As Meta As It Gets: The Writer As God

This is my creative process, and I am sharing it with you.

I would love to characterize myself as a thinker, but it’s not true.

Like a hen, I brood.

I brood over social injustices. I brood over gloomy prognostications about the future. I brood over the way Spotify killed music, NFTs killed art, Kindle Unlimited killed books, Covid killed live performance, and streaming services are killing the movie industry.

At the very moment the Internet was supposed to democratize the arts, we find that the table is tilted more than ever before. This is especially true for us writers, musicians, and visual artists who must find a way to keep the lights on (lack of affordable housing and rising inflation mean far more hours of the day are spent making a living) while at the same time conserving enough bandwidth to create, only now, without fully understanding how Google works, or social media works, or SEO works, we have to somehow find a way to be noticed online.

In a sea of influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, and Instagrammers, we, the curmudgeons and misanthropes, the very people who are issuing the rallying cry against social media, are the ones who must court it. To do otherwise is to be relegated to a non-virtual junkyard of 8-track tapes, pet rocks, and obscurity.

Accepting this new paradigm, that what few readers actually exist anymore aren’t likely to commit their time and money to an author whose work is unknown to them, I started Cappuccino. But I started Cappuccino for myself, too. I like speaking to readers directly.

Here, it’s just you and me. Four days a week, I plant my butt in this chair, stare at the blinking cursor till a spot of blood appears on my forehead, and refuse to budge until I blunder across my topic and the words to go with it. Every day, I fear that the well has run dry, or I’m boring my audience, or I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said a lot better in The Atlantic.

I brood—there’s that word again—about our collective attention deficit disorder, how no one can focus longer than thirty seconds, how people are too tired to read, how I’m out of sync with this metaverse, and how no one cares or understands what I’m saying because the written word is a mule cart in a Maserati world.

It takes time to read an article. It takes even more time to read a book. Reading requires more active participation than any other art form—hours, in some cases. The average time a person spends viewing a painting is 27.2 seconds. Watching a music video takes three minutes. And movies are the ultimate consumerist model. No longer forced to hazard sticky floors and overpriced popcorn, we now watch movies on iPhones and laptops, able to stop and start as far as our attention spans will allow.

And yet, no other art form than fiction can take you deeper inside another person’s skull. No other art form can evoke the same level of empathy. As writers, we conjure worlds with our fingertips. We create something out of nothing. The tools of our trade aren’t sable paint brushes or 1920’s saxophones. They’re tiny scribbles on a page that mean nothing unless you happen to be literate in the language of creation. We literally make word pictures out of abstractions, out of letters and glyphs.

When you read, you set up a projector inside your head. It’s why reading a book first, and then seeing the movie based on that book after, almost always comes as a disappointment. Never settle for somebody else’s interpretation of the world.

In these ways, reading not only encourages imagination and empathy, it vastly improves your vocabulary, just as fiction teaches you about yourself and others. But again, it takes time to read—time that is in increasingly short supply in a world that requires us to work two and three jobs just to make ends meet.

More than ever before, creating is an act of defiance. I write against the odds and against any expectation of being financially successful, appreciated, or even read. I write for many reasons, some quite personal, including a God-like control over the worlds I create. I set the stage, give breath and breadth to my characters, and then pit them against each other in a raw, Darwinian struggle reflecting the structural determinism of real life. They keep trying to climb a ladder out of the overheated cesspool of my imagination; I keep sadistically greasing the rungs.

Once I get an idea, I flesh it out right away. Cappuccino is my cauldron. Sometimes I start out writing one thing and end up writing something completely different.

Photo by Etienne Girardet

I have never written without the tormenting presence of M.O.P.G., My Own Personal Gargoyle. It sits on my shoulder and talks trash. Not about the writing. After thirty-eight years, I probably know how to write. Instead, it tells me how pointless this is, what a waste of time, how irrelevant my life’s work has become in a world of Kardashian clickbait.

Don’t ignore your O.P.G. Don’t even try. Gargoyles aren’t the exclusive province of the Creative, by the way. They can find you in business, relationships, diets, exercise regimens. Instead, you must negotiate with your gargoyle: “If you sit quietly for the next hour, we can watch fifteen minutes of cat videos.” Or, “I understand how hard it is to focus right now, but if we can crank out three pages, we’ll have the rest of the day off.”

Trying to drink away a gargoyle is pointless.

Almost everybody can write, which is why everybody thinks they can write, but the truth is, writing is a fiendishly difficult art form. If it takes ten years to create a world-class ballet dancer, it takes at least that long to produce a competent wordsmith. In the beginning, we have no idea what we’re doing—and even less awareness of how bad we are. Good writing, which looks effortless, is anything but. You must learn how to get out of your own way.

To summarize, my process is to stop asking for permission from anyone, including the gatekeepers in my own business, and just f***ing do it. I made a promise to myself to stop writing commercial fiction and start writing fiction that actually meant something—TO ME. Drilling down beneath the surface of your own learned writing stratagems, your need for approval, your cynical belief that no one cares, your lust for industry recognition, and your own perpetual ennui is not easy. But that’s where the defiance comes in, and the compulsion to put words on paper, no matter what.

You sit your ass in the chair, and you write. It’s that hard and that simple.

You write the truth without obfuscation.

You write even when you’d rather be doing anything else.

You write even when the gargoyle is smacking pans together in your ear.

You write when you’re afraid, sad, bored, desperate, angry, and resentful.

You write to an audience of everyone and no one.

Above all, you remember what poet Charles Bukowski once said: “Find what you love, and let it kill you.”

I love to hear your thoughts, so let ‘em rip. The comments section is just below.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin