How to tell when you're lying to yourself
On the particular kind of stuckness behind (most) bad writing by good writers.
::facedesk::
Oh, I’m so annoyed. I spent way more time than usual working on a draft for this week’s newsletter—gratuitous amounts of time—and yet somehow, six hours and 2000+ words later, this shit still isn’t publishable.
I’m sure the authors in the chat have all been here. Some weeks, the words slide out so easily: all at once, fibrous and well-lubricated, self-curling in their aesthetic spiral. Others—well, others contain words like the ones in my unpublished draft. There’s a lot stopped up in there—a bunch of fragmentary ideas, packed dry and pellet-like against one another—but I find no amount of effortful squeezing will force any more than the merest turtle head of them into resolution, and even that keeps retracting the second I relax my focus.1
I now have to do the thing one generally must in these circumstances: give up. Give up, walk away, stop straining, waddle around distracting myself, and hope that whatever is going on in the darkness of my body resolves on its own. It usually does.
As part of that process, let me tell you what the other piece was nominally about:
It was about problematic takes I’ve seen on r/PubTips.
R/pubtips, to remind, is a Reddit channel on which traditionally published authors (and those who want to be traditionally published) discuss their careers and concerns, including issues with their literary agents. I lurk on there a little more than I care to admit—it’s an anxiety stim for me; more on that in a moment—and while the overwhelming majority of posts are generous, professional, and well-informed, I do see and wig out over the occasional Problematic Take.
My erstwhile draft analyzed two Problematic Takes in particular, each of which I’ve seen and grumbled about in multiple comment threads:
