James here. Hello this week from the café in Tate Britain - you're already rolling your eyes after last week's visit to the Modern but honestly, I was in the area for a meeting, and the meeting went well and so I have a chocolate tart and a cappuccino. I'm not some kind of Tate-touring obsessive, though I now know enough to notice the differences between the two. The coffee is even more expensive, and where last week's visitors were school trips, this week I can look up and see grey hair and art students and people carrying little books that say Londres and Londono and ロンドン.
When I last left you, I was about to take a couple of days' gig at an agency. It went well, I think. I came in, I did what I do, they were happy.
But I still went into it with trepidation. Agency work? After all the cool narrative shit I said I was doing in the previous Eureka letter? Are you giving up, Mitchell?
Hey, now. We need to talk.
On The Balanced Diet
George Orwell's 1936 novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying is about a man named Gordon Comstock, who finds himself torn between two worlds. Or rather, he tears himself between them. On the one hand he's deft with words, and occasionally uses them to great effect in the nascent London advertising industry. On the other, he hates money, capitalism, and the idea of being middle-class. He believes that struggle and penury is part of the purity of the artistic life.
He says big things like,
“The violation of the inner person is the greatest territorial crime of all.”
In pursuit of purity, Comstock decides that the best way to make sure you don't care about money is to not have any. But ultimately he realises something. Or, in the tradition of that sort of novel, the narrator realises it with us, and if Comstock truly understands the psychological pickle he's in, he doesn't know what to do with it:
The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved, to pawn your clothes, to sneak trembling up the stairs when you owe three weeks’ rent and your landlady is listening for you. Moreover, in those seven months he wrote practically nothing. The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on—a ‘competence’, as the beastly middle-class phrase goes.
(Incidentally, Aspidistra is the work where Orwell makes his famous observation, that "advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket." - but let the record show that it's not Orwell - it's Gordon Comstock. And Gordon Comstock is not happy.)
Aspidistra is a fantastic book, and you'll have to read it to find out whether Comstock manages to apply what he's learned in time to salvage his life and his identity. But I think about it a lot. I mentioned a couple of editions ago that I'd been calling entrepreneur friends for advice. I'll do a roundup of that advice in a future edition, but one thing stuck with me that I didn't expect. I certainly didn't expect it to hit me emotionally:
"There is no shame or capitulation in doing some of the work you're just good at, in order to keep your dream project alive. Doing agency work is not Plan B - it's a part of Plan A."
I wanted to make a huge switch between work styles, overnight, on principle. The principle of what, exactly? I don't know. But what I do know is that beginnings are fragile times, and if you put too much pressure on something because it HAS to “work”, it's likely to fail. Not even just "work" in a financial sense - my ultimate dream is that Eureka doesn't just fill a balance sheet, but help define the structure of my days, my activities, my identity. Can you go from zero to 100 on all of that? Of course not.
On the same phone call, that same friend said, "You might be able to control whether people you. But you can't control whether they're ready and able to buy what you have to sell." The last couple of weeks have demonstrated this. Lots of people are excited about the idea, some are almost ready, but scoping and budgeting for the work takes its own time. And why shouldn't it? If you're asking people to invest in you, it's not right to rush them just because you're in a hurry.
So, taking a little "Oxygen Work" has taken the pressure off these discussions for me. It's meant I can make decisions in the interests of the work, not the need to pay rent. And Comstock would hate this, but isn't a little tension a good thing? Being kept away from Eureka for three days has made me eager to get back to this. To meetings, writing to you, and chocolate tarts.
After all, you can't eat them every day. A balanced diet is good, for all of us.
Inputs
Goodbye, Judith Kerr: The tea party had to end sometime. We've lost one of our greatest children's storytellers, Judith Kerr, at the age of 95. And if you didn't know, her life is as extraordinary as her stories. In this half-hour audio documentary, sit in her studio as she works, and hear her reflect on life, in her own words. There's a bit that made me stop in the street with its tragedy and comedy. You'll know it when you hear it.
Everything I Know About Storytelling I Learned From Planet Earth 2: A few years ago, everyone I knew lost their minds over a one-minute clip of a lizard trying to escape some snakes. Even watching it today, you're never QUITE sure what's going to happen. This article is a quick dissection of that scene along the beats of storytelling, to show my it works the way it does. I share this for two reasons, firstly as a reminder that nature docs (and stories) are a masterpiece not just of capturing but editing, and secondly because a diagram of The Hero's Journey never made anyone shout "OH FUCK HE'S NOT GONNA MAKE IT!" the way this does.
I got nice comments after last week. Someone said it sounded confident. Thank you for that - it's scary putting yourself out there. Let that be a reminder to all of us that confidence is a behaviour, not a feeling. As always, if you think someone would appreciate this week's thought, please pass it on to them. If you have comments, shoot me a DM @jamescmitchell. I'd love to know if you're enjoying this carnival float.
Until next time,
James (@jamescmitchell)
❧
psst. Did you get forwarded or linked to this? Do you want another one? If so: