Orderly In The Streets, Wild On The Page
Life advice from Coates, Knausgaard, and Flaubert.
This is your reminder that my debut novel, VICTIM, is available for pre-order. VICTIM is a 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. To learn more about the book, and it’s creation, check out this recent interview.
During my infancy as a writer, I idolized Jack Kerouac and On The Road, a novel I later realized serves as a gateway drug to literature for a certain type of young man—which, in my mind, makes the novel quite useful.
Kerouac wasn’t the only person I was into. There was also Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and Hunter S. Thompson.
What did all of these guys have in common—aside from excellent prose? They lived hard. They drank a lot, did a lot of drugs, reportedly slept with lots of women, and often found themselves in questionable situations.
During this period in my life, in which I was just beginning to take this vocation seriously, I believed that being a writer, or at least being the sort of writer I decided I wanted to be—exciting, stimulating, and even polarizing—required living the way in which these early heroes of mine lived.
It required, I assumed, experiencing adventures and surviving to write about them.
Through the end of high school and most of college, my life consisted of lots of drinking, hookups, and a good bit of trouble started for the purpose of manufacturing an adventure—even if it was just for one night.
The writing, I assumed, would happen in the aftermath. As I was hungover, and crept to my desk after having survived the latest jaunt, I’d simply allow my fingers to do the painless task of pumping it all out in a spontaneous burst—the sort of burst Kerouac became famous for.
But things never seemed to work out that way. Sure, there were some moments of excitement and flash, but that’s all they were, moments.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I became a father and a husband, until I found myself living a highly structured, even mundane life, that I was able to take the sorts of risks on the page I had always wanted to take.
It took years, but eventually, I learned that to create the type of wild, free, distinctive work I wanted to create on the page, I needed to reserve that sort of energy for the page. Which meant that my real life, my off-page life, needed to be controlled. It needed to be set up in such a way as to not distract me from the goal at hand.
I was reminded of this understanding while listening to Karl Ove Knausgaard a couple weeks ago.
In an interview with
of the Otherppl Podcast—an excellent literary podcast—Knausgaard discussed living through a period in his early ‘20s that seemed similar to my own.He described his life as “chaotic” then, and said there was a lot of drinking and a lot of engaging in acts that were dangerous, in retrospect. His writing, meanwhile, was far less exciting.
“At that time, when I was in that chaotic state, my writing was very poor. It was like nothing of what I had inside was possible to get on the page.”
The switch, Knausgaard told Listi, came when he started to set “boundaries” in his own life, and “be free in the writing.”
He set up a daily schedule, cut down on the booze and drug use, and focused a lot of his spare energy on his kids. His personal life as a result, became focused on “safety and security.” By focusing on these things, he finally felt “safe enough to transgress” on the page.
I loved that sentiment. Especially because transgressing on the page is so important today, when there is a big fear of hurting people’s feelings, of writing the wrong thing, of stoking discomfort in a reader. As if fiction was ever meant to dispense campaign slogans and comfort.
Listening to Knausgaard immediately reminded me of a 2016 podcast interview between journalist Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates, right before the transition of power from Obama to Trump.
The interview itself isn’t bad. But for our purposes, what is most important is the very end, when Klein asks Coates what advice he has for someone who wants to be a writer and “how to do a good, moral job of this.”
Coates launches into some recommendations: learn a foreign language, stay off Twitter, develop a tight, small, group of friends, try hard not to form any habits with drugs and alcohol. “You don’t want to cultivate things that rob you of time,” he says. Then his advice turns decidedly more “conservative”–Coates' word, not mine.
“I think it’s good to have a monogamous relationship. A good, consistent monogamous relationship,” he says, before sharing a version of a quote attributed to 20th century French novelist Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Coates goes on to praise this way of life, citing it as the key to unlocking some of his most memorable work.
“I’m like a big huge believer in that. I think you have to get your personal life disciplined as much as possible, because that enables you to go out and wreak havoc in your work, which I think you need to be able to do if you want to actually do something distinctive and creative.”
