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Sprig Magazine publishes two articles per month, written by our wonderful team of freelance writers.
THE TEAM/WRITERS
BACK TO SPRIG HOME
Sprig Magazine publishes two articles per month, written by our wonderful team of freelance writers.
THE TEAM/WRITERS
Why I (Don’t) Write
By James Wily
He/Him
Writer/Director/Warrior-Poet, James Wily is currently the youngest he's ever been in his entire life.
Based in Gadigal Sydney, James tells me (Himself) that he's interested in writing things that causes people to squint their eyes, and maybe even furrow them very deeply into a ‘v’ shaped crease. He (that is: James), thinks a lot about creases, and how he can cause them at a level that is "metaphysically bemusing” to himself, (that is, indeed: James). He's published fiction, essays, and poetry, with Loom Literary Journal, PULP, and Booker Magazine, and made a live-cinema improv show called The Premiere which one immediate family member called “quaint”.
Edited by Phoebe Smallwood
associate editor
she/her
Phoebe Smallwood is an editor, writer and word nerd currently pursuing a postgraduate degree in writing and publishing. She is passionate about art in all its various forms, but has a particular soft spot for literary and speculative fiction. She is thrilled to join the team at Sprig Magazine and its surrounding community of writers and artists.
Why I (Don’t) Write.
Or
The Obverse Of This Freedom
Or
The Gestalt of FEAR
Possibly
Tabula Rasa
No wait
[ ]
That gives me an idea
“If writing is soliloquising, then not-writing is like taking stage directions.”
Consider as well
Or how about:
Not-Writing, as an exercise in Semi-Truisms
Or how about:
Exeunt Meaning!
...
Maybe this is
Why I (don’t) write:
Maybe this is
Why I (don’t) write:
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
– Seen on a t-shirt.
I don't write.
In truth, there are really lots of good reasons for it.
* * *
The relationship between the writer and not-writing is no less fraught than that between matter and anti-matter.
I find this antinomy apt because writers like to mean what they say; they believe it all matters. (Is it a coincidence that a book is composed of front, body, and back ‘matters’?) Heck, they even write about why it matters so much to them: Joan Didion’s ‘Why I Write’, Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Dillard’s The Writing Life, George Saunders’ A Swim in The Pond In The Rain, Marguerite Duras’ Writing, Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation, George Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’ and so on and so forth; a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. The work of writing is both generative and communicative: it says something to someone. Matters. As a mattering thing, the writer (and really anyone who writes) is tacitly invested in the reasons why their words have meaning. This is an almost moronically obvious sentence to punch into a keyboard, but also, remember that I Don’t Write. When writing, every character is a choice, every sentence a decision, each paragraph a resolution, and every page a vow – it’s value judgements all the way up, baby. Judgements on what will most meaningfully communicate something to the reader – in this case: Why I (Don’t) Write.1
A natural corollary of all this matter wrangling is, well, the non-matter of not-writing. Not-writing doesn’t get as much attention as writing on account of there being a lot less of it to talk about. Because of this void-like qualia, not-writing is much less meaningful to the writer, than writing, and accordingly so do the reasons for the writer’s not-writing seem as flippant: as being a lack of talent; as stupidity, laziness or selfishness; having nothing to say, writer’s block, anxiety, or just simply having ‘lost their touch’ . This makes prolonged periods of not-writing, then, a rather monstrous predicament for the writer to be in; as contact between matter and anti-matter appears to be tantamount to an oblivion of the writer’s soul.
As a non-writer, I find this flippancy to be immensely dissatisfying. Aren’t the things we don’t do also that which define us? Negation is a metaphor-inducing concept, one that opens the capacities for new connections by the repression of known associations. What might occur in that space of not-writing? What does it mean (if anything) to not-write?
1. Take the word ‘Hobbit’ as a further example of writing as a meaning-making operation. Nice word: ‘Hobbit’. Roll it around in your mouth for a bit. ‘Hobbit’, ‘Hob-bit’, ‘Hob-bit’. To a reader unfamiliar with the works of Tolkien (in any medium), ‘Hobbit’ is meaningless. Nor would this person know ‘Ringwraith’, ‘Silmarill’, ‘Numenor’, or what it means to be ‘taken to Isengard’. This is an unfortunate ignorance for this hypothetical reader to possess, but I can forgive them on grounds of this person being a purely rhetorical invention. The point: Tolkien has made ‘Hobbit’ meaningful by placing Bilbo, Frodo, and Samwise within his stories, and putting this word in relation to other words with meanings we are familiar with (barefoot, 3–4 feet tall, pure-hearted), giving them a frame for ‘Hobbit’ to become meaningful to the reader.
* * *
Two characters – ME and YOU – are sitting across from each other.
YOU appear to be engrossed in a book.
Note: This conversation has been going on for some time, or at least, one side of it has.
