Quick plug at the top… if you’ve been working on a novel, or if you’ve been wanting to start one, I’ll be offering a great new Novel Generator course in 2026 through the 92NY Unterberg Poetry Center. We’ll meet virtually on Wednesday nights from February-December and discuss strategies for organizing and writing a novel, as we also workshop the class’s novels-in-progress throughout the year. Each student will bring in new pages (~40-50) every other month to share with the group, and by the end of the year everyone will have either finished a novel, or gotten well on their way. Send me an email or leave a comment if you want more information!

Apologies for the very long wait for a new post! I meant to finish this sooner, but then there was a leak in my shower, and then the oil change light came on, and then my friend needed a ride to the dentist, and then our rain gutters started overflowing, and then my father found a beehive in our Radon pump, and then the coolant system broke in my other car, and then there was this weird blight on my tomatoes, and then my parents came to town for eight weeks, and then my daughter broke her glasses, and then my dog hurt his paw (he's fine), and then…

This is, for better or for worse, just how life is. A series of self-interrupting events, often surprising, but typically disconnected in any casual sense. It tends to be pretty exciting, even challenging, to get through on a daily basis—most of us are fairly absorbed in these kinds of ups and downs all the time. Job stress, relationship drama, family tensions, home repairs and renovations… it is overwhelming, all-consuming.

Yet one of the first things we learn as writers is that it rarely makes a very good story. That is to say, it isn’t much of a plot.

If I were to take all those things I mentioned earlier and write them down in a story called “My Hectic Summer” it would be full of conflicts and even some drama. But it would not be especially compelling—few of us would really want to read it.

If you’ve ever met up with a friend for coffee, and asked them how life is going, and then sat there listening to some similar outpouring… you know what I’m getting at here. Just because there’s a lot going on in someone’s life, that doesn’t make it inherently interesting to anyone else.

But—if we focus on one thing, tell it in vivid detail, from start to finish, in a sequence of causal events, describing your moment-by-moment reactions with pathos or humor? Then even a relatively simple story about a burst tire can become a thrilling adventure, a worthy tale for an audience. You have taken life and made it into a story.

As EM Forster put it in Aspects of the Novel, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot...”

One of my professors used to tell a story about going to a party in his own college days, and going to leave his coat on the bed in the spare room, saw a typewriter on a desk with a huge stack of pages behind it. The host of the party came in and saw him looking at the stack of papers and said, “Oh that—that’s just my novel.” And our professor said, “Wow, that’s a really long novel!” And the host laughed and said, “Oh, well, it’s easy—I just sit down at the end of every day and I write a page about everything that happened to me and then I put it on the pile.”

That—my professor would then say to us—is not a novel. That’s, at best, a diary. A novel has to have a focus, a shape… a beginning and an end, not just a lot of middle. There are stakes and desires. More than anything it has to have some logical sequence of causal events, which daily life just doesn’t, most times, have.

Stuff just happens. Then plotting is what we do, retrospectively, looking back on things that have happened and organizing them in our minds. “Oh my hair was dirty after the leak in my shower meant I couldn't wash up, which meant that I was distracted by my dandruff and some got in my eye, which meant I couldn't see the Check Engine light in my car, and so then it overheated just when my friend was expecting me to pick them up from the dentist’s… in this version of my story called “Summer” if, at any point, the chain of events was altered, the whole thing would work out differently. (Had there been no leak, I would have seen the Check Engine light, and then I would have made it to my friend on time.)

It becomes a plot, and not just a bunch of stuff.

But isn't art supposed to mirror life? Is it maybe a little dishonest to present our lives in this kind of logical, structured form that didn't happen, or that we, living it, usually didn't see until much time has passed?

If it is a facet of modern life, perhaps since industrialization but certainly since digitalization, that our lives are under a kind of constant informational assault, hyper-interrupted and fragmented in ways that, frankly, might be driving us all to the brink of madness, but which are nevertheless also part of the daily texture of existence in a time of text messages and Breaking News alerts and phone notifications and social media… then do we maybe need to create fiction that honors that chaotic and sometimes nauseating quality of our lives? To not do that would be to risk having art detach from reality, become increasingly unable to represent what it means to be alive in our modern, stochastic world.

