Whose brain is it, anyway?

Hello! I’m a writer, editor, and book coach with a 15+ year career that spans Hollywood, book publishing, and other creatives industries. I work with novelists, screenwriters, and topic experts who want to share their ideas through storytelling. To learn more about my services, check out my website or connect with me on LinkedIn.

This newsletter is where I share my Brain Stuff on writing and culture. Sometimes my personal creative work finds its way here too. I hope you dig it.

Hello my friends!

It is deep winter in Berlin, by which I mean it’s mid-November and winter hasn’t officially started yet. As I said in my last letter I’m feeling quite cozy about the DarkTimes this year, with its soup and candles and melodic, melancholic soundtrack. But a couple of days ago my best friend sent me a picture from her neighborhood in Sydney, where spring wildflowers are blooming and in the background you can see the very blue sea glittering in a perfect mirror of the very blue sky, and I felt an actual ache in my ribcage.

One day I will again live in a glorious climate, or at least have the money to travel to one occasionally.

Last time I sent one of these out, I mentioned that I’ve been writing a lot more again, mostly as a result of taking poetry classes. This has been part of a several-month project of me trying to reconstitute a version of the writing life I had in college, when it felt fun and unknown and challenging in a good way, and didn’t make me neurotic and avoidant.

School was when I wrote mostly poetry and sometimes short prose things, and composed in big black A4 sketchbooks with a rainbow collection of pens. I’m now doing all of those things again (I have so many colorful pens!), and I’ve added in some witchy stuff that involves consecrated candles, keeping an altar on one end of my dining table, and using certain scents. I’m also, very very crucially, making a big ongoing effort to find a creative community and make writer friends, which is a huge part of what’s been so important about the classes.

I’ve also completely, entirely, and VERY happily let go of the idea that I need to write a book any time soon, or possibly ever, and that such book needs to be a novel, let alone a commercial one.

Creativity is mysterious, but one of the things about making art of any kind is that it only really works if it’s a reflection of how you work. Writing is a reflection of a lot of things about how you interface with the world, and how your brain processes those things into language. (This is, incidentally, very closely tied to what people mean when they talk about “voice.”) You can and should refine that process with the toolset that is craft, but if you try to write in a way that is inorganic to how your mind works, you're going to run into problems. It will feel laborious, and the results will probably be stilted or overly derivative or just somehow not gel.

I’m very verbal but also an extremely “nonlinear thinker,” and part of why I’ve always gravitated towards writing is that it helps me organize and linearize things. Narrative snaps the pieces into a picture. But I think my ideal form of writing, for purely personal purposes, is one that is slightly more… elastic than your conventional novel. Narrative, but where unexpected structures or patterns or connections emerge. My brain also likes intense bursts of things, where the challenge is achieving maximum effect in a compressed form (I also suspect this is why I got hooked on photography).

So while I love a great novel, almost every piece of writing that has truly stuck to me post-adolescence has been either poetry or short prose. This is kind of stuff that makes me envious (in an inspiring way), as opposed to simply very appreciative.

So why did I decide at some point after college that I had to be a novelist? And that any other type of goal or ambition or writing practice wasn’t the “real” one?

Well… careerism, mostly. Born of the received idea that having a “successful” “career” as a writer meant being a novelist (either that, or writing for The New Yorker). An idea that was then very reinforced by working in both Hollywood and trade publishing in my 20s and beyond, where the idea of what “success” is gets very narrow, both financially and culturally.

It’s a form of careerism I find hard to fully shake - I’m a Manhattan-born Capricorn, after all, and I’ll likely carry a lurking bit of status obsession to my grave. But like a lot of people I know around 40, I’ve gotten wary of a lot of the values that drove my early ambition - whether they’re actually authentic to me (partially, but not fully), and whether they’re capable of delivering what they initially seemed to promise (NOPE). The publishing and media landscape is absolutely never again going to look like it did in the 1990s and 2000s, pre-digitization and when my ideas of what being a writer looked like were forming.

It’s not that I don’t consider writing novels a worthwhile pursuit. It’s a fucking amazing pursuit, if it’s genuinely coming from something within you, and I love picking apart novels and figuring out how they work. But why should I still care about the prestige mentality of New York City circa Y2K, when I only have one life, and one brain to use in the most me way I possibly can? I’m about to be 41! What are we all even doing??? And who are we doing it for?

Part of the problem is also, admittedly, that ~everything else~ has annihilated whatever bandwidth I might have for longform writing. My finances are crunchy as fuck, I’m trying to retool my entire career, and I’m also trying to have space for friends and love and rest and pleasure, and every time I go online there is climate disaster and people my age are dying of cancer and everyone killing each other and the US is being dismantled by the stupidest Fascism imaginable. Right now the thought of novel-grade focus and endurance and planning, and that kind of delayed gratification, makes me want to put a stake through my forehead.

I don’t necessarily think this means that I’ll never again try to write a novel, or a commercial one - my guess is I will at some point, when I’m feeling properly resourced to. I have this one idea that I can’t get rid of, and I think for a lot of us, our brains work in different ways depending on context - which is why I think a lot of writers, including myself, may drift between different forms for different ideas at different times of life. But I don’t think writing longform fiction is my principal form, and I don’t think it was ever meant to be, and I don’t think it should be at the center of my practice.

But… being able to sit down - during my lunch break even! - and bang out the skeleton of a poem in 15 minutes, and then also having a whole bunch of poem drafts in different stages that I can move between as I please, and also doing Substack sometimes, and then some notes in a Scrivener doc for a longer project that I can dig into someday when that feels good? That feels infinitely more sustainable and pleasurable and stimulating right now, and probably always will. Being an adult is a lot of fucking work, and sometimes it is actually fine to just... let things be fun and free and chill.

Fuck it 40s, amirite?

That was an unintentional but also rather perfect preamble to my latest announcement, which is…

I will say more about this in a few weeks when I have the webpage set up and can start registering people. But the gist is it will be structured enough to be useful, but not so intense that it will require a major time commitment. It will be geared towards writing as a dynamic practice, rather than mastering a specific form. (For people who want personalized instruction, there will be an optional 1:1 add-on.) We’ll meet twice a month, evening in Europe / daytime in the USA, and I’ll also run a community Discord.

I’m looking to enroll at least five and max fifteen people, and it’s open-ended so admission will be rolling - though I’ll likely offer a first-month discount to anyone who registers before Jan 1, and then we’ll start around Jan 15. So if you, or anyone you know, is itching for a supportive community to develop their writing practice, or just wants to do a human creative thing with other humans, this is the place! A place for supportive, creative humans who want to learn and share cool things, but who want to untether those things from capitalist productivity culture because we are TIRED. I think it’s going to be neat. Again, I’ll be ready to share more in a few weeks, so watch this space.

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