Eureka #6: That's The Way To Do It
Work patterns. Life cycles. Finding your way. Forgiveness. A couple of links.
(note: this one has footnotes that look like this: (0)
. They’re not essential.)
Hello.
Good morning from one of the café seats at the front of Second Home: London Fields, where the sun is streaming in, at least at time of writing. I have chosen the Second Homiest Second Home spot today, because for the next four weeks, I have a contract which will mean just one day to myself, gently nudging Eureka along, and four days in an agency. An agency I used to work at, actually.
There were many things I liked about the place, but I was trepidatious about going back, for what does going back mean if not regressing, retreating, devolving? My first four days of sixteen are over, and I can say: something is different. I think it’s me. My favourite things and many of my old friends are still there, while the things that weren't to my taste - well, they're still there, but they somehow seem less relevant, less visceral. Perhaps, there is no going back. There is only coming around.
I've been coming around a lot in the last four days; the project I'm on involves taking a tricky situation that a brand is in, and working out exactly how they got there. There's a lot of thinking to do, and a lot of organising that thinking so that the thinking can truly be thought.
Sometimes, it's felt like I've spent four days transferring the same knowledge base between different formats, adding just a little more clarity each time: from the PDFs and decks of research into a Textedit file, sometimes paper if I'm in the cafe. From there into Google Docs to share, or a Keynote to present upwards, with an email on the side to share with the team I'm supporting, and then for yesterday's handover, a final super-neat memo in Pages, which also helped me make sense of what I'd been doing all this time. I didn't copy and paste any of it; I rewrote it every time. Which brings us here.
On Method
"How do you write Eureka?"
Great question, fantasy attendee of my 2023 Do Lecture.
The only thing I actually need to do is type the words I want to publish into the editing pane in Substack. It's very friendly and intuitive. But so far, I have used: Ommwriter, iAWriter, Google Docs, Textedit, and Evernote.(1)
I sometimes wish I had just one consistent method. Like how Steinbeck had one particular brand and model of pencil he favoured(2)
. He'd have a box of 12, and he’d sharpen all these pencils at the start of a session, and then just go through them all, swapping when the point was dull. Once pencil #12 had given out, he would stop and sharpen them all again, in what passed for a break in those days. Jiro, in the documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi, has his son spend about fifteen years just learning to make the rice for his restaurant. He's what, 50, and he's still making rice. And then you've got the "write every day" mantra held by Stephen King and many others.(3)
Writers (and maybe other creatives? You'll have to tell me) look to this Consistency Porn because it helps tame the idea that creativity is chaos. Which is funny, because young children don't worry about that chaos. I think our veneration of consistency must come from the school->work journey: this is your drawer, this your exercise book, this your desk. From a management perspective, consistency is desirable.
From a human perspective - one day, you get bored of your pencils. Or your mate tells you about a new app that makes you do 200 words a day, or ten minutes an hour, or the Pomodoro Technique. In the last decade I have been consistently inconsistent in method, doing different things in different ways, and sometimes the same things in different ways. Different settings, different playlists, different self-bribery. One task is powered through on the first try, one is rewritten to perfection.
And it's only recently that I've started to think, maybe all of the above is… fine? If you need to keep changing the formula to keep going, well, as least you're keeping going.(4)
You should try to consistently do the thing, but you don't have to be consistent in method to do so. Their way doesn't have to be your way, and your way doesn't even have to be a way. The right way to do something is the way that gets it done.(5)
Which, of course, is a form of self-forgiveness. The quicker you leave behind regret about not doing something perfectly, or not doing it more, or indeed any thought about what you're doing... the quicker you can do it.
And then? It's done.
Inputs
Julia Cameron’s book The Artist's Way is what I would have included as reference for last week's letter. It talks at length about unblocking your unconscious flow in order to create. Dorothea Brande's Becoming A Writer is also good, but I mention Cameron because, one: her writing is inclusive of all art forms and therefore useful to everyone here in the classroom, and two, she speaks of God. A lot. And to have someone bring the mystical to the creative conversation is a powerfully displacing thing.
Lithub - "Some Writing Advice: Don't Take Others' Advice". Yup.
The Big Green Bookshop was an amazing bookshop in Wood Green. The guy who ran it massively, MASSIVELY gave a shit. Every year he let 40 writers stay overnight for National Novel Writing Month, and I was one of them one year. Now he does really clever online stuff like Buy A Stranger A Book Day. And he gives a lot of books away to schools. And he's funny. As of last week, he's had to shut down. He's moving to the coast. So there's never been a better time to support him in some way.
That's it. As always, I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, and you can think of just one friend who would too, do them a favour and send it along. If you ARE that friend: hello! Here's how you get this thing again, and stop relying on your friend to be your PA/knowledge-butler:
Until next week,
James (@jamescmitchell)
❧
Footnotes
There are many things to be said, about everything. But also, your time is yours. So I'm going to put a few things down here, rather than break up the train of thought too much. I promise that these notes will be a) interesting and b) COMPLETELY SKIPPABLE.
(0)
I can see this isn’t your first footnote rodeo.
(1)
If you include fiction writing, the "workflow" (hahaha) includes Scrivener, not to mention all the forms of paper over the years: the Moleskines, the curios, the Leuchterms(sp?), that wonderful, wonderful year of being subscribed to Field Notes...
(2)
This magical pencil is called the Blackwing. And guess what, they've made a Steinbeck edition. Would he approve? I kind of hope not.
(3)
It worries me that my intuitive references for this are all male. I wonder if that's a consequence of outdated myth: male artists being seen as mystical creator-fathers whose processes are magical, whereas women should just sort of get on with it? Which is ridiculous. But since this post is ultimately about not treating these myths with too much reverence, perhaps it makes sense that most of this nonsense is attached to men? I don’t know.
(4)
See Eureka 5.
(5)
I'd love to hear your stories about getting things done. If you just reply to this email, I'll get it. I could feature it if you like.