I thought about this a lot last summer as I caught up on the hit TV show The Pitt, on HBO (I’ll never, ever call it “MAX”) about the lives of doctors and nurses and other health care workers in an emergency room in Pittsburgh. In some ways the show is a kind of reboot of the 90s TV phenomenon, ER, which also started Noah Wyle. In that show, Wyle played fresh-faced newbie Dr. Carter. In this one, he’s the seasoned veteran Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch.

One of the ways that, thirty years ago, ER broke new ground in TV storytelling was by lacing sudden and chaotic interruptions into the emotional dramas of its characters. Two doctors in the middle of discussing a marital crisis or the mental health of a nurse on shift, would suddenly be ripped away from that conversation as a team of EMTs burst through the doors with a gurney, carrying some patient in intense medical crisis. Watching it, audiences were always on edge—never knowing if a kid with a fever or a man who lopped off his arm or a woman with a gunshot wound was about to erupt into the story. While “normal” TV shows tended to follow fairly predictable sequences of cause-and-effect plotting, ER got attention by smashing that model.

In many ways the hourlong TV drama never went back—there have been dozens and dozens of Fire/Police/Medical dramas built on the ER formula in the years since, to the point where this sort of storytelling has become normal, if not even a little boring. I’ve written before on this very Substack about TV shows like Yellowstone that seem to exploit this tactic by constantly one-upping the existing dramas, often not even bothering to resolve the previous ones. But are the daily lives of Montana ranchers truly as intensely stochastic as the daily lives of Emergency Medicine doctors? (To be fair a friend of mine who works in an ER once told me that, unlike what’s seen on TV, he found he spent the vast majority of his time just giving “banana bags” of vitamins to unhoused people and dealing with minor stitch-ups from kitchen accidents.)

In any case, what The Pitt seems to do that feels new is to increase the pace and the chaos, well beyond what audiences have become used to in the post-ER years. There are still occasional moments of downtime, little moments of character building, side conversations—but these plot points come across as quick interruptions to the chaos, instead of the chaos interrupting the plot points. For the vast majority of the show there is only one crisis on top of another and another and another.

There isn't a pause for emotional drama. Almost every shot is in motion, every conversation is a walk-and-talk. There are patients overflowing the waiting room, patients overflowing the ER hallways. Stuff is happening in the background of almost every shot. (There's a three-episode arc during which Doctor Robby literally can't find a moment to pee.) Everything is happening everywhere and all at once. I often found myself having totally forgotten about a loose thread from a previous episode, or even earlier in the same one, such that when it resumed it would feel like it had been days since it last existed. But in The Pitt every hour-long episode is an hour in the ER, meaning that everything is happening in (pretty much) real time, all the time.

In the final few episodes, which follow a mass shooting event, there is such an even higher tempo from the hectic baseline that I almost forgot to breathe while watching.

It's incredible television, but it also strikes me as a very different kind of plot. Instead of a few intersecting, identifiable arcs that resolve over the course of an hour, in The Pitt there is a constant chaotic churn, and scenes don't coalesce into arcs the way you'd expect. A new patient arrives suddenly and interrupts the situation we were just invested in. And then that interruption is interrupted. And then that one.

Doctors just leave the story abruptly as their shifts end and they go home. Patients die totally unexpectedly, and there’s barely a moment for anyone to mourn them or to figure out what went wrong. Other patients are whisked off to surgery and will never be heard about again. There’s basically no way to keep tabs on all of it—you end up simply giving in to the relentless speed of it. You give up on expecting a story with cause and effect. You end up with a bunch of stuff.

In short, The Pitt breaks a lot of the rules of plots that we talked about before. An episode can feel a lot more like my bad “My Crazy Summer” story than an episode of ER. But it's one of the best new things on television. How?

Let's start by saying that the acting is excellent, nuanced, complex. We genuinely become attached to both Dr Robby and all the young doctors in training. The show makes the nurses, staff members, patients, all feel rich and layered and interesting, and very quickly—it’s excellent at the “single brushstroke” technique of characterization that I’ve written about before. And it has to be—there’s no time for two brushstrokes in The Pitt, at least not two in a row. But even the most interesting characters in the world need some kind of plotting to compel us, right?