According to Coates, two “counterintuitive” things that helped him the most as a writer are nurturing a long-term relationship with his wife, and having a child at a young age.
“That had the beauty of clarifying things for me. Do you understand? Like, everything was clarified. The one thing I do, I write. And the thing that comes from that writing, is, hopefully, some amount of money to feed this kid. That’s how the world works. It’s just that simple. It eliminated so much out of my life.”
I have written before about this wonderful sense of clarity that enveloped me the moment I had my first child, and that intensified with the birth of my second child.
But I love Coates’ thoughts on this—particularly given all that he tends to represent in the collective imagination of his readers.
Here is this staunch writer who advocates on behalf of liberal, even radical, reforms and yet, in dispensing advice, tells younger writers to slow down, to live quiet, conservative lives.
If the two things seem at odds, Coates does an excellent job of squaring them up in the interview.
“Because I was relatively conservative in my personal life, that allowed me to be flagrantly radical and liberal in my work, and just go all over the place and do things and think about things in ways that I don’t know would have been possible with another life.”
So, what to make of this then? What am I saying? Have children? Get married? Not exactly. Those are personal decisions. They’ve worked out well for me thus far, but I can’t say they work for everyone.
What I would say is that if these thoughts about how to live off the page resonate with you, then it is up to you to decide what “orderly” might look like in your life.
It could mean a shift in focus. It could mean structuring your day so your writing time is front and center. It could mean ensuring that whatever you do before or after your writing time, doesn’t distract you or tire you or inebriate you to the point that your next session becomes moot. It could mean thinking of your writing more like a job you clock into and clock out of, no matter what, instead of something you pursue only when the “muse” calls.
I can’t tell you specifics. But I can tell you that thinking this way about my personal life and my writing life has been extremely beneficial for me.
Even though I know 19-year-old me, with his Kerouac poster on the wall of his dorm room worshipping the “mad ones” would look upon 32-year-old me pushing a double-stroller through Publix with a shopping list and think, god damn, son, you’re mad fucking boring, I also know that this relatively boring life I lead nowadays is what allows me to be the best writer I possibly can be.
I know that doing the sort of work I really want to do, and having the sort of output I’d like to keep up while I’m alive, pretty much requires it.
Does that mean you can’t have fun? Can’t get drunk or hit a joint? Yeah, I still do that from time to time, and enjoy it.
The difference is that when I’m throwing a few back with a close friend, or doing something spontaneous with my wife on a date night, I’m no longer chasing some experience or adventure for the purpose of channeling it into my work in the hopes of making it messier and more exciting.
More often than not, I’ve already put in my work on the page for the day, and I’ve already gotten all the messiness and excitement out of the way.
Peace,
Andrew
Recommendations:
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this wild Hasan Minhaj story in The New Yorker, and not just because it is eerily related to VICTIM. There is so much to unpack about it. As a starting point, I recommend reading
here and here.I loved this interview with Zadie Smith on Fresh Air. Smith is such a sharp, independent thinker—in addition to being a hell of a writer. It was a treat to listen to her.
I’m tired of reading about blurbs, too, but
’s recent piece on them is actually worthwhile. I appreciate that she takes the time to put forth a reasonable proposal for thinking differently about blurbs that seems useful.I found myself nodding vigorously while reading this piece by Tyler Austin Harper in the Washington Post about Ibram X. Kendi’s (expected) unraveling and fall from grace.
Finally, speaking of transgressive writing, it is worth reading what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has to say about the matter in this recent interview with The Atlantic.
You could hardly be drawing on better sources. :)
We're the same person. Well, there's probably a lot of this type of person. I'm on board with this approach and kind of don't have a choice (first babby dropping next week), but I have to ask myself what distinguishes the writer that is able to write productively from within the chaos?
When we found out about babby, I started submitting work for the first time even though I've been writing without submitting for many years. I do wish I'd started earlier.