ME: So, if you think of writing as a kind of mental-soliloquy – mental’s a bit of a redundant
adverb there, more like … um … a mentally-staged soliloquy – then not-writing would be like–
ME takes a slow, masticatory bite out of their fried-chicken burger.
ME: That’s good.
YOU continue to read.
like … [licks fingers] taking stage directions. [pause] Know what I mean?
ME raises both hands.
Like … [in air quotes] ‘Exeunt ME-aning’.
Pause. Expectant.
You know, how it’s impossible to tell a story without one of your own? There has to be something true to lie over the top of it in the first place, YOU know what I mean?
Swallows. YOU turn the page. Pause: lugubrious.
You’re still good to shout me this right?
Ceaseless silence.
* * *
The Official List of Reasons to (Not) Write
- …One must be stronger than one’s self even to close in on writing; one must be stronger than what one writes. - Marguerite Duras, Writing
The best thing about not-writing is that it makes whatever it is that you are writing much, much better. Hellish weeks spent metaphorically (and literally) sledging your head into your macbook pro’s acrylonitrile butadiene styrene keyboard, whittling away at that one sentence that just sort-of-kinda-just-on-the-tip-of-your-tongue-sounds-like-it-could-maybe-possibly-work-if-we just-oh-what-the-hell-cut-it-NO-wait-I-think-I-got-it-......-no-that-didn’t-work-well-back-to-the-dra-wing-board-let’s-err-let’s-say-it-loud-and-see-if-that-changes-anything-...-ok-that-didn’t-change-anything-let’s-cut-it-again-NO-something-has-to-go-there-it-still-oh-god-this-will-never-work-I’m-u-seless-what-do-I-know-I-give-up-completely-I’m-a-freak-a-hack-a-rackateer-fraud-failure–oh-wa-it-I-got-it… are instead freed up to do anything else but that.
This leaves a lot more time to get some actual writing done. To divest yourself from the lonely isolation of writing, and become immersed inside of the life experiences that will enrich your future writing; the kinds of experiences that ought to be written about: like love, obtuse encounters with strangers, and fragrant days spent at the water park, for example.
One discovers the joy of talking about writing – something that feels almost as good as having just finished writing – and it’s wonderful capacity of giving people the impression that you write all the time.
Not-writing is also an excellent insurance policy against any grievous bodily harm that writing may cause to your self-esteem. Because nothing crushes fantastical notions of talent more than an attempt at making them painfully obvious to everyone around you. By avoiding specific failures, one is able to maintain a universal pride in a completely abstracted version of themselves. This mummifying quality of not-writing makes it quite excellent at arresting any harm that dilettante notions of talent, potential, and ‘it factor’ may cause.
The worst thing, however, about not-writing is that you always feel like you should be writing.
Excerpt from Franz “Kafkaesque” Kafka’s Diary. Famously chill guy.
It’s in the shadow of this obligatory ‘should’ that the writer-who-doesn’t-write exists. That paradoxical being who can somehow withstand the annihilation of matter and anti-matter’s contact: the glacial ego-death that occurs from the combination of simultaneously believing oneself to be a writer, not-writing, and also desperately wanting to write. This mismatch of action and identity is the essential conceit of the writer-who-doesn't-write – and their perennial state of sub-articulation: Kafka’s ‘virtually useless’ – and it prefigures an agony that lasts as long as the writer feels themselves to be unproductive. (Or, until the writer no longer thinks of themselves as a writer-who-writes.) (Or, the writer writes.) This tragic figure is sensitive, but inexpressive of this halting of letters. They have taste, but not craft. They are awake, but in sleep-paralysis. Raison, without d’etre. Oedipus without hamartia; Bert without Ernie; a this without a that: a writer-who-does-not-write.
Charlie Citrine, the brilliant writer–protagonist of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, is a writer-who-doesn’t-write. He waxes on about this stifling repression of thought and action in one of his iconic maladaptive soliloquies in the a car with his brother:
2. Bellow, Saul. Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking Press, 1975.
* * *
The most essential condition of considering something alive is knowing that it ends, but never how.
It’s this partial knowledge that gives all of my half-fictions their fullest life. If I knew how they ended, the story would end and I’d lose interest. They’d be as good as dead, and what good are dead thoughts?
* * *
Le Penseur
I’m going to shortcut some literary theory and say that writing is thinking. I’d like to do this with the help of my close personal friend, Joan Didion, and her assertion that writing fiction (for her) is ‘entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means’,3 as well as Marguerite Duras’s account that ‘writing is trying to know beforehand what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward; that is the most dangerous question one could ever ask oneself’.4 This is to say that the meaning of writing, to the writer, is as much about their relationship with a discovery of thought, as it is with the quality of thought that is discovered.