If a typical plot moves in an arc, building momentum through a series of conflicts, to a point of climax, after which things resolve. In the book Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Allison argues that we should expand the repertoire of plot forms to get beyond the “masculo-sexual” wave form. She proposes other “natural” structures that can work as models, like a meandering river, a series of “wavelets”, a radial explosion, a whirlpool, and so on.

But none of those really capture what you see in The Pitt. The closes we get is (above) her final proposed form, the tsunami, a huge wave made of other smaller waves. This gets the scale and intensity, but still suggests a kind of greater underlying order to the events than we really see in The Pitt.

My visualization of an episode of The Pitt would look something like the scatter plot above, where as time progresses along the X-axis, we jump around from character to character and story to story, never for more than a few moments. They overlap, collide, come apart, reconnect. But the overall effect is one of total randomness.

I've been calling this plot form a “Stochastic Plot” looking more like a great big swarm of insects, if we want to stay with the idea of a natural form. “Stochastic” is a mathematical term to describe a scattered, truly random distribution of points “that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.” I have heard it used recently in relation to terrorism, as a way of explaining the way that the random and unpredictable nature of the strikes are a key feature of its terrorizing effect. And that seems apt to the anxiety it induces here in the viewing process. You're on the edge of your seat all the time because at any moment something else unpredictable might occur, even in the middle of the many layers of ongoing action you're already wrapped up in.

And beneath the surface of the randomness, I expect that a keen student will still find patterns, logic, order—there is, always, some reason the writer or writers have put things together in the way they have. We are still not watching a live-stream of reality—it is only made to feel that way. This is precisely what is so impressive about it.

Recently I rewatched the Robert Altman movies Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993) and both felt somewhat similar in nature to this kind of story—everything is decentralized, there is no single main character, and the movie leaps around in a seemingly random way from one piece of the story to the next. Characters from one story will intersect with, and interact with, others, but there’s never any predicting which way it might go next. I thought also of the 2019 film Uncut Gems, which focuses on a disastrous day in the life of a single character but with similar constant interruptions that make you feel as if you’re having a two-hour panic attack. Clearly there’s a way of making this work on the screen, and when done well it can be very powerful indeed.

Could this work on the page for a novelist? One big difference between written and visual mediums like TV or film is that a book has to be actively paged through, a reader has to move themselves along, line by line. A video format means that the story is just happening. You have to actively choose to change the channel or turn off the show. The default is that it keeps going. Not true with a book.

But of course we have all had the experience of being wrapped up in novels that seem to be “unputdownable” and where time flies by without us realizing. So I would say we have to at least take that as a prerequisite, which is of course a tall order. But if you are able to compel a reader in that way, you should be able to pull off the kind of constant plot interruption technique without issue. You might follow one character through an hour or a day in which they have to withstand a warzone, or a hurricane, or a social media feed. Novels like Jenny Offill’s Weather or Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland are able to represent this reality/time fragmentation with a longer story told in small separated pieces (often called a “crot” in literary circles) which can create a similar kind of dynamic, stochastic effect.

And these (very good!) novels don’t in any way sacrifice those things we love about fiction that we don’t get from TV: interiority, lulls in action, moments of introspection, or quiet observation. But they keep things jumping, always, fragment to fragment, moment to moment, in a way that feels authentic to the way modern life feels to us today. It is just happening and we are in it, trying to navigate it to the best of our ability. To some degree these models return to one of the oldest storytelling forms—the picaresque—as we slip in and out of disconnected episodes and challenges in the course of a journey, each of us an Odysseus, a Don Quixote, a Moll Flanders, or a Huckleberry Finn, unable to see the bigger invisible forces and patterns all around us.

Two things before I start…

1. My novel Our Narrow Hiding Places is out today in paperback! Order it online or pick it up at your local bookstore!
   

2. This Fall I’m leading a The Great Gatsby at 100 reading group for The Center for Fiction! The class is online, so you can join us from anywhere. I’m looking forward to digging into the novel, and talking with you about its origins, revisions, and editors (including Zelda!)… and so much more. It’s 4 sessions between October and November, and you can sign up now!

