On Not Writing
Here’s how I write: I don’t, much. I read, I look at the internet, I drink, I go to parties, I take long baths. I remember things I should be writing, I keep not writing them. I agonise over not writing them. They haunt my leisure time and my thoughts before I go to sleep. The subjects or threads of concept will keep reminding me of themselves throughout most days. I’ll carry a notebook around and write in it only when extremely drunk and on public transport home or perhaps while very hungover on the way home from a man’s house. The next day I’ll read it over and it will be garbage but I’ll remember the *urgency* of communication I felt in that moment, how badly I needed to elucidate a certain thing, and the hazy memory of that urgency will make me actually sit down and write it again, better.
Here’s how I write: an idea about a broad thing will start scratching away at me. Although I can feel that once it’s on the page it will be a very particular angle on this broad thing, it is indescribable before it’s finished. It will sound absurdly general. I don’t have the ability to verbalise why a piece will work before it has already been written- this is why I am a terrible journalist. I can’t pitch. My ideas sound fuzzy and lazy, although to me they are clear and glowing with potential. Some examples of work I have done:
An essay about a relationship with an older man.
An essay about looking at my boyfriend’s ex girlfriend’s Instagram.
A story about two actors having an affair.
A story about drinking too much
An essay about wanting to be clever but also wanting to be beautiful.
Before I started writing these things, I couldn’t have told you any more detail than is given here, but I knew that once I started writing them they would become very specific stories, and the specificity would give them purpose and make them good writing.
Once I know I want to write about the certain, broad thing which will become specific through writing, I do what I describe in the first paragraph. I’ll live with the impulse to write about it for a period of time between a fortnight and 6 months. Along the way the various upsets and confrontations of my everyday life will influence how I think about the thing, they’ll add new testimony to arguments I want to make, or disprove initial ones. Then something will compel me to sit down and force it out.
Most often this is because I absolutely have to do it- I have a reading or performance the next day for instance, and want to read new work instead of old. Other times it might be a self imposed deadline which I have established by telling a friend I would send them something to read by that certain date. Whatever it is, I have to be *made* to start the thing. I never want to. But once I’ve begun and the broad thing starts to evolve into the specific thing it is, the thing it has been slowly becoming, I don’t want to stop. Then it’s easy to write, or at least easy to want to write which is the hardest part of what I do.
Renata Adler says in Speedboat:
“That ‘writers write’ is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”
But I find that many writers feel the need to impress on everyone around them how immensely structured and regular and plentiful their writing is. Is this because artists of all kinds are somewhere concerned that what they do is not considered “real” labour? Maybe. This is of course a very luxurious and fairly annoying concern to have. Is writing an essay about a romantic relationship or a book you have enjoyed the same as, say, cooking in a hot kitchen for nine hours? Or collecting rubbish? Of course it isn’t, and yet nor have my entry level admin jobs borne much relationship to what I know of hard work. They, much more so than writing, have largely been exercises in time-wasting and pantomime, being as they are usually filled with work which is both too simple and too boring to do all day. Simply turning up each day to those jobs was the real labour (a friend and ex-colleague and I used to remark that we were always surprised, upon occasionally having truly spent an entire day working, that we weren’t awarded additional wages on top of the ones we expected just for turning up).
The truth is is that the production of finished pages makes up only part of the work of being a writer. For one thing, you will have to make actual money which you are almost certainly not doing by virtue of your Important Work alone. You will work in waged jobs which bear at best tangential relation to your interests, and often none at all. You will apply for bursaries and grants. You will write things which are not your Important Work, writing people will actually pay for. But apart from that you will also be living, and this is what you are most concerned with as an artist, isn’t it?
(Let me interrupt myself here to address what I mean when I say the word “artist”. When I use the word in relation to myself, it is not to say I have any reputation or status within fine art or performance art or whatever you call the general thing which can be dismissed by calling it all “contemporary art”. This has caused some confusion occasionally, because although I *do* semi-regularly do readings or performances of my work in contemporary art spaces, I do *not* mean, when I use the word artist, to say that I have any real stake in that world.
When I say artist, I am using the word in the same way you would use it to describe a person engaged seriously in any creative work, the way you might call a film maker or a musician an artist. “ARTIST” gets imbued with all sorts of grandiose meaning which I don’t intend it to have, perhaps because it is often very hard-won for people to let themselves call themselves artists, and therefore it may not be palatable to see any old hack off the street use the word too. But I promise I use it only because it is the nearest-to-accurate word to describe the in-between space I feel myself occupy, where using the word writer doesn’t seem to entirely encapsulate the work that I do.
I don’t feel entirely at home in the world of pure literature. It has not always felt pliable enough for my purposes and my limitations. It feels at times smoother and more professional than I am capable of being. And so I sometimes say I am “a writer and artist” to try to mitigate that confusion. I wish I knew a better word, a single one. If you think of one, or dream one up, do let me know.)
Anyway- life is the raw material of the artist. That’s not to say I believe as B.S. Johnson and others did that one must have experienced an event to write about it truthfully. I mean only that what we observe of and feel about life- our own lives particularly and also life as a phenomenon, life as a catastrophe- influences what kind of work we will make. For this reason, and for the reason that comparing yourself with more successful writers is the easiest way to make yourself ill, I feel fine about telling you that how I write is basically how I live: messily, extremely, intemperately- often irresponsibly.
While I’m sure that plenty of writers need constant routine to produce the best versions of their work, I am also quite sure that there has to be more than one kind of good writer. At the moment, the most absolutely MeganNolan-work that could exist in this world is the work that results from my often sad, often squalid but usually exhilarating life. That is the work I want to make. This isn’t a lucrative or glamorous career; I’m probably never going to make a living doing what I do, let alone own a home or dog or any of that good stuff. So if I’m going to do it, which it appears I am, I think I must at the very least be exactly and completely the kind of writer I truly am.
My dad wrote something useful to me once, at a time I was feeling depressed about my lack of creative production, which I’ll say to you now. He wrote:
“When you’re gone, let them say about you, "Her life was not the least of her art”.
If I were a writer, this is how I would write about how I would and would not write.
