I Made a Bag!

and didn't share about it

My now years-long quest to disengage from the many voices of the internet is an effort to get back to a place of having ideas come to me. There was a time when, on walks or lying in bed, in the shower or doing dishes, ideas for books and scenes would come to me like leaves floating on a fast-flowing river. All I had to do was grab them. I want to get back to that.

For the most part, it’s working. It’s still hard, to sit in the quiet moments without habitually checking the digital world. But the more I sit in analog quiet, the more I get ideas, and in many ways, that is more addictive than checking for messages.

Recently, a scene of dialog came to me. I could hear the voices, this group of people, bantering, being funny and lovely with each other. The thing is, they’re not part of any book I’m currently writing. These characters have already charmed me, but who are they even, and what’s their story? I have no idea.

Then I got this thought – maybe I could adapt this scene somehow and share it in the newsletter? It’s so funny! Everyone would appreciate it!

Oh, my poor needy brain, my spine of people pleasing, my tibia of attention-seeking, my ulna of needing praise. This darn internet, with its ease of sharing. Because this scene, these characters, have come to me, and what I should absolutely not do is share the scene here. I will share it when there is an entire book around it, which has been drafted, written and rewritten, edited and copy edited. It might take ten years. But that's how I want to share.

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For years, I’ve been searching for the ideal bag. I began to think of it as the Mythical Messenger bag. I had a very particular idea of how big it would be and what kinds of pockets it would have. I kept searching. I bought several bags, many of which are great. But none was the Mythical Messenger.

A few months ago,¹ I realized I could just make it. As soon as I thought of that, ideas started flooding in for exactly how I wanted this perfect bag to be. The color, size, pocket placement, and lining fabric all formed in my brain. 

First draft of a bag.

I thought, “Oh! I could put fun patches on it!” and then immediately thought, “Why, Julie? So people will notice you? And praise you for your super cool bag?” I sat with that for a while, and then realized, no. I wanted to put patches on it so I could notice me. I wanted to make this bag because I wanted to have this bag. I don’t want to make it for anyone else. And if I want a patch? I get a patch. 

I’m not a particularly experienced sewist. I’ve done stuff. I’ve made stuff. But this bag required skills that I did not have, things I didn’t know how to do. But I knew they could be done.

Friends, it took me months to make the bag. All summer. I made three sample bags to figure out how the zippers and pockets would work. I took my time. I went so slowly, because I’ve made so many things in the past with crooked seams, and I didn’t want my perfect bag to have crooked seams. When I was actually making the bag, the pockets alone took seven straight hours. (It’s not even that many pockets.) And finally, after months and months, the bag was finished.

Let me tell you, this bag is perfect. For me! It’s perfect for me! 

If I had made this bag a few years ago, I would have decided that The Making of the Mythical Messenger Bag was great social media content. I’m sure I would have shared every single step of this thing. I for sure would have asked for advice and help. And maybe the help would have been helpful, but in the end, I didn’t need it. I needed to figure it out on my own. And it was lovely to figure it out on my own. I shared my progress with my neighbor friend Susannah and my college friend Emily. I contend there is a huge difference between texting a friend and posting to Instagram. Friendship is sharing. Most of social media is not really friendship. It’s sharing, without the friendship. YES I KNOW that many of us (including me) have made true real friends on social media. But lately social media has become less about the friendship and more about pleasing the algorithm, and let me tell you, the algorithm is not your friend.

As Zach Mandeville writes in his essay Sacred Servers,

“It’s not bad that we share what we do, as much as we do. It’s beautifully human. This need to share is something we’ve always had, now transposed to a digital space because humans are good at adaptation.

But it is awful how our experiences are commodified, contorted, cut up, and traded. That we cannot share with one another intentionally, but must make an offer to a company’s algorithm.” 

Besides the fact that I now possess the perfect bag, I learned that I can figure things out. I can make something from start to finish without having to share the journey with the internet. I learned that (for me), that’s a much, much better way to make things. 

It is interesting to me how much I need boredom and analog time to access my creative inspiration. I’m honestly fascinated by how five minutes looking something up on the internet turns into me purchasing or almost purchasing something I don’t need because someone on the internet recommended it, and how almost purchasing something is fairly far from the headstate I’m in when I’m accessing my intuition and creative inspiration.

Writing, making books, is making the Mythical Messenger bag, over and over. I see what I want the book to be in my head, and then I try to make it real, and sometimes I don’t quite have the skills to make it work yet, so I have to keep making drafts to figure it out.

I feel more grounded and creative when I keep the majority of my process and progress offline, no matter what I’m making. I have shared the entire process of revising a novel on Instagram before.² Let me tell you something – that revision was terrible. Truly – it reeked. Of course it did! I wasn’t doing it for me. I wasn't going deep.

When I go out in public with the bag, I’m honestly surprised when no one stops me to say, “Where did you get that absolutely perfect bag?!” because I know I’d be running after someone to ask that if I saw this bag in the wild. In some odd way, it’s gratifying that no one else cares about this bag. I show my family and like I am a child, they say some version of, “I can tell you worked hard on that.” I find I don’t care what anyone else thinks. What a revelation that is. Everyone else can be nonplussed about my bag and that doesn’t diminish the joy I feel in finally having the perfect bag.

I'm not showing you these photos for praise, but because I'd be annoyed if I read an entire essay about a perfect bag and there weren't any photos.