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A few years ago, working on my novel Our Narrow Hiding Places, I found myself stuck, badly, in a way I’d never quite experienced before. I tried and tried, spending months writing hundreds and then thousands of words that went right in the little digital recycling bin. I’d had blocks before, but they’d always resolved eventually with enough steady work, and patience. For some reason, I could find no way through. Words, scenes, and conversations all came to me, but everything still felt too distant.

Our Narrow Hiding Places, is about a young girl’s life in Holland during the end of WW2, and the stories were building on ones my Oma told me about her childhood. In this sense I was not lacking for material—I knew just what there was to say because she’d told me, in detail: about her struggles to survive starvation at the age of eight, and the way it felt to live alongside daily V-2 rocket blasts, and so on.

Dutifully, carefully, I described these things again and again, but to no avail. I had her interview transcripts in front of me, ample research from other books—and my head was spinning with ideas. I had a sense of the layout of her apartment building, and an old British war map of The Hague had given me a precise layout of the streets she was roaming through. I had books filled with period photographs of everything, including the exact street and building that my Oma had lived in then—in one of these I could even see the narrow windows of the attic where her father and the other men in her building had hidden from the Nazis during the Hunger Winter of 1944, rather than be forced off to work camps. It was all right there. So what was the problem?

I shared some pages with a friend, and it took them all of three minutes to put their finger on it.

“I can’t see it at all. I can’t tell what anybody looks like,” they told me.

That’s all it took for me to realize that I certainly didn’t know either. Many of the characters were based on relatives of mine—people I’d either never met, or only known in older age. Normally, writing about characters I’d invented, I had to begin by describing them, if only so I knew what they looked like, and they could begin doing things there, in my imagination. But I’d skipped this part somehow, lost in all my facts and dates and research.

Who was my grandmother, my Oma, at age eight? Did she look at all like my own daughter? My son? Who were her parents and neighbors? We had almost no photographs of them during the war years for the obvious reason that the family’s camera, along with most other personal items, had been taken by the Nazis occupying their city. Besides, everyone had been either starving or freezing to death—they weren’t documenting the experience for posterity.

Who were these people? How could I have written well over a hundred pages of a draft of my novel without having the slightest idea?

“Why don’t you draw them?” my friend suggested.

“Like write out little character sketches for everyone?”

“No,” they said. “Draw them.”

I did. And it worked. After just ten or fifteen minutes of sketching, I knew immediately who they were. When I came back to my novel draft, everything suddenly moved easily again. The characters before had been abstractions, all but puppets to deploy my research and to move the plot along. Within hours they were alive. I could hear their voices, see the ways they moved about, picture the expressions on their faces.

It worked. But why?

As a child, I drew all the time, long before I knew how to write. One of my earliest memories is of making pictures of monsters with my Opa, down in the cabin of a gently-rocking boat, during a family vacation when I was five years old. Someone had bought me a big purple book that showed, line-by-line, how to draw various magical creatures. Each was a kind of double; if you flipped the drawing upside down, the monster’s various folds and creases and horns and claws would invert, becoming new pieces of a different monster, hidden all along in the image—a bit like the classic optical illusion of a duck that is also, seen the other way, a rabbit.

From one angle my drawing would be grotesque and frightening. From the other it appeared cute and cuddly. I must have spent hours on that trip, drawing in the cabin of that rocking boat, watching my Opa’s hands skillfully creating these things that I, with shaky fingers, tried my best to mimic.

As I got older, my shaky fingers took a greater interest in making letters, words, and stories, but I always saw them quite vividly in my mind’s eye as well. While busting imaginary ghosts in my friend’s yard at night, I had no trouble convincing myself that, actually, they were totally real. I could convince myself they were there, moving, in the shadows around us.

The grade school tales I scrawled in my school notebooks always included little drawings of the characters: superheroes and dragons and, of course, more monsters.

But as I got older and illustrations fell away from the books I was reading, my artistic scribblings separated themselves from my literary ones. When I wrote stories then it seemed important that these be words-only, as that was what grown-up books were like.

