My eyes are sore. I’m into a 5-hour-per-night sleep pattern and 90% of my waking time is spent staring at illuminated liquid crystal. Eight hours of that is occupied by a job I needn’t say anything more about, the rest is devoted to reading and writing.
Some people might say I’m stupid for doing all this without getting paid for it. I would have a serious beef with that accusation.
First of all I love this. I have a biological need to be constantly immersed in ideas, just as many people need to be constantly immersed in social interactions.
I’d still be doing the same thing if I retired or won the lottery tomorrow (in fact, if I won the lottery I’d probably be somewhat annoyed by the distraction of financial and legal matters — though I’m sure that would pass). In other words, I am being paid — in subjective terms (which is ultimately why we do everything), if not compensated in objective terms.
Second, I approach this work as an investment. It’s my education. People pay a lot of money for education (side note: the line of credit I took out during my B.A will be paid off next month, exactly 11 years after I started it). Sure, I’m not getting paid to read and write, but at least I don’t have to pay somebody else for the privelege.
As I see it, writing begins and ends as an effort to think clearly. Not only does it compel greater articulateness and definition, writing makes me look at my thinking more objectively, which reveals and helps me address its many biases, shortcomings and flaws. It isn’t merely a kind of free-floating intellectualism; thinking as I do it is actually engaged with real opportunities and problems.
Until 2001, I was never very interested in writing. I had been deeply interested in current affairs as a kid but developed an ironic distance through my adolescent years. Maybe this was because “current affairs” when I was a kid meant things like the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War, and in Canada it meant controversial free trade agreements and constitutional disputes; whereas when I was in high school and university, “current affairs” in Canada and the U.S. meant pointless bickering and ridiculous scandals, and globally it meant regional crises in places most people couldn’t find on a map (which isn’t to say those shouldn’t have been more important).
When 9/11 happened, non-immediate events became real again — and really important.
Unifying moments like that (in which everybody is paying attention to the same thing, and everybody knows everybody is paying attention to the same thing) make people want to do something. Those of us who can’t do something directly involved do as much as we can anyways: we send donations, buy hats for charity, wear ribbons to show solidarity, and we think and talk.
(Yes, thinking and talking are doing; they are often the most/best we can do. Keep in mind we couldn’t make our donations or wear our ribbons if people hadn’t been talking about the issues and thinking about ways to help.)
So seven years ago on that day I started to write, trying to address questions of what went wrong? what should we have done better? what can we do? how do we fix or avoid this in the future?
Over the following months, as I started reading magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, I developed a sense that writing about such questions (and hopefully about answers to those questions) was something I wanted to do with my life (or at least was one of many things).
So I looked at journalism as a career and started working on a portfolio to submit to journalism school. But I found it nearly impossible to produce any samples. All I was interested in writing about were big issues, and writing about big issues meant dealing with even bigger concepts — of human nature, right and wrong, truth, etc. — and I never managed to get very far into a piece before I realized I didn’t have enough of the even bigger concepts worked out yet.
And then just as writing about big issues had been a career revelation, thinking about even bigger concepts was an even bigger revelation – a revelation of calling, I suppose. I still maintained an interest in journalistic writing, but I conceived it more as a revenue stream than as my main ambition (you know you’re screwed when freelance writing is your sensible career option).
Here I’m going to invoke the notion of investment yet again. My hope was that by getting the even bigger concepts worked out, I could afford to address big issues effectively for many years at relatively little cost — having already “invested” in a dynamic platform to do most of the work — by “making my ideas work for me,” just as we’re supposed to “make our money work for us” towards retirement, or in the same way that people invested a lot of time developing things like HTML, XML, CSS, RSS, etc., so all I have to do is hit “Publish” and my words will instantly proliferate around the world with relatively little effort.
By the time I worked out enough of the even bigger concepts about 2 years ago, I found myself in another non-productive predicament. I had invested so much in even bigger concepts that I had totally neglected issues people can relate to. Worse, the even bigger concepts compelled me to develop a very functional style, designed to formulate ideas rather than actually be read by anybody, nevermind enjoyed.
So here I am at 7:30 am, having got up at 3:52 after five hours of sleep; I have to leave for work at 10:00 (though I can get away with leaving at 10:10, and I will end up leaving at exactly 10:13, like I do every day), and I’m trying to calculate in my head how I can manage to compose at least one more out of the dozen or so ideas from the pipeline into writing, while fitting in ten minutes to shower and ten minutes to eat, along with whatever time it’ll take to check Arts & Letters Daily, Bookforum, the Globe & Mail, the National Post, the New York Times, updates in my Google Reader that haven’t been checked since 5:00… and wherever all of that leads.
That’s exactly the kind of paragraph I hoped not to write when I started a blog (though not exactly “blogging”) last August. Maybe I’m just too tired to edit. Or maybe I’m just starting to get how to write.
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