With writing, I’m seeking the same feeling I have about the bag — knowing, deep down, that I made it exactly how I wanted it to be. And sure, I want other people to like what I write. (In order to make money, I need other people to like it.) But “this is exactly how I wanted it to be” is a great starting point.

8 things I’ve noticed about creativity and the internet

1. A creative vision is a creative destination. There are many ways to get there. The best way might be to draw the map while you go.

2. The more time I spend quietly making something, the more I am inspired.

3. The internet tells us that everything is worth sharing, but often it’s more important to protect your creative vision until it’s fully formed and complete. It’s too fragile and vulnerable in the early stages, and so are you.

4. It’s normal (I HOPE) to want praise and validation, but it is potentially a problem if that ticks over into needing praise and validation. What we need to do is to know, deep down, that we’re good. If I know that, then I won’t strive for the praise of the internet.

5. The creative process is often a real mess. (Which is amazing!) We make a mess, and then we clean it up.³ You may want camaraderie during the cleaning — in my experience, offline friends are better people to share with.⁴ They understand the vulnerability of the process, and you won’t get distracted by the tornado of shouting that surrounds friendly voices on social media, so you can get back to your own head faster.

6. It’s not rude to be offline. It’s not rude to say you have something else important that needs your attention. It’s not rude to say you have to go if you find yourself acting as a sounding board to a stranger’s nonstop musings. It’s not rude to fail to respond to every message.

7. Sit in boredom. Go for walks without your phone. Say out loud, “I’m waiting for inspiration,” and then write down everything that comes. Keep working on your art for ten minutes beyond the place where it’s uncomfortable, even if you’re staring at your own foot and getting itchier by the minute.

8. Your words are important. The art you create is important. Your creativity gives you power. Honor that, please. Do you best to recognize that many of the voices of the internet want to take that power from you. They want to make you lose trust in yourself (because then you’ll scroll for longer and buy more things). Trust yourself. Write your book. Make your art. Know that it takes time, but eventually you will make something that is exactly as perfect as you imagined.

Thoughts and Links

• I hope you’re following along with The Short Story Project — I’m making sure that I include a generous chunk of the essays in the free previews, and you could certainly read that and choose your own short stories. The three picture book drafts I’ve written so far have been unexpected surprises. It’s like I go in thinking I’ll write a straightforward story about a sibling relationship, and then what ends up on the page is about cowboys using a vending machine. It has been a reminder to me that the way to get books written is to sit down and write them. Check out the posts and the previews here, or upgrade to paid if you want to have the links to all the short stories and to the full essays (the first 14 days are free).

• I was interested to read (especially given the nature of this newsletter’s essay) about

  Sari Botton
  quitting Twitter and
  Marlee Grace
  quitting Instagram. I still have accounts on both of those, but more and more I am considering never looking at them again.

• Thank you to Travis Jonker for recommending Do the Work along with some other truly great ones in an SLJ article called “6 Children’s Lit Creator Substack Newsletters I Read Every Time.”

• Congrats to FODTW (friend of Do the Work) Elayne Crain on her recently announced picture book, There’s Something Odd About the Babysitter.

• I greatly enjoyed this essay from

  Celia Mattison
  about cinematic representations of The New England Woman.

• Did you know there is a 1977 CIA manual for transcending time and space? Now you do.

• Recently

  Andrew Janjigian
  posted on his Wordloaf newsletter about his love of a German dough cloth, which is an acrylic mesh square that scrubs all the gummy raw bread dough off your bowls. I bought one from Breadtopia, and believe me when I tell you that this was not a case of me buying something I didn’t need just because the internet told me to. I needed this. I do not regret it one bit. My sponge is so happy not to be shellacked in dough goo.

• I have had “Expert in a Dying Field” by The Beths on repeat for weeks now. Heidi told me she’s got some decidedly more positive you’re-amazing songs playing nonstop, and maybe I should too, but then every time, I just play “Expert in a Dying Field” again.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: most book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• I really enjoyed Elephant House: Or, the Home of Edward Gorey for another side of the brilliant illustrator and writer.

• I got a copy of Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark at the dump’s swap shop, and it was wild: somehow both breezy and tragic, and very, very funny.

• One thing I love about the annual ALA YMA awards is how they let me know about books I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. American Murderer: The Parasite That Haunted the South was a finalist in this year’s 2023 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, and I just read it. It’s riveting. Also: terrifying. And gross. I’m glad I read it.

• In more “Julie reads award winners” news, I read Trust by Hernan Diaz (which won the Pulitzer) and it’s so incredibly great. Definitely a book you need someone to assure you is amazing. But I will say that I was hooked from the table of contents, which I read and thought, “Ok, what will this even BE?”

• I enthusiastically recommend Feel Something, Make Something by Caitlin Metz. I’m a little obsessed with it. If you like this newsletter (which I hope you do!), you’ll like Feel Something, Make Something.

1. Cue Julie’s broken record: in another Morning Pages revelation.

2. To which the algorithm said, “My what good content you have, my dear. I will use it to completely poison and rewrite your creativity neurons, thank you!”

3. Make a Mess, Clean It Up is also the name of my online course about how to revise a picture book.

4. I don’t mean only people you have met in person. I mean people who you talk to and connect with outside of social media. Maybe you met them on social media, but now you have other ways of communicating with them.