Separately, then, I took art classes after school twice a week, in a little studio called The Leneve School of Art, located a town or two away, was a one-room operation run by a kind, gray-haired woman named Jean. I’d sit there on a wobbly stool for an hour, listening to an Enya cassette, Bob Ross posters on the walls. We’d paint or sketch on one of four long tables so thoroughly plastered in colorful dried daubs of paint, that you had to use a heavy board underneath your sketchpad to keep it from coming out bumpy.

Ms. Jean rarely made us work on anything specific. If you didn’t know what to make, she would tell us to dig around on her bookshelves and find something to copy—this was the best way to learn, she explained—by copying other pictures as best we could.

My go-to was a book of Robert Wyland murals of orcas and other sea creatures: stunning, smooth, dark ocean-dwellers that glided against backdrops of clear blues and greens. The challenge was to try and get the gooey acrylic paints she supplied to match the colors in the original pictures, and to try and make the lines with the same fluidity and proportion.

Art, at the Leneve School, was about accuracy—a good picture, in Ms. Jean’s eyes, was one that looked as much as possible like the original. Some of the other kids found this frustrating. They wanted to just paint things from their own imaginations. But I loved training as a copyist, becoming a kind of junior art forger.

I was always slow. It took me months to finish a single piece—but I was patient, deliberate, always so fully absorbed that I could never believe the hour was over when the time came to go home.

Sometimes I’d bring in books from home and copy their jackets on my own canvases. Over the course of a year, I painstakingly copied the covers of the four Wrinkle in Time books by Madeliene L’Engle, which I had become obsessed with. In high school I continued to take art electives every year in high school, and briefly considered taking an AP Art course, but I had never developed a particularly strong sense of composition—for all my years of copying, I’d never really figured out how to make anything original.

Fortunately, I found this much easier to do in words, and so I shifted my energies into writing stories, and I was both quicker at that, and more confident in my own vision. Still, I missed the brush and the canvas. During college, between creative writing workshops, I painted the sets for our theater group. For a ritzy living room in Rumors, we made frames out of plywood and stretched canvas over it, and the techies mocked up a Mondrian and then a Rothko. After my finals were over, I took some of the leftover materials and made myself a huge 5’ x 3’ canvas and set to work:

Like everything else I’ve painted, this is a copy—of what I can no longer remember. My memory is that I found the original picture in an art book about Futurism and hadn’t been able to get it out of my head. The colors were bold, ideal for the acrylics (all I’d learned to use at the Leneve School.) Plus the cubist shapes were easy to sketch out on a penciled grid—another copyist technique I’d picked up from Ms. Jean.

The painting succeeded in clearing my head of a year’s worth of stress and strife and priming me for new creative endeavors in the months ahead.

This became a kind of ritual. Each summer afterwards, I’d set aside a few weeks to make another. I forged several Picassos and then a Juan Gris. They weren’t exactly going to pass at the MoMA, but they made me happy and engaged parts of my brain that hadn’t been turned on in a while.

I began to run out of walls in my apartment to hang them on, so I started to give them as gifts for friends and family, as decorations for friends’ offices. I tried my hand at new styles: Kandinsky, Bacon, Goncharova, but always bright, always playing with forms and shapes in some way.

They were joyful to make and joys to give, and as someone who often struggles to take a break from laboring on stories and novels, they gave me a welcome shift in perspective. I didn’t think of these art projects as being connected, anymore, to my writing—but in a sense they very much were the other side of a creative cycle, a different way of expressing something, even a copy of something, as my brain reset itself again.

How could I have forgotten?

By the time I was working on my World War II novel, it had been almost a decade since I’d painted anything. I thought about it sometimes—I kept seeing paintings that I imagined would be fun to copy—but I was a novelist now, I told myself—and even when I was not focused on a book, there were always more stories and essays and things to write than I had time to write. Add to that two children and a full-time teaching job and the idea of setting aside even a week or two over the summer break to paint something felt like an unaffordable luxury.

