We Are Only Immortal for a Limited Time - How to Ride a Tiger, part 2
Welcome to the Hammer Party #7
Welcome to the hammer party.
Earlier this month I sat down with Brian Ballance for his The Interesting Podcast, and it was, I hope, as advertised. At the very least you can hear me working out some of the ideas for this month’s essay, and it was fun talking to Brian about a lot of different things (one of which is linked to below).
I’m currently deep into edits and proofing for upcoming projects so I hope to have more to talk about soon. But until then …
Thoughts on Writing
We Are Only Immortal for a Limited Time
How to Ride a Tiger Part 2
When I was a child, I compulsively re-read books. Harriet the Spy, Tom Sawyer, the Great Brain books, a biography of Crazy Horse, all of which I checked out from my elementary school library. This was back when books in libraries had the little check-out cards stuck in the back, and I watched as my name filled up the slots, row after row. It became a competition with myself - how many times could I re-read them before another kid’s initials broke my streak?
In junior high it was Stephen King and Dune. In high school it was Hunter S. Thompson and The Secret History. Reading and rereading until I cracked spines and tattered pages, until the language washed over me, soaked into me, helped me shape my voice and word-sense. If I had to chose a single practice that made me the writer I am today, I would choose the compulsive rereading (paired with the compulsive re-watching of movies and TV that went alongside it).
So, since this is the behavior that I believe made me the best writer I can be, do I recommend it to people who want to become better writers?
No.
Because I believe that if I had forced it, if I had constantly reread those books not because I wanted to but because someone else told me to, it wouldn’t have worked.
I have some proof of this. As part of my early idolization of Hunter S. Thompson, I learned that he had spent his youth manually typing out the pages of The Great Gatsby in order to get a feel for the language. So I tried it myself (being at least self-aware enough to type out Thompson’s work instead of Gatsby). It didn’t work. Because that was the method that Thompson’s own brain had built for it’s own unique folds. My brain had devised its own program: constant re-reading. Because it emerged from from my own desires, it worked.
Much later I learned that compulsive re-watching and re-reading are a symptom of the anxiety that has marred my life in many ways. I don’t want to sell a mental disorder as a superpower. And yet the fact remains: by letting my subconscious lead me, I was able to give my brain what it wanted, and therefore it thrived. When I tried to force it to eat what it didn’t crave, nothing happened.
It’s a simple idea: embrace your uniqueness.
This applies to what comes out of your brain as much as it applies to what goes into it. Many writers I admire advocate for some version of the idea that their art is beamed to them from some other place, that they are merely an antennae for ideas that come from aliens or the astral plane. I will admit that I find this idea incoherent. If the artist is just a channel for aliens, then why do all the aliens who beamed story ideas to Russ Meyer happened to be obsessed with gigantic breasts? We aren’t conduits for anything that isn’t born inside our own brains. The call is coming from inside the house.
My metaphor that the storyteller is a person riding a tiger, and is also the tiger too, is closer to the truth. Yes, there’s a mind that is deeper and smarter than the surface you, and only by working in partnership with that unknown part of yourself can you do your best work, but you can’t claim it is alien to you. It’s you.
You’ve got to learn how to ride your tiger, and the best way to do that is to let it lead. If there’s a central thesis to these newsletters, it is that if you cultivate yourself and your subconscious properly and then work with the you inside yourself to create and sustain a dream in your audience, you will be living up to your highest potential as an storyteller. And listen: that is the only worthwhile metric of success.
The first step in this is cultivating yourself. Feed your tiger. Firstly, that means figuring out what and how it runs.
Pay attention to the difference between what you want and what your behavior wants. You want to write first thing in the morning but you keep hitting the snooze button? Then guess what - you don’t actually want to write first thing in the morning. Write at whatever time, with whatever schedule, using whatever tools work best for you at this stage in your life. Learn what other writers do (Eli Cranor’s Shop Talk is good for this) so you can experiment, keep what works and throw out what doesn’t. Don’t let the scolds of writing Twitter tell you that you have to do anything if it doesn’t get results. Write every day if you like doing that and it’s practical. If not, find another way.
