choose curiosity over fear

10 things to think about this week

Office in a Small City (1953), by Edward Hopper

Thank you to everyone who’s read and shared these newsletters so far. I make no money from these, of course, but I’m glad to hear that they’ve been bringing people some joy.

If you’d like to share this letter with a friend, or at least someone you think might find it useful, I’d really appreciate it.

Cheers,
Sam

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1. Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
   It's the same when love comes to an end,
   or the marriage fails and people say
   they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
   said it would never work. That she was
   old enough to know better. But anything
   worth doing is worth doing badly.
   
   — Jack Gilbert, from ‘Failing and Flying’
   
   

2. I think more about failing than succeeding. I know I’m not alone in that. I think so much about failing that I don’t begin things, things I really care about, things I genuinely love, because not beginning means not failing, and not failing is its own sad kind of succeeding.
   
   I wrote about my new productivity notebook a few weeks ago—a dairy, darlin’, my mum said. I’ve had one twenty years. It’s called ‘a dairy’—and the way it has changed my life in small steps. For years I suffered with the inevitability of my routine: idenitify an opportunity or task that needed doing, fret over it, never begin it, and then fret again because a chance was missed or finished so late that my eyes felt like they were going to begin bleeding.
   
   I now break my day down hour by hour, task by task, checking off each To Do with a thick cross-out. It’s a heavy gun-metal stripe from my favourite writing pencil, a total affectation that I adore, a long Palomino Blackwing 602 pencil, the type Quincy Jones used to write music, and John Steinbeck used to write stories, and I use to cross out a small task, like ‘Have lunch’.
   
   Sometimes the tasks are more exciting: Write this newsletter. Draw up questions for this-particular-famous-person I’m due to interview. Settle on a decent lunch option near the Barbican. But often they’re not. Often they’re simple. And I love that they are. Because every strike-out—what a pencil, btw; total not worth the money, but it’s fun to have one unnecessarily fancy thing you use for menial tasks—is its own reward. It keeps me in motion. I feel like I’m a rock falling down the hill, picking up sod and detritus until I become a boulder—I do not know how boulders work—and I’m picking up speed and picking up speed until I am ready to crash head-fucking-on into whatever the big tasks are.
   
   Not all tasks are the same size. That I know. But they all matter. Because being in motion is the only thing that matters.
   
   

3. I’ve stolen that last sentiment from Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer best known for Eat, Pray, Love. I’m currently listening to the audiobook version of Big Magic, her non-fiction treatise on creativity. I was expecting it all to be a bit woo-woo—Rick Rubin for middle-aged mums who love yoga, writing vivid anti-vax diatribes on Facebook, and wearing lots of turquoise beads—but I’ve found it to be something like a revelation.
   
   “If you can't do what you long to do, go do something else,” she writes. “Go walk the dog, go pick up every bit of trash on the street outside your home, go walk the dog again, go bake a peach cobbler, go paint some pebbles with brightly coloured nail polish and put them in a pile. You might think it's procrastination, but—with the right intention—it isn't; it’s motion. And any motion whatsoever beats inertia, because inspiration will always be drawn to motion.”
   
   The book is as much about letting go of fear as it is about writing, or creating art. There are sections on the well-trodden notion that ‘done is better than perfect’ but also that ‘done is better than good’: That the act of doing something that brings you joy is its own reward, and that our culture puts too much emphasis on wringing capital out of that joy.
   
   “What do you love doing,” she asks, “so much that the words ‘failure’ and ‘success’ become irrelevant?”
   
   Gilbert is a writer, but she’s also a speaker. She’s a real talker: calm and warm and silly and profound and quick to laugh¹. I am recommending this book with my whole chest, especially the audio version, because it feels like she talks directly into your soul.
   
   [I can whole-heartedly recommend this episode of the podcast, On Being, Gilbert speaks about Big Magic and outlines the strict differences between ‘choosing curiosity over fear’ and ‘following your passion’. This one hit me hard, and I’ll probably write about it in full another time.]
   
   If your soul is anything like mine, or anyone I have spoken to, then you have been feeling it shrivel on the vine for a long time: atrocity and selfishness and callousness dominate our consciousness, which makes the act of doing anything that brings you joy feel… Unworthy. I think about that a lot: worthiness. Is anything that I do changing the world, moving the needle, or giving anyone a better life? Probably not. But I do it anyway. Because I am moved to do it. I am moved to write equally when I have important things to say and when I have nothing to say, as those who regularly read this newsletter can attest. But, most of all, I write, to peddle the well-worn words of Didion, to find out ‘what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’
   
   “It seems to me that the less I fight my fear,” says Gilbert in Big Magic, “the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too.”
   