Watching my children play, I had become aware already of a kind of loss in my own imaginary powers—something I’d accepted as the inevitable process of aging, my brain having now developed into something else from what it had been then. When I wrote now I felt a kind of music in the language, and could hear the dialogue going back and forth, but I didn’t see anything like I used to. Not like my children could. Suddenly I began to wonder if it wasn’t just some natural shift in the neurons, but just a skill I’d accidentally allowed to atrophy. At their age, storytelling and imagery were all one thing to me. As I got older they’d come apart, but through those paintings maybe I’d managed to keep the visual parts of my brain strong. Perhaps all that had happened was that I’d neglected to work those lobes out—the neuroscientific version of skipping leg day.

Soon I began to start each daily writing session with a little fifteen-minute drawing session. Even when, some days I barely had an hour free for writing, I decided it was essential to use a quarter of that time for sketching. I’d pick a character, or an object from the scene I intended to work on and rough them out in a notebook.

To draw my protagonist, Mieke, it made sense to look at some pictures of my real-life Oma. Only I still had no photos of her from that period. I decided to work off of a photograph on the cover of one of the research books I’d read, The Cut-Out Girl by Bart van Es, also about a Dutch girl around the same age during the same time period.

She wasn’t my Oma, but she could be my Mieke in the novel.

Gradually I began to see Mieke for the first time: the defiant mischief in her eyes, the lips clamped shut as if holding back some secret, the hair a little wild, coming out of the braids someone had put in. These tiny, external details reflected the person I knew she was on the inside. In real life, we form quick unconscious assumptions based on a person’s micro-expressions, in order to guess at how they’re feeling on the inside. Angry? Sad? Worried? Elated? With my pencil in my hand, drawing, I felt like this same automatic instinct was turned on in the same way as if I was meeting a stranger in real life. Something in my unconscious mind was turning the flat image into a full, three-dimensional person, with hopes, dreams, fears, secrets. All in fifteen minutes of sketching.

By the time I finished, I felt I knew Mieke completely. And when I sat down to write about her then, the words poured out. She was all there in my head at last.

In doing verbal work, we activate the frontal, left hemisphere parts of the brain uses when speaking or articulating ideas, utilizing something called “Broca’s area.” But when we visualize things, and when we compare again and again the slight similarities and differences between an image and its copy-in-progress, we are working in the far back end of the brain, almost as far away as you can get from the verbal parts, much closer to the brainstem, in the visual cortex.

A classic guide to creativity, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, written by Betty Edwards in 1989, delves into the ways in which an artist can unlock their full potential through a series of simple drawing exercises—even if they have no real training or experience as a visual artist. Describing drawing as a “global” skill, Edwards explains that it is similar to reading and writing in that the larger ability to draw is made up of a number of basic skills which must be learned separately and then eventually brought together through repeated practice. Similar to how we can eventually walk, drive, or play a musical instrument, without needing to constantly consciously think about balance, traffic merging, or fingering—when we draw and when we write, we are aiming to achieve a kind of natural flow that does not need to be constantly checked-on, unless something is “off” for some reason. Edwards further explores the idea, commonly held at the time, that a person’s visual and perception skills needed for drawing are located in the right-hemisphere of the brain, while their verbal and language skills are over in the left. In an updated edition of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Edwards concedes that these concepts have become outdated in light of modern neuroscientific discoveries—there is considerably more overlapping work occurring in the brain when it comes to visual, or verbal activity, and these are not so neatly organized into the left and right hemispheres as once believed. But, Edwards explains, we can think of them rather as different “modes” of brain function, which she calls L-Mode and R-Mode, which still often operate independently of one another.

In layman’s terms, when we are writing a story using words, and constructing sentences according to logic and grammar rules, we are using our brain’s “L Mode.” But when we begin to draw a picture, something that the L Mode cannot oversee and therefore “turns down,” our “R Mode” will take over and we will regain access to those “subdominant” visualization functions needed to “see” something more fully in our imaginations, the way an artist must.

For ages I dismissed my visually artistic side, despite the joy it brought me, because I could only really copy other things. I doubt I’ll ever evolve beyond careful mimicry—but then again I suppose I have little desire to try it.

Now I understand how important it is to the larger creative life I’m attempting to live, and that there’s nothing about getting older that prohibits my imagination from seeing things that aren’t really there. It just takes a little exercise now, which it didn’t back then—so it goes with every other part of me as well in middle age. I’m grateful to see now that there’s much to be regained with just a little effort.

