On being obsessed with the writing process

A relaunch: What will this newsletter be all about?

Notebook, courtesy of a delightful Molly Young recommendation. Pen, Pilot Varsity, which I found on my own but apparently is also a favorite of Otessa Moshfegh’s.

I get a thrill reading about how Joan Didion would sit down at her typewriter and retype dozens of pages of her work every day just to get rid of the “blank terror.” (You’ll have to excuse my clichéd Didion references here and thereafter, but a) I am after all, a young woman journalist b) I’ve recently been on a Didion kick c) the lady did love to talk about her process.)

Or hearing about podcaster and writer Kelsey McKinney’s unhinged writer’s block ritual of blasting the Gone Girl soundtrack and stuffing her mouth with a very specific kind of extremely sour gummy she finds only in Texas. (If she stops physically typing while the soundtrack is playing, she must put more gummies in her mouth, unpleasantly numbing it more and more. I think I find this more tempting than Didion’s laborious copying.)

Writers love to read about other writers’ process (Processes? Sounds worse when I say it in my head, an indelible part of mine). We know this. Everyone knows this. But...why? 

Why is it so compelling to read or hear for the 50th time that the best time to write is in the early hours of the morning? Or slobber over the pen that this well-known author simply can’t write without? And don’t get me started on content about writers’ notebooks (actually please do, I suspect I’ll have an entire post on the wonderfully fraught relationship so many of us have with them…)

Is it just that we hope they will teach us our ways, that replicating their rituals will magically have their talents flow through us? (Has anyone replicated John McPhee’s INSANE coding system?)

Or is it simply that learning about any kind of work practice that requires skill is endlessly compelling? 

Or are we so in love with the idea of writing that we’re looking for every possible way to romanticize it? The image of a writer staring out the window by their desk in the morning with a hot cup of coffee... sounds like cheap, stock image ASMR. And yet, I think that for me, it is precisely that. A comfort. A couple of months ago I read

Jami Attenberg

’s book 1000 Words, A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round, in which many illustrious writers describe their process. While working on my own book proposal, it felt like a cozy blanket. Maybe it was the ritualistic, repetitive nature of it all, or maybe it made me feel less alone. I can’t tell you a single thing I retained from it. I almost feel like I blacked out while reading, just soothed by all those process rhythms, but I immediately sent copies of 1000 Words to my book writing accountability buddies so that they could feel the same way. 

Come to think of it, I can’t come up with a specific ritual or a practice that I’ve copied after reading about someone else’s process.

That’s probably because the writing process is something that develops so organically, that must be in tune with how your brain works, your natural cadences and routines, but also your deficiencies and distractions. Take it from Christopher Mims, the Wall Street Journal tech columnist who thus responded to my Threads post about process and McPhee’s intricate computer-assisted labeling when creating longform structure: “He was my guide initially on this. But, and with all due respect, I think his way of talking about his process like it’s this very systematic thing is horse shit. What I’ve learned from others, and from refining my own process, is that you have to develop one – what it is, matters less.” 

John McPhee, Draft No. 4

That’s not to say I haven’t borrowed or incorporated bits and pieces of other’s writing practices into my own. I am writing this on iAWriter, a piece of software I read about in the FASCINATING New Yorker piece about distraction free writing hardware. I was tempted by the devices themselves, but I do find that as a reporter who writes by constructing and tearing down rather than by putting word in front of word, I have to be able to see everything in front of me on the page. I bought Jia Tolentino’s favorite notebook, and it remains in my rotation. And I am convinced that many of my various other quirks and rituals are a result of some sort of osmosis of all that writing-about-writing I consume. 

When I post online images of my own process, which is somewhat visually pleasing, I often get a bunch of responses from tickled writers (“I love seeing this. I envy that table and I know that table.” – CBS anchor John Dickerson). It presents as brain-soothing, with its color coding and apparent orderliness, although I am anything but, and what those images usually show is the aftermath of much brain turmoil and probably a lot of skin-picking, an unfortunate compulsion. 

