Make things and don't post about them

Plus: Fail Better Club starts Monday

It’s such a lie of the modern age that we should share everything we’re doing. “Doin’ it for the ‘gram!” really feels like a fake saying concocted in a boardroom of people who are trying to invent phrases that convince people to spend more time on their phones.¹ Don’t fall for it. Do it for you! Or for your Gramma. Not the ‘gram.

I’ve talked here before about how I’ve spent the last 15 months or so learning how to sew. I’ve mostly been making clothes, although I made a few bags, too. I noticed that, even if the clothes I make are basic (a t-shirt) or have a few (or many!) mistakes, I love wearing them. They are tangible evidence of a learning process. (Plus it’s fun to make things and wear them.)

There is a dress I made a few years ago, before my current crash course in garment sewing. This dress is nice! It fits me and is a great color. But I don’t wear it nearly as much as the stuff I’ve made the past year. Which seemed weird once I realized it.

This is the dress I don’t wear often. Photo by Elle Darcy.

But then I remembered when I made the dress. I was online a lot more and felt like I had to post to Instagram stories all the time. I was constantly searching for postable content in my life. I posted all about the process of sewing that dress while I was doing it. And so, yes, it’s nice, but it forever has the residue of making it for other people (or for an app) rather than for me. 

Making anything reminds me that I’m powerful. To create something whole from separate parts and ingredients is a kind of alchemy, and it should be evidence of your immense power. But if we constantly hand our creations to others, we give that power away.

I’m still thinking about Filterworld, and how the internet rewards sameness because that’s easier for the algorithms to understand. I’m interested in disrupting that. I’m curious about making something that is a casserole of everything I love, rather than a one-ingredient sandwich of other people’s content. It’s hard! It’s wild to me how quickly looking at the internet will convince me that there is one way to write and post. But if I am consuming offline things, it leads to a many-tentacled type of inspiration, where I’ll think, “I love how this movie is structured, and I love how this other book has a main character who is terrible but somehow likeable, and this one joke made me laugh so much – could I put those elements together somehow?”

The ideas I get from offline consumption are delightful squishy blobs I get to play with; the ones I tend to get from anything online are more like factory-assembled aluminum bricks that look like everything else on the assembly line.

A gift for us, as writers, is that sharing our process is awkward and not particularly photogenic. I take this as my cue that I should not, in fact, share my process. My gut reaction is: who cares? So I’m revising (#amrevising). Literally, who cares? The tricky thing is that I do think there is knowledge and inspiration in other people’s processes, and what methods they use to write and revise a book. I’m so fascinated by that. BUT: tell us later. Tell us when your book is done. It’s a lie told to us by the tech companies that we need to share our process while we’re in it. We don’t. When I’m writing a book, I want to be deep in it. As soon as I post about it, I lose that thread of connection to my creative intuition.

No one needs to know that you’re writing and revising right this second. We’ll wait for your news of a finished project, and you can tell us then how you made it.

The list of things I want to make is very long. Books, clothes, bread, cards, soap, flower essences, lip balm, ability to meditate longer, dog treats, a headstand, flip books, grain salads, tiny clay gnomes, better interior design in my house, layer cakes, rock hard abs. Each of these things takes time and resolve. I have to believe I can make something, and then begin the slow and incremental work of learning and creating. Everything is learning. Everything needs revision. Good work takes so much time. So much of the internet feels like a waste of time to me. One problem is that some of it is not necessarily a waste of time – it’s up to us to know the difference. 

I remember how the -cide root in “decide” means to cut off. To remove. To kill. When you decide something, you kill off the other paths and possibilities. If I decide to stare at the internet, fine, but it means I won’t be creating anything during that time, or reading any books, or any of the things from that long (and incomplete!) list in the previous paragraph.

The trick is to create your own algorithm – a series of coincidences and serendipity that is presented to you when you step into the world and make things. A rabbit hole can be lovely when each step of it is inspired from within, rather than offered to you by computer code.²

If you need a push to make things, Fail Better Club starts on Monday! I’m so fired up to have conversations about the stories that people have submitted so far. It’s open to paying subscribers. You can reply to this email, or click on the button right there.

Chester Barkingham, Coming Soon!

This is Ophelia, a true wonder of a dog. (Click the photo to get to an Instagram post of some of the other animals I met.)

This week, I went to the Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland to film the book trailer for Chester Barkingham Saves the Country. Chester is a rescue dog who is adopted by the president’s daughter and can see exactly what congress needs to do to stop bickering and name calling so they can actually get work done. It’s an epistolary book, if that’s your thing (it’s my thing – Chester is my second epistolary picture book). I was reminded once again of the messiness of the creative process when it took me six tries over a few weeks to make a fake microphone for interviewing dogs.

This book comes out September 17. Next month! It’s cool that we managed to have it come out right before the election. Illustrator Eva Byrne pulled out all of her future-seeing powers for this one, since the president is a woman of color. Ok! You should buy this book then, right? Right! Or at least add it to your stack of presidential picture books (another new book for the stack: Christina Soontornvat’s Leo’s First Vote, illustrated by Isabel Roxas).

You can preorder a signed, personalized copy of Chester Barkingham Saves the Country from Print: A Bookstore.

Thoughts and Links

• No pressure, but if you read and liked Help Wanted: One Rooster, would you consider writing a five-star review on that large behemoth of an everything store? I thank you, all the roosters thank you.

• A reminder that I’ll be reading Help Wanted: One Rooster at the Woodford’s Corner Farmer’s Market on Thursday, August 22 at 4 pm with Alexandra Penfold.

• The list of authors at the Bath Book Bash is huge! Will I see you September 7th?

• Dinner of the week (oh gosh, I am not going to make this a thing, it’s just that I’ve had some great dinners recently) is the Build-Your-Own Buddha Bowl from Cookie and Kate. This recipe is all about the carrot ginger dressing, which is bright orange and delicious. I want to pour it on top of everything now.

• Just a straight-up great eraser. Eats every pencil mark without much effort.

• My new favorite website is this searchable site of images in the public domain. A sampling below of some of the options. You can see why I’m so excited about it.

1. Other possibilities were:
Havin’ a TikTok afternoon.
Snapchat Summer.
Conspicuous consumption expressly for the purpose of postin’ about it somewhere on a Meta platform.

2. On Browsing by Jason Guriel is a good treatise on the wonders of an analog rabbit hole and real-world discovery.