When I draw things now, when I am copying, I’m there in the cabin of that boat again, making upside-down monsters with my Opa, building those little localized skills up, one by one.

When I sit down and put pencil to paper, for only a little while, and I begin to see the things that happened in his life that he never got to tell me, half a world away and forty years before I was born. And then, in words, I can make them real again.

Hello! It’s been a minute since my last post in May. I have a number of things I’ve been wanting to post here about—for example, a number of recent articles about why men don’t read and my own experiences with a local “boys only” book club that I started. So look for that soon!

But at the start of 2025, I posted here about my intention to read the epic novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust over the course of the next four years. I’ve been meaning to post some kind of update on that goal for ages now, and here it (belatedly) is…

A quick recap: after the election last November, I was trying to wrap my head around the forthcoming years of kakistocracy, corruption, and just utterly disgusting behavior that was sure to continue to flood the news.

A few months into Trump 2.0 now, I think it’s safe to say that in my wildest nightmares back then, I was still severely underestimating the soul-killing daily misery of a second Trump term. Knowing that my country, even friends of mine, voted for that man after every single awful thing they knew to be true about him, has just been a source of perpetual heartache ever since November.

In any case, I came up with a plan last winter to try and weather the coming shitstorm by intentionally engaging with something life-affirming—something that had stood the tests of time—something so massive in scale and historical importance that it would remind me that these dark days would eventually pass.

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is, for the unfamiliar, a 3800 page novel split into six volumes (depending on the translation) all written and published serially between 1913 and 1927. He started working on it around 1909, and almost half of the volumes were published after Proust’s death in 1922. It is still one of the most highly-regarded and important works of literature of all time.

In any case, my plan was to spread these books out over the course of the coming four years, to read just a few pages a day, so that I could have some kind of throughline to follow—something that would see me safely and sanely to the other side of this very bleak tunnel.

At the start I assumed that, if I failed, it would simply be because I lost interest in the very long book, which I’d been warned involves hundreds of pages dedicated to the ins-and-outs of high society gatherings and other stuff I was worried I’d find deathly boring. I’d figured I’d spend most of this year on the first volume and try to start in on the second. I had some secondary texts to read as well, some guides and some bonus content about the paintings referenced in the novels. I figured I’d be in for the long haul.

But, well—something else happened. It turned out I could not stop reading this novel.

Or, rather, I could not slow down enough to make it last anywhere close to four years.

I finished the first volume, Swann’s Way before the end of January and could not wait even a few months to dig back in again on the second, Within a Budding Grove. I burned through that 600+ page book before the end of the Spring semester.

It is now the end of July and I’ve had to force myself to take a break after just finishing the third book in the cycle, The Guermantes Way.

That’s right—as it stand I’m now about halfway through the whole megillah.

I want to pause here just to say that, just a few years ago, I was struggling to read even a dozen (regular sized) books in a year. My attention span was shot, and I wasn’t making the time to engage with anything longer than a tweet.

But after just two years of trying to consciously read 26 books a year (at least one by an author, going from A-Z) I have become such an avid reader again that I’m currently on my 25th novel of the year, with five months to go. (And three of those are Proust volumes!)

Even when I was younger, and even before social media existed, I never read like this, and it has been tremendous. Not quite enough to keep me from despairing over current events, or to distract me from wasting (some) time online… but it’s a marked improvement, which I feel the benefits of daily.

Anyway, I badly underestimated Proust, and maybe myself a little too—I seriously love this novel and I have not stopped thinking about it all year.

If I’ve stalled a bit in posting an update, it’s partly because I wasn’t sure how to report about the experience in a way that wouldn’t sound silly or reductive or pretentious… although maybe when you’re talking about a 3800 page novel, the pretentious thing is just a given.

But! Maybe I’ll start there. Which is that the book actually doesn’t feel pretentious in the way I expected. Yes, a good deal of the story is about the narrator (who is called Marcel a few times, and is commonly read as a kind of auto-fictional Marcel Proust) and his encounters with high society, particularly the third volume The Guermantes Way, which I’ve just finished.