Maybe that’s also the reason I like to read about writing? Because it’s imposing an order on something that is so disorderly, intangible, torturous, magical? I mean, duh.

And maybe it’s bigger than all that. My former colleague and one of my favorite newsletter writers

Rosie Spinks

had a more poetic take in a recent post of hers, one very much rooted in her way of looking at the world, which I so admire and love reading as an antidote to my more literal and cynical tendencies: 

“Writing advice is often viewed as low-hanging fruit, and rather cliché. But I think there is a good reason why writing advice is so compelling to so many people. Writing is a method of paying attention to the experience of being alive. More than just putting words on the page, it is about engaging with the world in an attuned, open, and curious way. Whether it’s writing essays, painting, dancing, or cooking — it’s all variations of the same act: A way to show your work as you figure out how to be alive.” 

(Which is, coincidentally or not, a fun flip of the famous and often too-rosily interpreted Didion quote and book title “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”)

What do I want to do with this newsletter? 

I’ve found that most writing-about-writing focuses on fiction, maaaaybe memoir, too. And while the sitting-down-with-coffee-at-6am-ritual may be similar for writers of all stripes, the needs of the longform narrative nonfiction writer are different. We write very much in conjunction with the external world, the writer’s private cocoon constantly disrupted by reams of pesky research and inconvenient facts that have to be accommodated.

So my hope for this newsletter is… to process the process. It will be a meditation on the craft of nonfiction writing, from research to structuring to the actual typing of words. I’ll be compiling how other people talk about their process, whether it’s in their own writing, or through interviews with me. I’ll also be talking about my own rituals, as I am about to officially start the longest piece of writing I will have ever done – a book! (It’s a very very reporting-heavy social history of online dating, to be published with One Signal/Atria/Simon & Schuster. I hope you buy it and read it, eventually, but the contents of the book, for the purposes of this newsletter, matter less.) 

I will be including my favorite advice and tips, but that’s not quite the main aim of this newsletter. It’s not a how-to because while I THINK I generally know how to do the thing, having written actual thousands of pieces of journalism, dozens of them longform (see some here), I’m not a teacher, or some sort of sage, or a prominent writer with multiple books under her belt. (And even if I was one of those, as I said above, I think process isn’t something you can just copy.)  This newsletter will be a trip, a discovery. I will be thinking through my own writing through writing about writing (this is it, it sounds insane, but this is it). And I hope you get something out of it, too. 

The bulk of it will be free, for now. I’m aiming for biweekly (fortnightly, to use my favorite old-timey Britishism which is honestly much less confusing than the whole “biweekly”/”bimonthly” debate) posts, although that might change in the future. You can expect: 

• Process book recommendations, excerpts, comments

• Nonfiction book and longform article recommendations

• Original interviews with other authors about their process 

• Journal of my own trials and tribulations and cork boards and post-it notes and color coding (starting with the next issue) 

• Some tips and tricks, and definitely tools and creature comforts (think: The Strategist for nonfiction writers, wow what a shiver of delight I get just from typing that) 

Along with the above, I am also launching a paid series about crafting my proposal and selling my book. During this process, I often found myself scrambling for up-to-date resources specifically for crafting a nonfiction proposal, for figuring out how this all works. I’ve learned that your mileage may vary and I found it very helpful to be reading about what other writers did and talking through everything with a couple of awesome writer friends. First up, the saga of my agent-finding process, filled with strategy inspiration and words of caution. In your inbox next week.

Thank you for reading and welcome! 

Hanna

P.S. If you’ve signed up for this newsletter ages ago when I first started it as a vague “personal essay” space – thank you! If you’re not interested in the topic please don’t feel obliged to stay here, but I also won’t be mad if you remain a subscriber. I hope this might give you insight into how the (meatless, I’m vegetarian) sausage gets made.