Getting to the ocean floor

how to clear out the buzz of logistics in your brain so you can write something actually good

I’m currently working through a major manuscript revision for my memoir. It turns out, I’m 2 for 2 in sending my editor a manuscript and then having the results of a presidential election mean I need to do a substantial overhaul coming to terms with how to make my book face a new, scarier and more fraught moment. File that one under “things nobody told me I might have to think about when I was a Classics Ph.D. candidate.” Hopefully this is the last time, but maybe it’s just part of the book-writing process for me? I write a book, an authoritarian gets elected, I rewrite the book. Let’s hope this is just a coincidence and not a pattern.

As with Not All Dead White Men, I believe that the work I’m doing in Antiquated is even more urgent and necessary than it was before Trump got elected. The world needs queer stories that are complex and messy and human. But doing that work of reimagining? It’s hard. See also: this post from two months ago.

don't write a book (unless you have to)

It’s even harder this time than it was in 2017. I’ve been told that no matter how many books you write, each one is harder than the last. I believe it. Somewhat counterintuitively, it is much easier to say something true in scholarship than in memoir. Even if you’re telling a story of events that happened to you, getting to the heart of those events requires a kind of patience and excavation and humility that I wasn’t completely prepared for.

Also, last time I rethought an entire manuscript to meet a political moment, I had a neurodivergent four-year old. Now she’s twelve and in middle school, and I’ve added two six-year olds and an old bulldog and two coparents and a life that is just orders of magnitude more complex than what I was working with in 2017. Richer and more joyful, but definitely more complex. My brain is a busy hive of logistics bees — have I sent in the health forms for summer camp? Does anyone need a medication refill? Should I be worried that the dog’s ear infection doesn’t seem to be resolving? Just how long can I continue to drive with that “low tire pressure” alert without doing something about it? Are we out of milk/laundry detergent/fucks to give for each other’s bullshit? And when those bees start swarming, it becomes next to impossible for me to write anything I don’t want to delete immediately.

I’ve been working on this book for so long that digging into the revision feels like a visit with an old friend who knows me extremely well but who I haven’t seen in ages. The first hour or so, you’re just catching each other up on what’s going on in your lives. How’s your new role at work going? Contractors sure are a nightmare, right?

After the throat-clearing is done, you get into what’s really going on with you under the surface. And then by the end of the evening you’re into the stuff so deep that you didn’t even realize it was there, and it isn’t until you hear yourself say it that you realized how much it needed to be said. Stuff like “I definitely need to leave my job” or “do I really believe in God” or “I want to re-evaluate my relationship with alcohol” or “I think the trauma from X event is impacting my ability to live my life.”

If you’re a Morning Pages person, you know what I mean. It’s the work that happens on Page 3. Most days, by the time I’m nearing the end of Page 2, I’ve written all the thoughts that were in my brain and I’m strongly tempted to call that enough. But the stuff that happens on Page 3 is the real stuff. Everything that you’re secretly furious with your partner about but pushing down, everything you’re so ashamed of it hurts to even look at it directly.

The question that’s occupying me these days is: how to I get to the ocean floor of my own mind, where all the colorful and violent and bizarre sea creatures are? I don’t want my reader to spend the entire memoir there — that sounds exhausting. But I also suspect that any memoir worth reading takes the reader down into those depths every so often before bringing them up to the surface. You need to be able to get to Page 3, which is almost impossible to do in the presence of logistics bees and children with big feelings and subcontractors who are treating the moss on my roof and a dog who seems to have become allergic to herself, somehow?

Photo by Francis Taylor on Unsplash

I wish that I could give you some kind of easy, foolproof trick for getting to that ocean floor. If I even claimed to have one, this would be a very different kind of newsletter. I’ve been noticing an increasing number of Substack newsletters focusing on giving advice on how to improve/grow/monetize your Substack newsletter, and the content therein usually boils down to the fairly obvious: figure out what value you’re bringing your readers, and then give it to them consistently.

But instead of dropping a paywall here, I’m going to give you a list of suggestions for getting to the ocean floor that I guarantee you already know.

1. Go for a walk. I know: groundbreaking. Bring your dog and prepare to reassure passing concerned strangers that her reverse sneezing is totally normal and not a seizure

2. Journal. Morning Pages feel cheesy almost every time, but they work

3. Meditate — or, better yet, treat yourself to a massage and let your mind wander

I hate so much that those three things really work. So here are three things that also seem to work for me, but are less boring and grown-up:

1. Dancing in your underwear

2. Starting a deeply weird art project, like carving erasers into stamps

3. Exactly the right amount of alcohol, maybe about 1.5 drinks, and then getting really angry about something

And here are three things that have never worked, not once:

1. Staring at a blank Google doc

2. Either negative or positive self-talk

3. Giving yourself a deadline (“I must access my deepest, hardest thoughts by next Tuesday at the latest”)

Ultimately, my best advice is that when you find yourself procrastinating by handling a bunch of other annoying bullshit — just let that happen. It might feel like you’re avoiding the hard work by doing literally anything other than it, but really you’re calming down all the swarming logistics bees, which is key.

Your mileage may vary, of course. And noticing and paying attention to what does and doesn’t work for you, with curiosity and without judgment, is an important part of the journey. Actually, maybe it is the journey. Noticing everything your brain does to avoid really being with itself is the hardest and most essential work.

Good luck getting to your own ocean floors, friends. I can’t wait to see what deeply weird stuff is down there.