Before the critic wakes up

The Muse is an early bird, so get started

3am is the bewitching hour. 4am is the writing hour. 5am the day has started. The genie is back in the bottle. All the stardust falls to the ground in the daylight.

At dawn, my ideas are fresher, less fettered. I don’t have much of an inner critic (verbally less so) early in the morning and for essays I do a one take. Maybe a glance over edit, but it’s more important to get out my stream of consciousness before the critics wake up. They’ll call the legal department, put things on hold as “draft” which is a coffin of half starts that I rarely return to and generally muck up a decent story. If a real editor exists, they’ll say can we make it more topical, or pick something up from the AP wires that is repetitive and droll. Clicky matters. Yellow Journalism is what we called it in college. Satisfying the algorithm, today. If you look at the page for two seconds they can imprint an ad in your brain. Lowest common denominator. I hate it.

I saw a typo yesterday in a headline in the New York Times. I wasn’t shocked, but this is where we are. Platforms like Substack give me hope (even though they take 18% of your subscription fees) We’re all trying to figure it out. I waste so much time trying to figure out the platform that it changes modalities by the time I get my pen out. So now I just push out the stories and hope they land somewhere. I have no answers.

I went to a Writer’s Workshop in Guatemala once and the hostess had been one of my favorite columnists from my childhood. Never meet your heroes. In person I found her to be insufferable. She liked my writing but I couldn’t even hear the compliments, because she was a narcissist, a story stealer and an abysmal event planner. She was also rude and cheap with the locals and I could picture her at her lakefront home cracking a whip for her stable of boys passing out 5 quetzales and a soggy tamal while exposing a breast (accidentally). Complaining about the rising taxes in Marin County, CA from her home’s boat dock, she made $90,000usd for the 5 day retreat with a bunch of big city housewives who couldn’t write. Obviously, she knew how to make money talking about writing. She was caught naked in the temezcal with the husband of a co-host after doing mushrooms. There was very little workshopping going on but she would always say, “No writing about writing, it’s pedestrian.” So as an anti nod to her, I write about writing whenever I like.

Who was she to dismiss any part of anyone’s process? With the glut of content out there one can simply choose to read on, or go back to scrolling, or go have a sandwich. Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art series is a whole bunch of writing about writing with millions of copies sold and it’s quite helpful when actually read and applied.

As the morning unfurls and the 12 furry dog personalities demand a walk, a game, a ball toss, I’ll wrap this up. I’d say I’ll finish it later but I know better. Don’t kid yourself into thinking time to write will make you write. It’s like putting your screenplay on hold waiting for the $50000 camera.

Any creative process really, benefits from you getting out of your own way. Doing the work. Not listening to the inner critic. Or outer critics. Mushrooms and getting naked in the temezcal, optional .

(* to be fair, I don’t begrudge anyone doing that, I just think that if people are paying you to help them hone their craft 5000 miles from home where they are going to get dysentery, you can put your hedonistic faux rock star lifestyle on hold for a week, maybe I’m old fashioned.)

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