Staring at the blank page before you...

It still surprises me how often I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write.

So much of the “working” part of being a working writer, for me, has been a lot of pitching and rejection (or radio silence) and invoicing and following up on invoices and researching rates and negotiating contracts and not a whole lot of practice on the page.

I sent 83 pitches (that I tracked — probably missing a few) between January and August last year, and only three were accepted. It’s pretty demoralizing to look back at a whole year of work and thought and excitement over ideas and only have three pieces of writing to show for it. (Well, I had many podcast episodes to show for it, but that is a problem in and of itself, and for a future newsletter.)

If hardest part is getting someone to take the pitch, and it happens so infrequently, then too many times I’ll find myself opening up a document to get started and just thinking, Now what?

This current bout feels all the more potent because something did change in the last year. Even with months between writing assignments — which alternated in format enough (profile, review, reported essay, repeat) to prevent me from establishing any kind of groove — all the years of learning how to do the work by editing other people’s interviews, ripping my hair out through a first draft of criticism, and having a reported feature killed started to pay off.

The reported essay I wrote last summer about Frog and Toad flew out of me; the problem was too many ideas to fit into one article with an assigned word count of 2000 (it, uh, published at 3000 words, and I saved a lot of writing that couldn’t fit for a companion piece which one day might publish here). I felt myself stretching past a threshold I’d been stuck behind. I had amassed the skills I needed to meet my ambitious ideas head-on and execute the longform cultural reporting and criticism I always wanted to do.

When I have an idea, or a line of thought, or an observation, I try to just put it on a page. I’ve been dreading the task of cleaning up and organizing my digital archive — aside from figuring out if it’s possible to divest from Google in any meaningful way when they host all of my email accounts, all of my photos, all of my documents, all of my notes, and run the OS on my phone — because my work tends to sprawl. But by allowing myself the freedom to write little snippets in the notes app on my phone, or a desktop sticky note, or via text, or all manner of junk drafts (track notes, coverage notes, lede ideas, draft 1, discarded lines, draft 2), writing became a jigsaw puzzle in which I assembled a whole picture out of a box filled with too many pieces.

This work feels best when there’s a direct line running through you: mind to hands to page, thoughts running faster than you can keep up. I think all of us keep writing because we remember the euphoria of self-expression more powerfully than twisted self-torture of working our way to it. It’s like someone running the tip of a knife up and down your entire body: The pain is psychological, predicated on the “what if.” What if I don’t have it in me? What if I fail? What if every memory of writing as a victory over the self and the subject is a lie, and I never managed it at all?

I say “self-expression” here because that’s what I’m trying to remember. Even when I wasn’t the subject, all of my criticism and reporting flowed through my experience and left an imprint of my psyche on the page.

When I wrote about Lorde, I was really writing about feeling patronized my whole life as a girl with ambition and smarts, how I wanted to live in a world that took girls seriously for what they had to say — without sexualizing them, without treating their earnestness as a joke. Or when I wrote about Sylvan Esso’s No Rules Sandy, I was wrestling with the same questions they were, too, after I was priced out of the D.C. rental market and had to move back in with my parents: What if I wasn’t afraid of the fall? What would I create?

So how is choosing to write more explicitly from my own experience so different from all of that that I'm back to starting at a blank page?

I’ve been stuck overthinking how much of myself I want to share here, or online, or in general. If great writing gives the reader a vehicle to connect with it, and that vehicle is often found in verisimilitude and the personal details needed to create it, then where’s the line between enough and too much? How much should I save for myself?

I told a friend this week that the great irony is that I used to be completely self-obsessed in my own writing and completely un-self-conscious of it. I want to regain a bit of that fearlessness, to trust in my perspective — just without sinking too deep into the trap of using pain and the divulgence of it as a substitute for crafting narrative, which is a critique I’ve volleyed at more than a few artists and writers over the years.

Recently, I read this part of an essay by Kevin Brazil in Granta that seemed to outline the heart of it:

Getting sober from memoir is not getting sober from sadness, depression or pain. It is about stepping away from a certain kind of writing: first-person, retrospective, luxuriating in the display of its wounds. This writing might create a self that has survived, but it might not create a self that has known happiness. Happiness, or queer happiness at least, may be a matter of the form of the stories we tell about ourselves. And changing the form of these stories might enable us to step away from a certain idea of who we are: individual, unique, the source of the only story that matters.

I don’t think I’m the source of the only story that matters now, but the last time I wrote through an explicitly personal lens, I did. Or at least, I knew stories like mine were not part of a canon that was accessible to me when I needed it. And then I spent the better part of a decade taking the "I" out of the art, so in a way, I’m relearning how to write all over again, finding a new center of gravity. Maybe this time, too, changing the form of the stories I want to tell will help me step away from an idea of who I am, an unsuccessful and unemployed music journalist, and towards a new self entirely.

Alright, that’s enough of that.

Me: I’m going to write, just for myself, about my struggle to define where I want to place the boundaries between my professional life and my personal life when I write, and then maybe I’ll have a better understanding of how I can approach some of the drafts I want to send out for the newsletter.

1200 words later…It’s a newsletter, baby. I am the one who knocks.

Next time: The disco-pop revival is one of the dominant sounds of the 2020s. It’s awful. On trial: Sabrina Carpenter, Dua Lipa, and the low-energy whisper-vocalists who are boring me to death.