On Showing Up

Getting reps in and sharing a snippet of something new.

This is your reminder that my debut novel, VICTIM, is available for pre-order. VICTIM is a fearless satire about a hustler from the Bronx who sees through the veneer of diversity initiatives and decides to cash in on the odd currency of identity. If you enjoy this newsletter, I think you’ll also enjoy the book.

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I’ve been dwelling on this 2022 Twitter (or X, I guess) thread by writer and critic Austin Adams, who recently dug it up on his timeline.

Writing & bodybuilding seem like antagonist interests, but each is an asymptotic struggle to reach an impossible ideal, necessitating Herculean discomfort & constant assessment of your own weaknesses. Any sense of accomplishment is hard-won & fleeting.

When asked whether you enjoy doing either, the only honest answer is, “I guess?” When people see what’s required to be successful at either, they think you have a mental/eating disorder. When people read your book/see you naked, they say, “I’ve seen better.”

The short thread has stuck with me because I think it is pretty good at putting words to a connection between weight training and writing that I’ve been circling around myself for some time now.

When I’m up early in the morning working out at the gym, I often feel the experience is connected to my writing. It isn’t just that I get most of my reading done at the gym these days (I walk uphill on the treadmill for 30 minutes and read after lifting), but also because something about the two activities—writing and working out—feel so intertwined to me.  

Adams’ thoughts helped me flesh this out a bit.

He’s right. Writing, just like waking up early in the morning and lifting, is not something I always enjoy doing.

A lot of times, writing feels like work—especially during periods like the one I’m in now, where I’m in between projects in a sense, trying to figure out the shape of something new. Trying to find a path. And in the meantime, mostly, wandering about in the dark until I do. 

Writing this Substack can feel just as hard sometimes, too. I’ll be honest. It feels that way this week.

I’ve done my usual routine of taking a week or so to think things over, before using the rest of the time before my self-imposed bi-weekly deadline rolls around to write up a draft.

Usually, the process works. Four or five days before the post is due, I’ve generally got an idea of what I’m saying and, usually, I’m well into a draft and simply giving it a light polish the day before its due.

But for whatever reason, that didn’t happen in the past two weeks since my last dispatch. 

For whatever reason, when I thought about what I might write, nothing really came to mind. I felt sort of like I do when I show up at the gym some days—tired, going through the motions of whatever workouts I have planned.

And yet, I’m here. Going through the motions again, just on the page this time.

Why?

Because I made a commitment to myself when I started this space that I would write one of these dispatches every two weeks. I made a commitment to remain consistent. And, as I’ve written in the past, I really believe in the importance of consistency. In the importance of simply showing up. 

I’ve learned throughout my time as a writer that simply showing up is a big chunk of the battle. Getting to the desk and writing something—anything.

Just last week, I was reminded of why this practice is important.

As I’ve mentioned here over the past few dispatches, I’ve been at work on a new novel. I got about 100 pages together. But a couple weeks ago, I hit a wall and realized I needed to take a step back and assess what I’ve got so far.

Before I did that, I took a break from this new thing altogether. I finished up some other writing projects I had hanging out in the wind. I read a couple books. And then, last week, I started the process of reading through those 100 pages I wrote.

Not to edit or revise in any way. Just to read them and try to suss out what they’re pointing to. To try and find some threads I can pull on, or that seem worth pulling on.

A lot of the writing wasn’t all that good, which I expected. But some of it seemed promising, and made me think, hmm, there is something here I can work with.

Here is one little nugget I dug out recently and that I’ll share with you all.

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Nico can only think of age in terms of months now. The baby is 19-months-old. It still takes him a minute to understand that the others—the childless, who live their lives as they’d like, wake up when they’d like, shit when they’d like, and fuck when they’d like—don’t think about time in this way. They don’t have to.

Still he likes to watch them try to calculate the numbers in their minds before he decides to just make it simpler for them: “Almost two.” 

The baby thrashes about the house, trips, rolls on the ground, falls for no good reason, tries and fails to climb things and falls again. There is so much movement happening these days that Nico has begun to regret watching all those YouTube videos, reading all those articles about teaching infants how to walk, and putting his son through all that training.

He has begun to miss when his son was just a little immobile being confined to a bassinet, begun to miss when he could tell himself they were spending time together while his son laid there and he watched baseball. 

He watches his son try to shove a toy firetruck through the bars of his crib now, an incompatibility that should be obvious, he thinks. He remembers when the boy was much smaller. When he would look down at him in the bassinet as if he was a rare artifact in a museum. When he would watch his little breaths and count, making sure they were still occurring as they should.  

The little breaths were always a reminder to him: This is a human. His son. He was this person’s dad. 

What does that mean? What does that entail?

The questions start up once more. He focuses on his toes fondling some oversized Legos. He listens to his son scream because the truck will not go through the bars and the boy still hasn’t realized this.

He tries to will the questions, and the thoughts, away. He calls out to his son: “Calm down, calm down. It’s okay.” 

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Is this any good? I don’t know.

But something about it speaks to me. Something about it suggests that there is more there, under the surface, to play with. At the very least, it is something to build off of.

The thing is, I don’t remember writing it. Just like I don’t remember writing much of what I’m starting to read through in these 100 draft pages.

The vast majority of it was written simply because I showed up to the page on a given day. Because I sat down, often when I didn’t really want to, or when I thought, just like I think now, that I didn’t have much to say, and forced myself to write something anyway.

And that is why you go through the motions. Just like that is why you go and do the lifts day in and day out.

The curls you do today won’t result in the biceps you want tomorrow. But they’ll help. They’ll provide a little building block.

And in six months, or a year, if you’re consistent, you’ll have those biceps you wanted. Though, by that point, the goal posts would have likely moved again, and you won’t even realize you have them. You’ll be focused on the next thing.

And that’s how it goes—with both writing and working out. We move closer to some ideal we’re looking for, striving for, but never reach it.

I’m starting to learn that that’s okay though.

That perhaps the whole point of the ideal is that you’ll never reach it. Which only ensures that you’ll keep trying to.

Peace,

Andrew

Recommendations: 

1. I enjoyed this interview of critic and Substacker

   Christian Lorentzen
   on the Cultural Mixtapes podcast. Lorentzen shared great insights about the state of literary criticism today and why writers—and publishers—should take risks on the page given that most people aren’t reading anyway.

2. I found this piece on blurbs in The Atlantic interesting, even though I don’t really agree with it all that much.

3. This piece, a follow-up to The Atlantic piece on blurbs, by

   Kathleen Schmidt
   , is also worth reading.

4. I found myself listening to this 2016 interview of Hanya Yanagihara on the Otherppl podcast. I have not read A Little Life, but plan to soon. Nonetheless, I enjoyed listening to Yanagihara speak about her process, and especially about how much of a role she took in shaping and marketing her book. It seems she took a number of gambles that ended up paying off. I’m a sucker for that. 

5. Since my last dispatch, I finished reading Trust by Hernan Diaz. It was the first book of Diaz’s I’ve ever read—and I loved it. The onion-like structure kept me intrigued, and the language was precise, spare, and beautiful. I understand why it has won so many awards.