Liberate yourself from what doesn’t work. Embrace what does.
Feed your tiger. Vary its diet, again experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. Don’t let anybody tell you what you should or shouldn’t absorb - and that includes the cop in your head. Take chances, challenge yourself, but if you catch yourself studying your phone instead of the book or screen, then move on. Go ahead, re-watch Heat if that’s what you want. It teaches an important lesson for storytellers: the action is the juice.
When it’s time to start your work, create spirit boards that help you cohere and refine your own unique aesthetic, and then create the kind of stuff that you are compelled to make.
Two warnings.
First, it is vital that you do not let this cultivation of self curdle into solipsism. Making art only for yourself is masturbatory. You have to remember that the end goal is to create a vivid and sustained dream in partnership with the mind of your audience. There is a vast difference between making the changes and clarifications needed to make sure the dream remains deep and sustained, and the cheap compromises of bad corporate content. That’s why this cultivation is just the first step of creating a dream - the second stage is transmitting it to someone else. At its best, storytelling is an act of service.
Second, pursue your uniqueness, but do not let this curdle into narcissism. Being unique doesn’t raise you above people - it makes you a person. I was recently blown away by brilliant thinker Alain Badiou and his book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. I am still struggling to understand everything he says, but in my mangled way: Badiou believes that humans are an animal who have the ability to become more-than-animal by communing with the unknown within themselves through a commitment to their singular truth, which can include the pursuit and consumption of art:
The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man’s identity as immortal at the instant he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal … And we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal.
Later on he expands on how this is done by giving yourself up to the unknown inside yourself:
Lacan touched on this point when he proposed his ethical maxim: ‘do not give up on your desires’. For desire is the constitutive of the subject of the unconscious … such that ‘do not give up on your desire’ rightly means: ‘ do not give up on that part of you that you do not know.’
Maybe this all sounds like twaddle to you. Maybe you think that you don’t have anything special to offer, or maybe you’re embarrassed or afraid to face the kind of art you really want to do. Or maybe you think it’s better to do the safe thing, to keep your influences narrow and predictable and salable. Maybe you can ignore the parts of you that scare you. Maybe you can deliver just what the market wants and nothing else. Maybe you can break your tiger down and teach it how to churn out some goddamn content.
But -
What if you really are unique? What if no one else will ever exist who shares your brain folds, life experiences and interests, and therefore if you are true to yourself and practice your craft, you can create something that literally no one else in timespace could ever create? What if not only is this the only life you will be given, but what if you are the only you who will ever be given to life? What if by embracing this and facing it fearlessly, you can leave a small but immortal mark on the world that only you are capable of leaving?
What then? What are you going to do about it?
Flashback: “Midnight Rider”
starring Ryan Hurst, directed by Nina Lopez-Corrado
One thing that came up on the aforementioned podcast with Brian was this short film I made maybe a decade ago, based on my short story “Midnight Rider” and starring Sons of Anarchy’s Ryan Hurst, directed by Nina Lopez-Corrado. It’s really more of a filmed monologe than a short film, but Hurst is great and it was a lot of fun to do.
Refilling the Tank
Akira
Watch Akira on the biggest screen you can as loud as you can. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Writing Music of the Month
Ravedeath 1972, Tim Hecker
Tim Hecker, creator of much beautiful and fractured music, recorded most of this album by playing a pipe organ in Iceland, then retreating to his studio to manipulate the sounds, creating a shimmering and blurry work that at times walks the line between music and noise.
Murder Ballad of the Month
“Shit, Damn, Motherfucker”, D’Angelo
D’Angelo’s debut record is a masterwork of smoothness and sex, so smooth and so sexy that you could be excused for not even noticing that this is a song about killing people.
OK, party’s over.
“Liberate yourself from what doesn’t work. Embrace what does.” Thanks for this reminder and this great essay. Needed it.