Writing marshals thought through the abattoir of syntax, where it knocks thought unconscious with a tense-appropriate-pistol, for thought to then have its throat slit open with an apostrophe, and its blood let out onto the Gocs page, and finally prepared for the beautiful reader (who’s currently made it this far)5 to enjoy. As rarefied thought, the question of why one writes is often a deeply personal and complicated question, with answers as multi-valent and light and deep and dark and scary and as sacred as any relationship with your own mind could be.
Not-writing, as a negation of this relationship, is predicated on a fear of this cognitive discovery.
I think.
3. Joan Didion. “Why I Write” The New York Times (New York, N.Y), December 5, 1976.
4. Duras, Marguerite, and Mark Polizzotti. Writing. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 45.
5. And whom, I love.
* * *
Reader’s Block: A Poetic Agony in Five* Lines.
Some writers don’t read
because of an anxiety of influence.
For those same reasons, I refuse the ‘Why’,
and never read anything I write.
* * *
Writer’s block is usually spoken of in the same kind of ineluctable transience and ‘that’s the way things are’ verbal shrug as episodic conditions like the common cold, economic recession, and someone with micro-bangs are spoken of: as symptoms suggesting that something much deeper is out of alignment. It’s also a bit of a double bind. Because, to emerge on the other side of the block, is to, write (and thus continue to be a writer), and on the other hand, to continue to suffer from the block is, by common sense, to no longer write (and thus no longer be a writer, [which is then to no longer suffer from Writer’s block]).
There’s some messy overlap here with creative plateaus, depression, burnout culture, literal brain damage, ennui, and ‘losing your mojo’ that makes writer’s block seem as precise a diagnosis as a hammer is to straightening out a Jenga tower. This is probably because the term was coined in the mid-20th century fugue statue of psychiatry that gave us such bangers as the Oedipus complex.
Subconscious psychosexual drives to commit incest aside, whilst the writer-who-doesn’t-write most certainly suffers from writer’s block, this block is not the whole story behind the underlying element that makes the condition chronic:
Wanting to be a writer.
* * *
For what is public speaking? But the death of the private self? And what is the private self? But a public death?
- Excerpt from Half-fiction #6: ‘Rhetorician Rhetorica’ (Or: ‘The Public Speakers guide to faux-meaningful Oration’)
* * *
Saying that you're a writer feels like explaining the great joke of your existence. The experience is not unlike being at a party where you don’t know anyone, and the only stranger who’s semi-interesting enough for you to converse with reveals that they do standup. Your ears might prick at this. There’s a tacit confession of ego that occurs whenever someone tells you they’re involved with anything that requires an audience – such as stand-up, magic, writing, or lion-taming – and confessions of ego usually entreat themselves to some stress-testing: ‘Alright, tell me a joke’ slash ‘Know any tricks?’ slash ‘Isn’t lion-taming illegal?’ slash ‘Oh really? What do you write about?’ Because good writing, like magic, comedy, and unsubstantiated egos, is something that most people feel like they know when they see it. Follow up questions like the above, can colour the whole interaction with a bit of self-defeat for the admitted writer. As if the need to explain your value, and belief (or, want for belief) in your own perceived identity – something so bloody obvious to you – is immediately undercut by the fact of having to have been justified in the first place to some semi-stranger. Like asking permission to be yourself.
In moments like this, there’s a rapid sense of perception that occurs as the superpositional grace-period of the stranger – where someone you’ve just met ‘could be anything’ – collapses into the inevitable short-hand association that we bring to all book covers: ‘Oh you’re a doctor?’ You must be smart. ‘You work in tech?’ A soulless zealot. ‘You’re a writer?’ You must demand attention on your own terms.
This instantiation also occurs on both sides of the interlocution. For the stranger, however, the performance of ego is as much about making these associations true – Hey! You must think that I am sexy/smart/awesome because I’m a pianist/doctor/lion-tamer/writer – as it is about reinforcing what the stranger wants to be true about themself. The tension between these two things can be very upsetting.
In a way, I’m reminded of this scene in Frances Ha.
Not-writing can free you from this justification of self, as much as it traps you in a process of repressed self-actualisation, one that inevitably leads to the psychic pebble-in-the-shoe that is Imposter Syndrome: the real-time psychic friction between your own actions, identity, and how you think everyone else perceives them.
In this same way, most, if not all, of the pain of not-writing is wholly imaginary. The pain resides in the grotesque difference between what you imagine writing about and what you actually have written.
* * *
- At this moment there are over fifty-seven half-fictions inside of me, waiting to kill themselves, and be written.
- They live on as an unforgettable manifest of literary limerence; scant lines, idle dialogue, sticky imagery – each a promising fragment of something more: more metaphor, more salience, more magic, more thought, more life. More, well, writing.