   I don’t think what I write fights with my fear, exactly. But writing has taught me to acknowledge fear and to do it anyway.

4. I saw a Tweet this morning about how fucked the media industry is, specifically with regards to writing and journalism. Lots of incredibly talented people have lost their jobs. Lots of interesting publications have shut their doors. Paths have become narrower. Gates locked. This could have been any Tweet on any morning.
   
   But this specific Tweet—which I won’t link to because I can no longer find it but will paraphrase pretty accurately, so don’t worry—had me thinking about the futility of demanding creativity be your sole bread winner.
   
   The Tweet spoke of the soul-crushing disappointment of rejection letters or of total silence meeting your submission. This, they said, was getting more frequent, and a sure sign that this job of ours was over. I know this feeling. I’ve been writing for ten years and, last year, I had one article pitch successfully commissioned. It was a crushing feeling. I had to do something else to bring money in or else, I knew, I wasn’t going to be doing anything else.
   
   The visibility that the internet has provided writers has been brilliant and it has also been a terrible, terrible thing. We saw so many articles and stories get published that it made it seem like success was something like an inevitability. It was just a numbers game: if you wrote to a decent degree, someone somewhere will publish you and pay you handsomely for the privilege, right?
   
   But writing has never been a stable, or even particularly lucrative path. This is as true in 2024 as it was in 1994 as it was in 1924 or 1894. And yet, as Gilbert again points out in her book, people do it anyway.
   
   The media landscape as we once knew it is done. That’s a fact. And there are more talented writers than there have ever been. That’s also a fact. I wish publication after publication hadn’t been driven into the ground by capricious social media platforms and short-sighted venture capital sociopaths but, the horrible truth is, art owes none of us a living.
   
   

5. Okay, we’re midway through. Here’s a live EP I love from a jazz collective in south-east London called Tanhai Collective.

6. Okay, now back to it.
   
   Here’s a message from a reader a couple weeks ago about my interview with Josh from Somewhere Soul, talking about the new way of speaking to audiences on the internet:
   
   “i found it both interesting and depressing in equal measure, as a vaguely creative/wordy type who has no interest in being the 'face' of anything. sort of wonder where all the shuffly weirdos go now there's far less writing jobs, sub-editing jobs, and such like. those people always had a fair bit to offer, and presumably still do, but where do they go? i work in PR for a uni now. is it what I thought I'd be doing at this point? nope. it pays the bills and it's roughly 6/10 rewarding, and for now, that'll do. as for the future, I've honestly no idea. if someone as talented as yourself is doing brand work (maybe because you love it - I'm not judging at all - but perhaps because writing/editing pays so poorly) then it doesn't give me much optimism”
   
   First off, I nearly didn’t share this at all because the reader, who asked to remain anonymous, called me talented. So, thank you for the kind words, [Redacted]. But I wanted to share because I’ve been thinking about the points it raises a lot.
   
   Firstly, about brand work: I do love it. I love it because I’m good at it but I also love it because it feels like storytelling in another medium, crafting a company or product into speaking its truth in a way it did not before and reaching people who will find value in what it has to offer. It also, frankly, pays me money that writing did not. Brand work is quite full on—it requires a lot of research and interviewing and speaking and deck-writing and deck-presenting and listening to and understanding the fears of those you are working with and helping them find creative solutions to alleviate some of those fears in a way which will, ultimately, make their product/company/whatever more successful—but it also gave me space to write. I should make the distinction, it did not give me time to write—I have less time than ever now—but it gave me breathing space. It gave me thinking space. And, because of that, I made time to write again. I got up early to write, I stayed up late to write, I wrote through lunch. I started doing this newsletter in earnest; setting myself deadlines, getting it out there. Doing work that wasn’t writing made me love writing more and made me ask less from my writing. Writing no longer had to pay all my bills, it just had to be interesting to me. It just had to keep me in motion.
   
   

   
   

7. “Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred,” writes Gilbert; the Elizabeth one, not Jack Gilbert who I quote up-top and who I will get back to. “What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave.”
   
   I took five minutes away from writing this newsletter to get up and stretch my legs. And by ‘stretch my legs’ I mean ‘look at my phone’ and saw another writer say they had ‘too many ideas are just sat in [their] notes app or gathering dust in editor's inboxes’.
   
