The Artist vs. The Gatekeeper
Surprise! They're both me.
I send this to you from within the numbing hug of Advil and Tylenol, which I have taken to combat the painful aftereffects of a wee dermatological procedure I had on Monday. Nothing concerning, but it did require a couple of stitches, and I somehow failed to realize that having the equivalent of a surgical tooth extraction done under my scalp would hurt like… a surgical tooth extraction, but ON MY HEAD. I had a migraine-level headache yesterday and it has been very hard to find a comfortable sleeping position the last couple of nights, and I am tired.
But enough complaining.
(Lol, as if I could ever have enough of complaining.)
Last week I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a good long while, which is set up a dedicated space in my apartment for creative practice.
Now, “dedicated space” may be a bit of an exaggeration here - the space is actually my dining table, and I also eat off it. But I moved some stuff around and assembled a little altar on one side, with candles and polaroids and creative totems - including my dressed-and-dedicated yellow writing candle - all laid out on a white cloth. I also set it up so that I sit on a different side of the table when I write than when I eat, so it feels like entering an intentional space.
I considered taking a picture of my cute little setup for this post, but I realized that providing proof felt like exactly the wrong thing to do. While some of what I make in this space may be intended for sharing, the whole point its that the space itself is mine. Nobody else gets in, even friends who come over for dinner and have to eat next to it. The yellow candle never gets lit for anyone but me.
This is, basically, a magical practice: the creation of a ritual space designed to “call it in,” as my witchy friend Claire put it the other day. “It” being, well… you could define “it” any number of ways. I don’t really attach a single definition to “it” because I don’t feel much need to. “It” is the thing that makes creative work happen.
As everyone who reads this newsletter knows, I’ve gotten kind of woo-woo in the last several years. I’m again hesitant to define exactly what this means - only to say it has little to do with the rise of pop astrology (though that’s been fun), and is instead a return to a fascination with mythology, mysticism, magical realism, and all kinds of Weird Old Shit that started when I was very little and never really went away.
Speaking of younger me, she also used to write a lot. Like a LOT a lot. She seems to have found this an endlessly pleasurable and absorbing activity, rather than one that felt alternatively frustrating and frightening. She wrote all kinds of kooky stories - one involved a vengeful robot that ate canned anchovies for fuel, and won a citywide writing prize when she was ten. When she was in 7th grade, she wrote a full-length novelization of Titanic based on a bootleg screenplay she got her hands on before you could download such things on the internet. (Do her parents still have this stashed in a box somewhere? Please god, let it be so.)
She studied poetry at the University of Michigan, and during her senior year she would sit on her bed with earplugs in while her housemates got drunk in the living room, happily scribbling out poems for her honors thesis - a cycle of extremely dark and strange monologues spoken by female Catholic saints, several of whom died horribly. At her first job out of college, she wrote at least one truly awful screenplay at her desk when she was supposed to be writing grants.
What the fuck happened to that girl who used to just… DO these things? I have often wailed to myself, over the last decade of stalled fiction projects and false starts - or more often than not, absolutely no starts at all.
In my 30s my creative process, which I never really thought of as a process so much as a thing I just did, almost entirely collapsed. A lot of things likely contributed. Spine injury. Existential crisis. Move abroad. Pandemic six months after moving abroad. Existential crisis redux. Depression. Housing stress. Toxic relationship with my phone. Late-30s hormone changes. The enshittification of ~the world~. Etc etc.
Last year, after finally moving into my very own (rent controlled!) apartment, I began to address this collapse by picking up this Substack again and forcing myself to get out something - literally anything - that felt semi-readable every couple of weeks. I also deliberately shrank down my life in various ways, and gave myself permission to just rest and nest. Big Taurus Fourth House Profection Year energy.
It worked. In addition to (more or less) keeping up a newsletter schedule, I came up with four different novel ideas, as well as some other projects I’d like to noodle around in - like reworking some of that weird mystical feminist stuff I wrote back in college, before I adopted weird mystical feminism on purpose. I was psyched. I had goals.
However, as I have rapidly discovered, having four book ideas does not mean that you have a creative practice that will allow you to develop those ideas, or that will sustain you when you get stuck and have to struggle through figuring out exactly what you are trying to say and how. To fuck around until you find out, as it were. And it does not stave off the roiling existential dread that rears up every time I sit down to work on something that won’t yield finished, internet-ready results in two hours.
Two weekends ago, I went to my usual cafe to read and decompress. I pulled out my journal, and was suddenly overtaken by a very visceral, angry rant.
Anyway, after I got past the really rant-y part about the corrosive evils of capitalism and also *the world* and having to work for a living and all my long-lost dreams, I ended up here:
I don’t always want to admit how angry and hopeless I sometimes feel about these things, because I don’t think that’ll help necessarily. I want to maintain my optimism, in part because nothing can actually be achieved without it. I also, generally, think that endless complaining and “woe is me” nonsense is extremely corrosive.