- If we suppose the average length of the novel to be about 75,000 words (57*75000 = 4.27 million words) and, taking that further, we make some allowances for variations of length, genre, and extenuating circumstances (three of these are entries into a cyber-punkomance series, averaging 250,000 words) – I won’t bore you with the calculations here – but this essentially comes out as being a hypothetical oeuvre of:
- Four unfinished detective novellas: ‘The Cold Case Trilogy’.
- An eighteen-volume series about histories of the world: ‘A Long History of Brief Histories of The World’.
- A Cyber-punkomance omnibus: ‘Love.eXe’ (pronounced ‘love-ex’).
- A short story romantasy penthology: ‘Soft Tragic System’.
- An oration-for-dummies-type manual: ‘Rhetorician Rhetorica (The Public Speaker’s Guide to Faux-Meaningful Oration)’.
- A 5,000 word monograph about encyclopedias: ‘A Little Bit On Everything’.
- The world's first ever connect-the-dots medical textbook series with a ‘colour it yourself’ neuroscience chapter: ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Tones’.
- A fifteen part auto-fiction series written from (what I imagine to be) the perspective of my best friend Teddy Fresh: ‘Not That Funny, And a Little Bit Clever’.
- A personal essay collection about my life between ages nine, and nine and three-quarters: ‘I’m sorry, I almost meant that’.
05. These half-fictions are less than half the story, however. ‘Half’ because in the absence of execution it’s impossible to tell if any of them are alive and/or worth the time. And I find execution an apt term; a decisive stroke upon the nape of inspiration, delivered with such concision and speed that only has a few seconds to blubber: ‘Yes, I was alive’. All that remains is a dark spigot of plasma – sputtering its thick misty thirty-chapter-historical-genre-fiction-with-illustrations coloured spray over my shoes. I can feel it’s misery.
06. A habit is a promise to yourself kept without thinking.
* * *
Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it ... Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality.
- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life.
The-writer-who-doesn’t-write is like an over-edited essay without any thesis: something that is obsessively scrutinised, picked apart, and re-written without actually eventuating to anything substantial. The over-edited essay is something that, at best, can only become more abstractly refined; slightly less of a broad gestural sweep, a little less awkward, and hopeful that you caught the gist. At worst, it’s a deeply involuted nightmare of half-associations and bizarre leaps in logic that fail to cohere into anything at all. And, with the same lack of confidence that someone desperately trying to over-correct their swing in tennis has – an overanalysis that usually instills the bad habit even further.
Let’s circle this nightmare back to writing. Which is personal, and as a process, travels through the thoughts of the writer. Not-writing, on the other hand, is even more personal than that, and is kind of solipsistic. Writing (ideally) begs a reader, another party to be communicated with; not-writing, on the other hand, only begs the non-writer to circle those same few thoughts.
According to Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway once said ‘scratch a writer, and you find a social climber’. If that is the case (and I think that it is) then I suppose if you were to scratch a writer-who-does-not-write, you’ll find a social abseiler. Someone precariously teetering over the edge of the cliff of social debasement, quivering from their achilles to their heart, afraid to take the plunge downwards. Continuing this lateral metaphor of writing as a transcendent climb, then the solipsism of not-writing equates itself to a kind of negative transcendence, a divinely comic descent into one’s own self (‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita’)6, a person only buoyed by the abstract attachment to the idea of ‘being a writer’.
6. Opening line of The Divine Comedy:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Taken from Dante Alighieri, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and ProQuest. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2017. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4872932.
Excerpt from Susan “Against-Interpretation” Sontag’s Journal. Another famously chill guy.
There is something deeply humiliating about needing permission to do what you feel you’re best at. Especially when that permission can't even come from you. Not-writing is predicated on this pusillanimous fear of pain, in this way. It hurts to find out what you think, so much, that it never happens. And the irony of avoiding being around yourself is that you’re the one who’s inevitably doing all the avoiding, so the person you end up becoming is merely a stranger.
The writer-who-doesn’t-write is really just one big unfinished thought too, being: ‘I’m a writer’. Something that gets to feel perfect in its untested, perennially ‘virtually useless’ shape. An unrarefied abstract over-edited experience that’s digesting itself: something semi-true.
In the same way everyone has different metabolisms for nutrients, some people must have different metabolisms for spiritual nourishment. This isn’t bad. Like the employment of identity-based metaphor at a party with strangers ('I am X’), there’s no way to write about how you don’t write without some element of self-defeat. Because not everything has to be useful, or matter, to be imbibed. In the same way that it’s impossible to edit something that isn’t concluded, it can be very hard to write as a person unconcluded: a person unfailed, undigested: semi-true. It’s a partial completion, that you know ends, but never how.
* * *
I was tired, having not-written all of last night, and so thought about it for a while.
‘At the moment, Myself.’
‘That’s a really bad answer’, their reply.
And I thought about it. And it was.
And I replied: ‘Yes. But it’s true.’
Let this be my exception.