Motivation, Distraction, Procrastination, Confidence

More stream of consciousness from someone who just needs to write an essay and cook some beans

I have written, re-written and deleted the first sentence of this newsletter fifty times. Good writers will tell you to simply get words onto a page, forget about deleting and editing yourself as you go, just do it and see what mess you’ve concocted and edit accordingly. In this sense, I am not a ‘good writer’. I am too concerned with how it looks and sounds and feels; why I’m writing it and how others will feel when they’re reading it; too distracted by the film of dust that coats my side boards and the beans that are soaking in water or getting my chair positioned just right for the spring sun to enter my living room for approximately three minutes and forty six seconds that it does.

Motivation

The other night I went to a film screening of Mia Hansen-Løve’s new film, Un Bonne Matin (One Fine Morning), which is released next week. I paid a little extra to see it early and for a live Q&A with the French writer-director, in hopes that I would become motivated by cinematic osmosis. My desire to write is always most urgent when I have read or watched something beautiful that a female writer or director has created. On some level I assume this is simply a primal competitiveness; a need to keep up with my chosen vocation, or to finally realise some of the writerly dreams that I have, but have not yet found the courage, conviction or capability to start.

During the Q&A, Mia talks about her writing process, of how she turns often autobiographical moments or feelings into fiction that feels appropriately distanced from her own life. She tells us that what propels her to create is to “turn the chaotic feelings of life into writing, into cinema,” which has similarly always motivated me. On the bus home, I listen to a conversation between Mia and the Norwegian-Danish director, Joachim Trier (who wrote and directed The Worst Person In The World). The host asks her about ‘art as therapy’, and she says that she’s always used writing and cinema as a means of analysing her own thoughts and feelings about life. “If I didn’t do that, I probably would need to go,” she jokes. As someone who has always been somewhat skittish around paying someone to listen to my problems, this resonates. I think of writing as my own kind of therapy; a way of ironing out the kinks in my brain, of reminding myself to breathe, of calming myself down, of turning impulsivity and reactions into something slower, and less damaging.

I am often motivated to write, but less motivated to write ‘well’. By that I mean write with real purpose, with true structure, with an argument that feels crafted and considered and neat. Like Mia, I’m motivated to turn the chaos of life into writing, but often the writing is similarly as chaotic. It has no beginning or ending, and I often worry that it might not meaning anything to anyone else. In a personal journal this is acceptable; but public writing often requires something more rigid. It’s caused me to question why I do what I do; why I enjoy it, or why I sometimes resent it.

In my job as A Writer, I’m required to write according to a strategy, which gives a piece of writing some sense of purpose or grounding. In my creative pursuit as a writer, I’m able to side swerve a strategy and instead become motivated by whatever takes hold in my brain. Earlier this week I was convinced I would pen an essay about why we like what we like (or more specifically, why we want what we want, and why sometimes we go after things we don’t like and vice versa). I jotted down notes and discussed the subject with friends, but when it came to writing it, I didn’t feel motivated to do it. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have anything new or original to say about it (I do believe good writing is knowing when you’re adding value, or when you’re just creating white noise for the sake of it; although this can sometimes simply turn out to be an excuse for pure procrastination or avoidance). It’s difficult to create when we’re not motivated, which I deem to feel like being emotionally moved so much so that an outpouring of words cannot be stopped. This does not happen very often.

Distraction/Procrastination

I could sit in the sun forever. I’m sitting in the corner of my living room, remembering the daily ritual of this three years ago when there was nothing else to do but sit. I have become an expert in the sun’s movements. How it appears and disappears behind the tree. How it peeks through the left hand window around 9am but disappears by 10.30am. After 12pm it makes it way further west and it will be blocked by the adjacent building at approximately 2.37pm.

My upstairs neighbours are playing the same music they always do, usually accompanied by high pitched shrieks of joy, that I try not resent even though I know I need to write and the thudding beat is pulsing through my ceiling. Other people’s joy should always be celebrated, I think to myself. The sun is shining. I have found a way to write, even if it is to write about how I cannot do it, an un-subtle metaphor for something (for what I do not know).

I try to do the ‘good writer’ thing and not edit. I try to do the confident thing and pretend that what I’ve written is good (not important, but good), and then I think about how confidence is just about pretending until you believe it to be true; and then I wonder if emotional truths can ever be absolute, and about the podcast I just listened to about platonic friendships and whether I should move my table to the back of my living room and, oh shit, the beans.

I exit stage right to cook the beans.

Confidence

I’ve returned with a new-found confidence because something I know I can do is cook the beans. I drain them, setting them aside in the sieve. I take my favourite heavy cast iron pot and drizzle a little oil at the bottom, add the beans, some garlic cloves, half a leek and the chicken stock that I made earlier this week and bring it to a boil, turning down the heat to low. I keep the lid on for an hour and a half and now I can smell the broth, the beans, the aromatics. This is satisfying. Turning something from uncooked to cook. The scent of something good. Knowing I can feed people with it. I think extensively about how to roast the chicken – the second roast this week – and consider the sunshine and how this will effect the mood of the meal. It must be bright. There should be olive oil, not butter, and lemon zest and soft herbs that nestle under the skin, and a salad, and homemade aioli, even though that’s something I have a habit of messing up.

If there is one thing I am confident about, it’s how to roast a chicken. Writing? That’s a little trickier. Somehow I’ve written a thousand words. They might not be as good as the beans, but the words are here, both as permanent and as temporary as the chicken on the table that will soon be eaten.