To Feel Not Simply Alive But Expressive

On finding a way to glow in the dark.

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For the past few months I’ve been cultivating a “Praise Folder” in my Google Drive. This is a place where I keep a screenshot of every nice thing that people say about my writing—tweets, Facebook comments, Goodreads messages, Instagram stories, texts, you name it.

I look back into this folder when I’m feeling particularly low or uninspired, and 95% of the time it makes me feel not just better, but something like whole, and loved, and wrapped up in the arms of many. (The other 5% is because the shitty parts of the human brain can never be truly defeated, and those little folds and firing signals can occasionally produce a thought like, “Well yeah that was good, and all that means is that everything you do from here on out is sure to disappoint!” Very cool.)

So: just know that if you have ever said anything nice about my work, I have held onto it. You have probably become important to me in ways you can’t imagine, and I may have even developed a sort of parasocial attachment to you even if we don’t know each other that well. Or at all.

I find rejection too devastating and anxiety-inducing to do the stereotypical writerly thing where you save all of your rejections and use them as fuel. Plus they don’t really send you the typewritten, letterhead-adorned ones like Vonnegut or Kincaid or whoever got. Now it’s mostly just the absence of an email, which is decidely less sexy.

Anyway, with what little standing I have to offer advice to other people who make stuff, I want to wholeheartedly endorse this strategy. Hang onto the nice things people say about your writing or drawing or music or poetry or latte art. It’s never too late to start, even if you can’t find all the ones that were said in the past. (And what a lovely problem to have—to have a history of having received compliments!) It can be weird and hard to do this at first, though no one will ever know unless you tell them; I think the thing I struggled with most was that at first I found myself trying to analyze the sincerity of the compliments themselves. Are they just being nice to me, which makes it even more of a foolish thing to keep this folder? Do they just like me, and so they’re kind enough to say they like my work, simply because I made it? (See? The brain is a very cool and fun organ.)

But I am getting over that hump and I have committed to saving all of them without prejudice, because who am I to judge what’s sincere? And again, it’s probably a good problem to have: “Oh nooo I have too many people being nice to me my life sucks ahhhh.” You might even be fortunate enough to get ones like this, which make it impossible to disbelieve:

I expected to get 10 pages in and then tweet out a recommendation, probably accompanied by a cat seemingly engrossed in page 200. I didn’t expect to read the whole thing in 2 days, or to come out feeling like we were best friends. (I have truly broken my brain with podcasts, but I am going to try to talk to him more.) My point is, he’s lovely and his musings are worthwhile and sincere.

I share that here not just to flex super hard, but because it made me cry, and while I would probably have remembered it in passing every so often, it was the kind of comment I never wanted to forget. So I saved it. And you can do that for yourself, too.

Chuck, you might find yourself thinking, I would like to do that but I can’t say I have any compliments to save. That’s okay: Believe it or not I have a strategy for that, too.

Maris Kreizman @mariskreizman

How To Be a Good Literary Citizen tip of the day: Be a fan.

Maris Kreizman @mariskreizman

A fun thing I learned about publishing my own book is that if you tout others 90% of the time, it feels OK to spend the other 10% on yours.

(Like many of my creative precepts this idea was borrowed from Austin Kleon.)

The way to avoid being a shameless self-promoter is to not be shameless! If you share your stuff along with all the things you like—your influences and inspirations—you’ll be participating in something larger than your own project, and people might find you by finding others. (I think you should do this whether or not you personally get anything out of it, but only you will really know if you’re doing that.) If the internet is good for anything I think it’s that it gives you a chance to geek out about the people whose work you admire, and in doing so collapse some of the distance between you. I’ve even made some friends that way, just by gushing about the things they’ve done. I’ve also found friends because a third party who liked both of our stuff was kind enough to share it in the same tweet, or sent our stuff to the other person. Community can be found if you know how to look for it.

chuck 🏔 @crowcialist

Have recently come to realize that outside of organizing, one of my purposes in life is hyping up my friends who spend time making cool shit, especially if they’d otherwise be too nervous to share it. So I’d like to do that here. Drop something cool you’re making/have made ⬇️

(The responses to that are pretty cool. Some of the people have deleted all their tweets or their whole account in the interim which is really a shame. Gonna have to put out another call soon.)

To return to the idea of saving your praise: a side effect of making this folder is that it has allowed me to feel as though there’s still a point to creative work at all. There is no denying that these are frightening times, fraught with danger and catastrophe. Spending time on work that is not expressly dedicated to fixing or mitigating those problems can feel like an exercise in vanity, like pretending they aren’t there. But hearing from other people that they, too, find value in just…wondering about flowers, or trees, or whales or whatever is a lovely thing, especially in times like these.

Still, my commitment to creative work and my commitment to politics can occasionally feel at odds, not because they feel like obligations—not all the time anyway—but because I feel like each has the potential to make my life so full and deserves a commensurate amount of my time. Vivian Gornick, in her introduction to The Romance of American Communism, wrote about something like this feeling taking over the lives of the working class Communists she grew up around.

There’s a certain kind of cultural hero—the artist, the scientist, the thinker—who is often characterized as one who lives for “the work.” Family, friends, moral obligations be damned, the work comes first. The reason the work comes first in the case of the artist, the scientist, the thinker is that its practice makes flare into bright life a sense of inner expressiveness that is incomparable. To feel not simply alive but expressive is to feel as though one has reached center. That conviction of centeredness irradiates the mind, heart, and spirit like nothing else. Many if not most of the Communists who felt destined for a life of serious radicalism experienced themselves in exactly the same way. Their lives too—impassioned by an ideal of social justice—were irradiated by a kind of expressiveness that made them feel beautifully centered. This centeredness glowed in the dark: it was what made them beautiful, well-spoken, and often heroic.

(It seems to me that these organizers were of a different sort than the scientists and artists and other lone geniuses she compared them to—that they were engaged in this manner not in potentially destructive single-minded pursuit of something others couldn’t understand, but in the explicit pursuit of a sharing the work and the burden. A collective project of building a better, more hopeful world, rather than a Steve Jobs-ian megalomania.)

In the synthesis of all these ideas I find permission not to be driven off the edge by my dedication to my politics, and instead strive for some kind of balance, and to make time and space for the things that I find restorative, like writing. In my early 20s the sum total of my aspirations was to live a romantic sort of literary life, the kind that can only be brought on by a very specific overdose on Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald at a formative age. Now I feel much more responsible to the world for how I spend my time—though in the curious way that any good dream matures, this also makes me feel much more connected to the world. Spending years vanishing to the French Riviera or the Montana plains to write novels is probably not in the cards for me the way I thought I wanted it to be when I was younger; being a teacher and a union member and a socialist organizer has become too important to me. But I can still write each night and restore my soul in the woods on weekends, and I think I’m okay with that.

A friend said something on Facebook recently that I have been invigorated by ever since. to paraphrase: while it is certainly true that the crises we face are real and grave, giving in to doom and proclaiming absolutely everything hopeless is an excuse—an excuse not to learn more and be responsible for getting out of unhelpful frameworks, an excuse not to engage in the very real political fights (not the theatrical ones) that actually have the potential to change things.

May our convictions, as Gornick says, make us glow in the dark.

-Chuck

PS: This has been awfully self-indulgent so I may as well take one more swing: my book, A Good Place For Maniacs: Dispatches From The Pacific Crest Trail, is available online at your favorite independent bookstore, and in person at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park.