But, on the other hand, I don’t think that pretending I’m not very angry and very scared by all of this helps either - I think avoiding those feelings rather than dealing with them leads to work avoidance, because they are so tangled up in work. And admitting that I still want to do that work anyway, even if it won’t get me what I once thought it could, but then also having to make up the financial gaps at the same time, is very demoralizing.
If “work” is writing in this context, then “work” is also that I have been an editor in various capacities for close to fifteen years. I used to do a fair amount of 1:1 work, and would like to slowly reconfigure things back in that direction because I find it more rewarding. I’m also good at it, and my clients tend to really love working with me, which is a nice feeling.
However my most reliable source of income has been the ultra-high volume, editing-lite thing known in Hollywood as “being a reader” and “doing script notes” and evaluating books for adaptation.
I have frequently told people that I learned more about effective storytelling from my first two years as a script reader and book editor than I did in my entire formal education, and this is absolutely true. I’m also extraordinarily grateful for the almost four years I spent smack in the middle of the agency world, first in Hollywood and then in book publishing. If you want to understand the intersection of art and commerce - and what it means to make a living making art - pretty much the best place you can position yourself is where artists are being managed, and art is being sold.
But, while I am grateful for those jobs, they were never the jobs that I actually wanted. I tried to convince myself they would make me happy, because they were exactly the kind of “prestigious” but still “responsible” thing you were supposed to do if you were an overeducated white girl from New York City with a solid social network but without significant family money. But those jobs actually made me miserable and barely paid enough to make rent, so I left. For the freedom of being a creative freelancer, who had more time and energy for writing. And who could do crazy shit like run away to Europe, because why the fuck not?
However I did actually have to make money, so I basically wound up doing a freelance version of what I had done full time. Plus copywriting and “content marketing,” because of course. And I have been thinking a lot recently about what over a decade of this kind of work has done to my own writing. A lot of it is objectively not good.
I write a lot faster, but I also get frustrated a lot more easily when I can’t write extremely fast. I’ve also become much more formulaic, because I’m always neck deep in formulaic writing and it also allows me to write faster. And if I can’t see the product emerging very quickly, I can barely get started writing at all. That product - an obviously salable, consumable thing that will yield income - is where my brain has been trained to focus by all this corporate and corporate-adjacent work. I have been trained to think like a gatekeeper, because I have spent my professional life basically being one.
You know what is really fucking hard to do if you’ve developed Gatekeeper Brain? Write a book. Start writing a book. Finish writing a book. The beginning part is especially mysterious and disorganized and weird, and you have to let yourself go very deep into that exploratory uncertainty if you’re going to get through the first couple of drafts. Even writing off an outline (I so love an outline!) doesn’t really change that. And no amount of prep is going to save you from how totally scary it can be when some part isn’t quite pulling together and you’re not sure how to go about fixing it.
So what am I so angry about? Maybe I’m mad about all the ways that art-as-commerce has gotten increasingly tight and cruel over the decade-plus I’ve been working within it. And how being a cog in that machine has killed - or at least, aggressively hijacked - the girl who could just sit and do the thing. Endlessly and happily, because it was fun and fascinating and fully absorbing, and she wasn’t already worrying about how the thing was going to pay her rent, and all the people - such as her future self - who might say “no.” She was just tangoing with the muse, or whatever you want to call the it.
So I think I’ve realized that if I’m going to be a writer again, I have to somehow bench the woman who has spent the last years evaluating work through the lens of its salability in an increasingly impossible market. Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful that this woman exists; she will be invaluable to me for the “career” part of “writing career.” She is also the person who pays my rent for the foreseeable future. But I need to somehow banish her from the psychic space where my writing comes from.
I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do or sustain this over time, but I will say that my dining table altar has helped. Jeanna Kadlec of Astrology for Writers, whose work introduced me to the phrase “internalized capitalism” (woof), writes about creativity as a fundamentally spiritual practice that is grounded and sustained by ritual, and how ritual is a very different concept from routine.
Getting your shit done every day so you can pay your rent usually requires a routine. But creativity is witchy and mystical and weird; young children don’t usually need rituals to access their creativity because childhood is a time when deep unknowing, and constant discovery and figuring out, is the only state there is. But as an adult, you probably need rituals to open the door that separates the woman who pays the rent from the witchy kid she used to be, and to walk through it. I drafted the bulk of this essay longhand, in a notebook, in one sitting next to my yellow candle - which is now making weird hissing noises as I revise. I truly cannot even begin to remember the last time I knocked out a workable draft of something in longhand. It was probably back when I still wrote poetry.
Look at you! You read all the way to the end! You must have really been enjoying yourself.
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