I wrote and published something yesterday, for the first time in ages, because I wrote directly into the editor. No notes, no drafts, no plans, no structure. I liked it, so I'm doing it again.
You, unfortunately, are going to have to keep eating this garbage.
It's hard to know when to start writing, or to stop reading.
I have this sense that I have to read everything about something before I explain it. I keep a bibliography, and I add to and mark up items as I come across and read them.
But, of course, you can't read everything. At some point, you have to stop. If you want to write something, anything at all, you have to stop before you've read everything.
Usually, there's some external constraint to force you to stop. A deadline. A recurring deadline. But when you're out on your own, there's nothing like that. You have to set your own.
It's arbitrary, necessarily so. But it's consequential. Take whatever measure you like—quality, quantity, scope, depth—your necessarily arbitrary choice of stopping point will determine it.
For a certain sort of person—for me, that is—this is paralyzing. Your choice is freighted with consequences. It determines the likelihood that your work is true, is meaningful, but it does so in ways that you do not know, and cannot know.
And so you don't choose, and you don't write.
There's a temptation to retreat to safety. To do work of defined scope and scale, according to a determinate method. To take a known corpus, of tractable scale, and devour it whole.
There's something reassuringly programmatic about it. Find a literature gap. Find an outstanding problem. Define the gap. Define the problem. Narrow the universe of material down into something tractable. Then read it. Write it up.
This steady, patient work—patiently assembling, sorting, parsing the papers in the store of all past papers, attempting a better summary of them than the last, then shelving the summary back in with the rest—can be comforting.
It's different when you're writing for the public.
To write in the vernacular, in print, and with immediacy—not in the store of all past papers, but in public, for the public—takes away the comforts of method, program, definition.
It's a different sort of game. You play to the audience. You trade ignorance of the past for knowledge of the present. You trade certainty and definition for immediacy and weight. It's not writing anymore—it's talking.
And you can't play the public's game by the clerk's rules.
They don't want the steady, patient work—the assembly, the sorting, the parsing. They don't want to read the papers in the store of all past papers. They want talk. You have to talk to them.
My problem, I think, is that I wanted to have it all.
I wanted to marry safety to talk. To put the steady, patient work, the certainty and definition of written method behind the immediacy and weight of speech. And I wanted a stopping point for that.
But that isn't how it works. Not even for Matt Levine. And if you're not in the store of all past papers, you have to write for the public. Like Matt Levine. You have to stop reading, and start writing.
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