   It is hard to think like this, but we should do things that aren’t writing. Writing is an infinitely useful, transferrable skill which allows us to see the world differently and allows us to help other people see the world differently, too. But it is not the only skills we possess.
   
   The annals of writing are littered with journalists and poets and authors and essayists who worked hard for their living doing things other than writing. A young Dickens worked in a factory pasting labels onto pots of boot polish. My pencil-mate Steinbeck started a business manufacturing plaster mannequins with his wife. Octavia Butler worked as a telemarketer. Stephen King was a caretaker at a high school. Kirk Vonnegut sold cars.
   
   In many instances, they were not writers in spite of their jobs, but because of them. Writing requires experience, it requires living, it requires doing, and it requires working.
   
   Not writing full-time is sad if that’s what you want to do with your life, but when doing something else can not only help you write more but writing better—more rounded, more fully, with more perspective, and with bills that actually fucking get paid—things start to feel a lot less sad pretty quickly.
   
   
   

8. Phew. Up on my high horse there for a bit. So here’s something different.
   
   Aaron Levine has made his living as a guy with impeccable taste, a deep sonorous voice, and the kind of beard usually reserved for 19th century philosophers.
   
   Not content with consulting for Aimé Leon Dore after heading up a lot of the very surprising reanimation of Abercrombie & Fitch, Levine is mixing menswear work with Madewell—another flat American high street brand now punching above its weight—with… a series of really, really long Reels where he just reads a story from a tattered old book in front of a burning fire.
   
   “I’m going to start a new little series on here just for me,” he says in an introduction video. “When my girls were young I would read them bedtime stories out loud. To calm them down before bed. And what I found was that it calmed me down, too, to read them out loud. It rebooted my system. So I am… Going to start a story time on [Instagram].”
   
   He needed, he said, to first figure out how to do longer formats on a platform usually associated with snackable content. His first story time was a reading of The Odyssey—not a deep cut—that ran for 33 minutes.
   
   It is mesmerising and a little boring and very calming. He didn’t have the book that contained the story he wanted to read with him when he wanted to film, but he did it anyway. Done, after all, is better than perfect.
   
   I love seeing people doing something that brings them joy on platforms we’ve long accepted as places that do little but bring us pain. I’m intrigued to see what stories he tells when he remembers to bring the right books with him next time.
   
   [Edit: Literally just before hitting send on this ‘sletter, I discovered he’s posted another one. This time he reads while holding his cat. I’ve not listened to it yet, so that is a treat we can share together.]
   
   

9. I discovered Jack Gilbert’s poetry, funnily enough, through Elizabeth Gilbert, although they are not related. He is the subject of Big Magic’s opening salvo: a poet who rejected publicity, winning awards before disappearing into obscurity, publishing five collections in five decades, two of which were nominated for a Pulitzer, before his death in 2012.
   
   “I am by nature drawn to exigence, compression, selection,” wrote Gilbert in a 1984 introduction to a reprinting of his work. “One of the special pleasures in poetry for me is accomplishing a lot with the least means possible.”
   
   A contemporary of the Beat movement but never a Beat poet, Gilbert worked as a door-to-door salesman, an exterminator, and a steelworker before settling into writing, a job which he performed infrequently between travelling and working odd jobs away from letters, before settling into sporadic tenures as a travelling professor and writer-in-residence at colleges across America in later years.
   
   “All Jack ever wanted to know was that he was awake,” said his friend Linda Gregg, another poet, “that the trees in bloom were almond trees, and to walk down the road to get breakfast. He never cared if he was poor or had to sleep on a park bench.”
   
   Elizabeth Gilbert called him the poet laureate of her life.
   
   

10. You’ve made it to the end. Congratulations. To celebrate, here: Another poem. More Jack Gilbert. Now you can say you read two poems this year, if nothing else.
    
    ‘Going There’
    
    Of course it was a disaster.
    That unbearable, dearest secret
    has always been a disaster.
    The danger when we try to leave.
    Going over and over afterward
    what we should have done
    instead of what we did.
    But for those short times
    we seemed to be alive. Misled,
    misused, lied to and cheated,
    certainly. Still, for that
    little while, we visited
    our possible life.

1. Yes I am prone to developing these writerly-crushes (last week it was Klosterman, wasn’t it, before that Susan Orlean, and a few weeks back it was Zach Baron. Who will it be next week? I might give Larry McMurtry a crack.