Invisible Work

Writing your way toward something to say.

I searched my inbox the other day for the last time I had corresponded with a particular friend, and accidentally ran across this paragraph I wrote in the second year of my PhD:

I’m in one of the weird periods where I don’t have anything to say in public writing, in the sense that I am too alienated from what people are talking about and not expert enough yet in what I want to say to do so. In those moments, I really feel the absence of private writing from 2016 life; the more I study intellectuals, I realize how central correspondence has always been for intellectual community and the development of ideas. I’m trying to do it more, and find it relieves some of the loneliness of not being in public writing mode.

It was one of those strange, relieving things to encounter: your past self feeling exactly like your current self, a reminder that such things are recurring patterns. Later that year, I wrote an essay for Jacobin that led to publishing my first review essay in TNR, and the following three years was my most productive period of public writing thus far. But the “lost” period before that was real: during that time, I started tons of essays and blog posts, but they all felt “off.” I was phoning it in, my heart wasn’t in it; my life conditions and intellectual inputs had changed—now I was consuming philosophy and history, not “the discourse”—but my skills hadn’t caught up yet. I had lots of material, but not enough purchase on it to have anything I felt confident saying.

It’s been like that again the past few years. I’ve drafted dozens of posts here, trying to mentally lower the stakes, to casually react to things I was reading or thinking about. Looking back, I wonder why I didn’t publish them; they’re fine, there’s nothing wrong with them, I’m probably being overly self-conscious. There was this lingering sense of uncertainty and vulnerability: Is that really what I want to write about? Or am I spewing words just to publish something? I tried to write a couple of critical essays for magazines the way I was doing a few years ago, and there too felt completely blocked. One was a political history of the use of biology in gay rights activism, which I found stimulating but lacked the contextual reading to have a worthwhile view on. Another was about a novel, which was even more exposing: I realized I had not honed any kind of critical framework for discussing fiction, and was not positioned in any kind of discourse in which to situate it. I was a low-information reader, the best I could do was emote.

That I would find myself blocked in this way was obvious given the total world collapse I was going through personally the past few years. Almost overnight, real life came to seem more important than books; in a way, having lived too much in books, and in my head, seemed part of what had gone wrong with the first stage of my adulthood. Without the fuel of sublimated sexuality, the intensity of my intellectual ambition seemed to evaporate. My academic career ended at the same time, along with the freedom and material support for thinking it afforded. The grief and loss of identity was much deeper and harder to get over than I expected, since I had “officially” told myself the entire time that it was never going to work out. The easiest way to get over something is to dissociate from it, to make yourself hate it; I never quite went as far as hate, but a certain period of “no contact” seemed necessary. Lots of things I thought I cared about turned out to be merely conjunctural, the products of a life a no longer had.

But I still wrote, probably more than ever. I had more burning questions than ever, all the more vital because they were personal and psychological rather than political. Instinctively, without even meaning to, I treated my new life as a research project, documenting it extensively and collecting data, “familiarizing myself with the literature.” I read lots of books, especially novels, which seemed much more alive to me now—seemed like the most promising path to what I was trying to learn, to be able to say.

Way back at the beginning, before journalism and academia, when I first started to imagine myself a writer, I wrote fiction. (“Writing novels isn’t a job,” my mom told me when I was in high school, reasonably. So I chose journalism.) That old love came back suddenly in the middle of drafting my dissertation, at a nadir of frustration and pessimism. I let myself give in to it and felt unleashed in a vertiginous way, like all these things that had built up over the previous decade were pouring out; I had some thought along the lines of this is what I was actually supposed to do all along. It’s a story for another time, but that half-written novel mid-PhD brought me back in touch with myself in such a visceral way that it surely played a role in me coming out. Now there was a sense of having come full circle, that I had found my way back to the honesty and authenticity I needed to, to be overly grandiose, do what I was born to do.

