If You Keep Pivoting, You're Not Lost

I have always enjoyed writing but the enjoyment has never tracked to any one mode of it. And for a long time I thought that was the problem.

I’ve tried my hand at young adult sci-fi, literary fiction, collaborative sci-fi neo-noir thriller, books on looking at writing through a yogic lens, poetry, freewriting as a thing to do for hours, and prose poetry. Each one belonged to a version of me that was becoming something and then needed to become something else.

As a kid I wanted to be a writer but this variously looked like: write on a computer and make magazine articles, have a mailing list sharing C.S. Lewis quotes, write poems, run D&D adventures, daydream a world in a Tolkienesque story. The idea of being pinned down as any one thing terrified me. Every pivot felt like I was ascending toward some new mysterious success.

Of all of them prose poetry came closest to something I felt was my thing, this form that’s about the making and not the shape of it that can be experienced in the span of a human moment as an extension of living fully through language.

I thought I couldn’t decide that writing (in any form) was my thing because I’m not naturally good at it. I’ve been a professor for twenty years and I still confuse that and which. And because I spent so much of my life investing in other things, like building a hobbit house dug from the hillside, or learning blockchain software engineering.

What I actually stuck with, through every pivot, wasn’t writing as much as what happens while you write. I’m fascinated by what happens in the moment your hand is moving and something is forming and you don’t have a name for it yet. Your attention is right there with the prelingual, almost as a performance, but an inner one. What carried through the sci-fi and the freewriting and the hobbit house was the alchemy of making things as an embodied human. This means hands on material, attention on what’s emerging, the body in the act of becoming something it wasn’t a moment ago.

Who cares about mere writing compared with what happens to you when you stay with the making?

And I think about this against the backdrop of what’s been happening around all of us.

Before the internet there was at least the pretense that what a person made with their hands and their attention had value. You could disagree about what was good, but the making itself wasn’t in question. Then the internet arrived and smartphones and social media and we started giving our attention away and slowly the message became that what you make matters less than how many people see it.

Then covid. And for that brief strange window, people took refuge in baking bread, playing instruments, and looking for opportunities to bring about real connection remotely.

But then in recent times, more macroeconomic nastiness has brought inflation and layoffs. And right into that vacuum is the AI bubble, which isn’t really about AI as much as it’s about the fact that somewhere along the line we started treating each other as replaceable, and now we finally have the technology to make that feel efficient. The corporate version has always been there: do more with less, automate the human out.

None of this has anything to do with whether the technology is good or useful. It more about what we’ve been training ourselves to believe about each other for a long time now.

And writing sits right in the middle of it because writing is the thing you can do while you’re becoming. Before you’ve said something comes the inner orientation toward that place where voice speaks from.

Who cares about the output compared with that nascent stage before you know what you’re making, before it has a shape? That’s where the whole thing lives, but that’s the part that’s at risk of becoming invisible.

I always assumed I was supposed to create things that matched my own arc. But I think I’m more useful unpacking from experience and giving a map of inner territory to show what it looks like inside when you’re at the blank page and you don’t know what you’re becoming yet.

I keep meeting people who are in the middle of their own pivots, like stuck writers and people with a creative project they care about, and I don’t think what they need most is a plan for the output. They someone to help them stay with it when they don’t know what it is yet.

As for me: I’m working on my next books, sure. I’m also leading in-person typewriter events and planning future writing retreats.

The common thread here is that these are in-person and embodied and physical things because I think our job is to swim upstream to build the muscle that would otherwise atrophy.

If you want to try what I’m talking about, I put together a free five-day writing practice that gets into this. Try it out. Let me know how it connects with you. If you have a different experience, that’s valuable too, and I’d like to hear it.

I don’t think any of the world’s current challenges get fixed easily. But part of the fix needs to look like people making things with their hands and paying attention to what happens when they do.

That. And let’s be good to each other.