I have been thinking a lot recently about how it’s pretty much two decades since I made my definitive (if oil-tanker slow) turn toward writing as the thing to which I wanted to devote my energies.
If I could go back and tell 2004-vintage me—who would be on the cusp of leaving his last ever factory job for a library assistant position, and doing his first mawkish poetry readings at open-mic nights in Southsea backstreet pubs—that by 2024, he’d be making a living from skills directly derived from a developed talent for working with words, if not always actually from writing itself, he’d be greatly encouraged. (Believe it or not, he never saw it as an inevitability.)
But he’d likely have hoped that this success might have manifested as the publishing of novels, and/or journalism—because that’s what “being a writer” meant, right? Indeed, part of me would still like to be making a living doing either or both of those things… but it’s the same part of me which, while slowly accumulating the skills required, also got to watch the already shaky financial basis of those careers erode away to almost nothing.
(As noted many times before, there’s also a sense of complicity here: in joining the blogging goldrush, I contributed to the same devaluation of professional writing that made it hard to find writing work that actually paid.)
No tiny violin here, though. Because later I blundered sidewise into a second shot in the academy, and while that bridge also crumbled under my feet just as I thought I was getting somewhere, I still got out with a bundle of skills and credentials and portfolio, and I’m doing a passing good job—if I may say so myself—of alchemising them into a job that features all of the best aspects of the stuff I’ve done for the last two decades. (And also most of the precarity, but hey, I’m a long way from being the only one in that boat.)
All of which is to say: I suspect (or perhaps just hope) that the very callow me of 2004 would look at the me of now and recognise that he’d lucked out pretty well.
However, he’d likely also wonder what happened to all the novels he intended to write.
A lot of those ideas got binned, of course, as he acquired a better idea of what might make a decent novel—but they’ve been replaced (and indeed vastly outnumbered) by newer, better ideas for novels, and for many other things. The root of his puzzlement, though would likely come out as something along the lines of: “but you’re a writer now, like, a real one; so why aren’t you writing more?”
As is often the way, I’ve been struggling to articulate this confusion in a way that made it tractable to myself—and so I’ll raise a glass to Paul 65-days-of-Wolinski for putting a pretty good equivalent in front of me.
Responding to the revelation that one of his friends does book-binding as a hobby, and has started a newsletter in order to have somewhere to talk about that, Paul addresses what in some ways has been the perpetual lament of the blogger, ever since blogging was a thing: why don’t I have as much mojo for this as I feel like I should have? His reflections speak rather clearly to that lingering confusion of 2004-me.
Another difference in our circumstances is that, for Kesvani, book binding is an enjoyable hobby, but my chosen subject matter is wrapped up with the concept of ‘work’. I am lucky enough to still be making music for a living and this has led to a particular set of neuroses and anxieties about the relationship between what constitutes a hobby, work, practice, praxis, experimenting, play; what it means to be relying on my musical skills to pay the bills, and where exactly ‘enjoyment’ ought to fall amongst all that. I am not sure what it means to me now to think of making music as something I do as a hobby. And that feels simultaneously like a huge privilege and also a bit sad.
There it is: I pay the rent with my wordwork, and that’s an amazing thing that not many people get to do, no matter how much they want it and work for it. But the price of that is that, well: writing is work now. While there’s pleasure to the process—at least on some days; I’m not quite so lucky as Warren when it comes to enjoying the activity as much as the outcomes—there’s also an expenditure of energy both physical and mental, with the result that when the day’s paid work is done, the motivation to continue with the unpaid work can be hard to rouse. Or, more simply: now that writing’s my job, it feels strange and difficult to think of it as a hobby or even an art, and that feels, per Wolinski, “a bit sad”.
And again, for the forestalling of the obvious accusation: yes, this is very #firstworldproblems, thank you for pointing that out. T’other Paul addresses that obliquely with some theory derived from Jameson: there’s no ethical consumption or creation under capitalism, and we’re just as much trapped in that as anyone else, albeit under much better conditions.
But there comes a point with theory—and I say this as a die-hard theorist!—when the ability to abstract and explain ceases to satisfy. A phenomenon is draining joy from my life, so I track it down with the rest of the gang in the Mystery Machine, and when we remove its uncannily convincing mask, it turns out it was capitalism all along!
If writing is (one of) the thing(s) one does, one can of course write about that unmasking. But there’s a hollowness to that, a sense of futility, which is one of the reasons I’ve stopped producing anywhere near so much of that sort of writing here in recent years. It’s not that I don’t think it matters any more; it’s that I don’t know how to articulate it with the medium, to connect it with the work itself. Wolinski again:
We all exist in and through capitalism. Music predates capitalism, sure, but now our access to it and any enjoyment we can take from it is mediated through capitalism. That doesn’t mean it is necessary to always be thinking about things in those terms. It certainly isn’t a recipe for writing a blog to bring energy and joy to people who might be reading it because they are interested in making music! But what can I say? Writing about this stuff currently feels more connected to my process of making music than, I don’t know, writing about creative strategies for programming interesting MIDI hi-hat patterns.
Same, you know?
Only in my case, I think I have exhausted whatever value I was getting from the process of thinking through the constrained circumstances of my production, so to speak. I have more than come to terms with the fact that I must write to make the rent: under the circumstances, things could be (and certainly have been) far worse for me! The unconquered terrain, then, is the no-man’s-land of the hobby, of the art.
So, to continue with the theoretical terminology: capital would dearly like me to claim that territory on its behalf, because every hobby should be a hustle, amirite? But I wonder: is that perhaps the very source of my resistance to returning there? The internalised voice of the market whispering “see, I knew you could do it—now crank out one of those novels, get it out to an agent, then we’ll be cooking!” A sense that to work more than one needs to is in some way a capitulation to capital, even if you don’t intend or need the work to become exchange-value. A sense that—again with the Scooby-Doo unmasking scene—that this is why I can’t have make nice things.
And that is clearly bullshit, right? You write it out like that, and your concrete metaphor was there all along: you’ve internalised the market all the more insidiously for your having studied the ways in which it works! Your justification for not doing the thing that matters to you most is that you won’t get paid for it!
You fought the law, and the law won through your becoming the law.
The cop in the head is always the most bastard of all cops.
To be clear—to you, dear reader, but particularly to Paul Wolinski, who is a dear friend—this is a personal epiphany, rather than a prescription. The message here, if there is a message, is definitely not “haha stop writing about capitalism and make an art”.
What’s happened here, rather, is—I think?—a crystallisation of something which I must assume has been happening at some subconscious level for some time. I have been looking for the argument that would not only give me permission to return to the territory of the hobby, but also the mission to return there… and here it is. The hobby/work dichotomy is false, and the best way to combat it is to refuse to reify it.
Or: it turns out that I had to stop writing about capitalism in order to realise that the best way to spite capitalism in the context of my own writing is precisely to produce not for the sake of production, but for the sake of beauty—for the sake of the feeling that I want and need to make things.
And, y’know—much easier said than done? But I felt a genuine chime of revelation on reading Paul’s post, and decided the best way to honour that was to respond to the instinct that it should be written back to: to make the thing that demanded to be made, even if I wasn’t sure what it was. Be the change you want to see in yourself, etc etc.
An alternative explanation would be that it’s pretty hot here right now, and I didn’t sleep well, and you’re reading the distilled essence of sleep-deprivation as filtered through a terminal overthinker… so perhaps just picture Roland Barthes stood in the rutted dirt of the main drag at high noon, his hand a-hover above the handle of his revolver, and us all retreating slowly into the shade of the saloon or the hardware store, in hope that it won’t be us catching that lead.
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