I tried to write fiction again over the past few years; I always had the plot of a novel in my head that I was arranging and rearranging every few months. But the actual writing I attempted was just like those old essays, stillborn, lifeless. I don’t think it was actually lifeless, I think it had too much life—it was too close to the ground, too unprocessed, too much the product of chaotic tumult. I couldn’t step back from it at all, I couldn’t play with it or refine it, because it wasn’t fiction, it was life-stenography. And then there was also the more immediate practical concerns: I needed a career, not an obsession even more economically unviable than the previous one. At least when you’re an academic, you have an office and a job title, you have work to do even if you’re not exactly producing anything. Writing fiction, by contrast, seems embarrassing and naive; even though I knew I was good at it, I couldn’t take myself seriously.

The way it goes, though, it is that it’s impossible until one day, without warning, it isn’t. Recently I decided to try to forget that I’m a professional writer and pretend like I didn’t know anything; to read books about how to write and do that extremely basic, clichéd thing of setting a daily word count. The stories started coming out, feeling real, having at least potential. It seemed almost magical, amazing that it could be so easy, like it came from nowhere. But of course it didn’t come from nowhere: suddenly, all those random books and failed drafts and hidden documents made sense, started to look like a subconscious plan. It was only coming easy now because of all that invisible work—work that I hadn’t counted as work because it felt like an accident, aimless wandering, something I would have done anyway.

I think there are three phases to this kind of work. The first is the “collecting” phase, which is the most fun and stimulating, because you don’t have to know what you’re doing, you’re just bouncing from one thing that tickles your fancy to the next. You’re building a corpus, collecting the raw material of project you haven’t committed to or even consciously realized you have in mind. That’s the invisible work, because, while it’s absolutely essential, it doesn’t feel like work. The second and middle part is the “concretization” phase, where you start turning that mass of raw material into an actual thing—an essay, a dissertation, a story, a novel. I hate this part with a passion because it’s where the most formidable doubts come up: What even is this? Do I have any idea what I’m doing? What if I do it this way and it’s wrong—all that time wasted! Who do I think I am to even imagine I can do this? I find this phase paralyzing and will hesitate a very long time thinking I can’t go on because I “haven’t figured it out” or “don’t know what it’s about yet.” But you have to push through that to get to the final phase, “refinement,” which is itself laden with doubts—I could have done this better, but it’s too late now—but moves back into more pleasurable territory because the end is in sight. You now have an actual, limited thing to work with, not a blank expanse of infinite possibility.

What I’ve been trying to do, with modest success, is to reframe the “concretization” phase to maintain more of what I enjoy about the initial “collection” phase. (In reality, of course, all of the phases overlap, it’s a looping, zigzagging process, not a linear one.) The most helpful thing to remind myself is that the “what this is” or “what this is about” is the result, not the catalyst, of concretization. It’s the process of concretization—the messy, disorderly, frustrating work that often seems like it’s getting nowhere—that enables the point to emerge. Just like in life, you can only work it out by doing it, not merely by thinking about it. I understood that on some level with a dissertation: that it was a developmental progression, learning on the job, a research project, not some mystical object that would crash into the world fully formed. I’ve been trying to see fiction the same way, as a project with different stages of work. In the concretization phase, you have to start working more consciously, doggedly, actually laboring, but also kind of pretend you’re still just playing around, that anything still goes. A manufactured state of simultaneous seriousness and unseriousness. (As is so often the case, the gimmicks that seem too silly even to consider until you get desperate can actually work wonders, like the post-it I put on my laptop screen: LET IT SUCK!)

The great thing about finally getting yourself over the hump into concretization is that you start to feel oriented again. Things start to narrow in a productive way. You read with much more attention and purpose, you get hungry for material to light your path. You look for models and study them. Your questions come into focus. I still don’t know that I “have anything to say,” but I can see the point where I would potentially have something to say and the work it will take to get there. It gets easier, when thinking about, say, what to write here for the paying subscribers I’ve left twisting in the wind, to decide why I might want to write X and not bother with writing about Y.

But then, also, you see all over again the staggering amount of work all this is, how much you have to read and know to do any of it. As Phoebe Bridgers sings, “Why would somebody do this on purpose when they could do something else?”