How to write without feeling anything
You can't – but should Adele's 'Someone like you' be in every writer's toolbox?
One of the techniques that actors use to make themselves cry on camera is shallow, rapid breathing. Apparently this releases a stress hormone, which allows them to bring emotion to the surface. I had to do something similar to write this post. For me it’s going for a solo walk and listening to songs I have on a playlist simply called ‘emotional’. They’re a mix of tunes that remind me of friends and experiences, or have a message I relate to, or simply those songs that are tear jerkers. Like ‘Easy Silence’ by the Dixie Chicks, or ‘Moon River’. They’re my version of hyperventilating. They bring it forth. It’s not that this is going to be a particularly heavy post, but I just cannot write when I’m feeling dispassionate.
Life recently has been a necessary, mundane slog. I have a lot of copywriting work on, to the point where every morning I have to set an alarm and get straight out of bed, and sit at my desk and start work, without even playing Whiteout Survival on my phone first. Ew. I have some very annoying clients at the moment too, and going to hate-stare at their LinkedIn profiles just isn’t enough anymore. All this results in me making noises like James from Love on the Spectrum (relatable feminist king).
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My girlfriend, who works in a leadership role in tech and regularly works long hours and weekends, has little sympathy for me – often laughing when I complain about having been at my desk all day, and having five meetings. I’m juggling a fulltime contract with clients on the side, and I’m very grateful to have had consistent work for the last four months, but damn. Life is not conducive to writing, is it?
My problem is not finding the time. I can get up earlier and I can spend my evenings and weekends writing if I want. I’m privileged like that. The problem is lifting myself up out of the muck of the mundane to feel something. I chase moments of joy, or of any kind of remembering that provokes an emotion. But they’re so fleeting, near-impossible to capture, like taking a good photo of the moon.
Recently I printed out a bunch of photos and created an ‘achievements and adventures’ wall in my office. I hope it will help me to remember that even when life seems like a grind, and nothing noteworthy is happening, that things will change. That I’ve lived an interesting life and will do so again. That maybe I’m too hard on myself, and needs-must.
I’ve always been a ‘memory person’. Not a journal-writer but a memory keeper. I file things away in the hopes that one day I’ll find a use for them. That’s what my memoir Not That I’d Kiss a Girl was to me. It felt right because I’d finally found an outlet for all the experiences and insights and observations I’d collected over my early adulthood. After it was published, I was grateful for the year of writer’s festivals and podcasts, because it scratched my endless itch of needing to be achieving something, without having to actually produce something. My well was dry. I had no more insights to share or things to articulate. But I could talk about the book, and my family, and being queer, and whatever else I was asked about. I didn’t have to be self-directed.
Ideas have come back to me slowly. It’s been nearly five years since then, and I have a small new reservoir of ‘things’ that I’m hoping to channel into a new book. At the end of this week I head away on a writer’s residency – the first I’ve ever experienced – and I hope that this amputation from my usual life will give me the headspace that I struggle so hard to find and hold onto. You know that feeling when you’re so close to an orgasm, but then you lose your train of thought, and you're mentally chasing to find it again? That’s what being in the right headspace to write is for me. My drive to write is very similar to my sex drive, when I think about it. It’s more responsive than spontaneous, and when those spontaneous moments flare, it’s never at an appropriate time anyway. But I’ve learned that when I give it a go, and persevere, I can get into it.
The intent of this post was actually to write about this past weekend being the one-year anniversary of our book OTHERHOOD’s publication. Realising that it had been a year since Alie Benge, Kathryn van Beek and I had a whirlwind week of not one but three totally indulgent book launches for our essay collection, and met heaps of our wonderful contributors.
As we chatted about it having been a whole year, my brain was screaming ‘What have you achieved in the last year, hmmm?’. But mostly I was thinking about how rewarding it had been. How crazy it was that three strangers decided to create a book together based on a shared love of an essay, and came out the other end with a really special friendship. There was a time when we texted each other on our group Whatsapp every day, and would talk about how weird it was when we’d gone a day without messaging. Our chats often popped off when I was already in bed, what with Alie living in London and Kathryn being a night owl, and I would frequently be stifling a cackle while my girlfriend slept beside me. Or she would get annoyed with my tap-tap-tapping as I wrote witty repartees while she was trying to read.
As we reflected on it having been a year since launch, we also talked about the emotion of publishing a book. During our launch period, we all cried spontaneously at different times during launches or interviews. I cried during a podcast interview when Petra, the host, asked me: ‘What do you think your 80-year-old self would say to you today?’
My response came out unformed and unconsidered, and it was about friendship. Friends function as ‘found family’ for me, a queer person without good family relationships. I’ve got a rough skin built up for when I talk about family, but when it came to friends, I got choked up.
Looking back at this interview now, with Kathryn sitting next me, I noticed how we looked at each other with respect and to seek affirmation as we answered questions. It made me emotional again. Unexpected friendships do that, and friendships born of challenge and resilience, founded in respect. That’s why my friendship with Alie and Kathryn is so special and unique, I think. We came to know each other so well in a very specific way during the two-year creation period of OTHERHOOD.
(Skip to the end if you want to see the question and where I cry)
Why is publishing so emotional? Alie reckons that the heightened emotions around launching a book lead to tears that would never happen otherwise. My girlfriend thinks it’s a releasing of adrenaline, after a long build-up. And I think it’s also a moment where your vulnerability slips through.
When you write a book, you’re in the thick of it every day, especially when it’s non-fiction. You conjure old feelings and emotions up; try to relive them so you can accurately represent them on the page. But then there’s a long period where you’re stepping back a bit – to manage edits, to write the back cover blurb and review the cover designs. Or in the case of OTHERHOOD, to edit other people’s essays. In OTHERHOOD I have an essay about about going through fertility treatments in the USA, and yes I cried when I wrote it, quite a lot actually. But I wrote it so long ago, when we needed samples to help us pitch the book to publishers. I hadn’t steeped myself in the vulnerability it takes to write a personal essay for nearly two years before the book was published.
But then the book launch is one of those moments where you go Oh shit, I’ve done something very personal, what was I thinking?? Hold on, I didn’t quite connect that people were actually going to read this. You come back to just being a person who is opening themselves up and hoping that others will understand you. One of my favourite quotes about writing is by Kazuo Ishiguro, who says:
“…in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
So on the one-year anniversary of OTHERHOOD, I want to give thanks again to all the people who wrote essays for us – whether they made it in the book or not. Writing is a vulnerable thing, and we appreciate you trusting us with your words. Most of all, I’m glad of the friendships I made from the process, especially with my Barrenesses, Alie and Kathryn. Real good bitches.