day of the past four years I’ve been like… is what I’m doing real? Am I playing pretend? I mean, how am I supposed to know it’s real or not? I’m not analyzing the zeitgeist enough, I’m not talking about books enough, I’m just navel-gazing, whatever.

I feel like it’s taken me until this year to have a secure relationship with writing and a new sense of comfort with it. And the thing I feel now is just: what matters most is your own relationship with your writing, how much you believe in it, and your ability to push forward without much external guidance. Because then you can persevere through the middle.

Making things is hard and I feel like that’s the most useful thing to say about it. You have to try to be consistent, you have to practice constantly, you have to read, and you can’t make yourself be interested in topics you aren’t interested in. And you have to accept that it’s always going to be challenging. My friend said this about her work, which is very different (she’s running a company): I just had to accept that my life was going to be difficult for a long time. There was something comforting about that thought for me.

Accepting that it’s difficult and that’s a good thing has been really helpful for me. Writing itself doesn’t always feel difficult, but the project of making a living off it, making something I’m proud of continues to be challenging. I think this is because most of making things is just being perpetually stuck in the long middle. First there’s the ecstasy of getting started, and then the incredible sense of having gained some momentum, and then… there you are. Squarely in the middle. For so long I thought I needed some kind of revelation to rescue me from the middle of things. Maybe I would wake up one day and have an idea about the next chapter of the book, and then, bam, I would be out of the middle. But I realized that even if you have a revelation you’re still in the middle. Even if you finish your project you’re still in the middle. Because the middle of things is your life now. Hopefully, you’ll be stuck there for a very long time.

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Request for classifieds

Okay, so several readers have mentioned that I should do matchmaking through my Substack, and while I haven’t figured out exactly how that will work I thought maybe I could start by doing dating ads.

If you’re looking for love (and you live in the Bay Area, probably?), email me at avabearexpress@gmail.com with your name, age, gender and ~100 words about you and what you’re looking for. And I will select 10 and post them!