I’d braced myself for something a bit like watching The Gilded Age or Downton Abbey without the “downstairs” parts of either, just a ton of descriptions of dinner parties and Parisian society gossip and the politics of the rich and so on…

And, well, there is a lot of that, but Proust manages to make all of that about something else that’s much more interesting. So far the novel is really about his steady awakening to the essential shallowness of two different sides of the modern world, and I’m expecting the next few volumes to focus on whatever comes after that awakening.

In the beginning you get the stuff you’ve maybe heard about… the madeliene cookie, the narrator trying to get to sleep and thinking back on the past… but this all really is just the opening. Very soon after, we get the narrator describing his boyhood in a French country home in Combray (an imaginary town, in Normandy) and his fascinations with two groups of his upper class neighbors.

Actually he’s in the upper class, so really what he admires are the upper upper class—everyone he wants to hang out with is a Count or a Baron or even several actual Princesses. As a boy he looks up to these people, and wants to learn how to join their ranks when he’s older. He believes that there are universal truths and beauty contained within art, which he hears the adults around him talking about constantly: they attend plays, own paintings, listen to sonatas, and on and on. And then there are the aristocrats, the Counts and Barons and Princesses, who maintain a kind of power through their money and their lineages—the young narrator believes in this order completely and dreams of being a part of that noble class.

These groups are represented symbolically in the book by two different paths (ways) along which he walks as a child through the landscape around Combray.

There is “Swann’s Way” which goes by the estate of M. Swann, a prominent figure who is part of the Verdurin salon of well-to-do artistic types where they listen to performances of the Vinteuil sonata (which makes Mme Verdurin cry) and talk about paintings and plays and such all the time. And there is “the Guermantes Way” which goes by the estate that belongs to the aristocratic members of that royal circle, who are involved in French matters of state and politics.

At first the young narrator leans towards Swann’s way—he wants to be a writer, and he loves the work of a writer named Bergotte, and fantasizes about going to see a theatrical performance by a famed singer that he dreams will be utter perfection. And he idolizes M. Swann, who he understands has bucked societal conventions by marrying a “coquette” named Odette who no one else approves of. But in due time the narrator discovers that people in the Verdurin salon think Bergotte is sub-par. He finally goes to see the theatrical performance and discovers it doesn’t live up to his imagination at all. And when he finds out more about Swann’s situation with Odette, he realizes it is actually pretty much a miserable disaster—one which he is soon to repeat almost exactly with Swann and Odette’s daughter, Gilberte, in the first part of Book Two, Within a Budding Grove.

After the relationship with Gilberte ends, he goes away for the summer to Balbec and he enjoys the new landscape of the seaside, and befriends a boy named Robert Saint Loup, who is from one of these very elite families and has connections to that world. The narrator has somewhat gotten over his idealizing of Swann, now that he understands how he’s disliked by all the other fancy folks he wants to join in with—Swann’s even been disinvited by the Verdurins, because of Odette.

At the beach, the narrator and Saint Loup begin to take notice of a group of girls and eventually concoct a plan to meet them. He falls for one, a girl named Albertine, who invites him up to her room alone, but then is suddenly upset when he attempts to kiss her. Meanwhile he somewhat replaces Swann as a role model with a painter he meets there, named Elstir, who it turns out also has some ties back to Odette (he’s painted her anyway).

In the third volume, he returns back to Paris and begins to infiltrate high society. His plan is to meet the Princess de Guermantes, through Saint Loup, and under the auspices of wanting to come see some paintings of Elstir’s that she owns. This all takes some time, but eventually pays off. But just as the theatrical performance, or the writings of Bergotte, turn out to be less perfect than he once imagined, so do the upper crust.

There are indeed hundreds of pages of society dinners and details about parties and everything I dreaded, but it all comes in the context of him steadily realizing all of them are, well, full of crap.

They’re rich and they’re important, but he begins to realize that they’re also deeply unintelligent, incredibly petty, and ultimately have no real convictions at all. Their superior titles and lands and lineages don’t actually correspond to their being superior people. Or, rather, they are all superior, but decidedly lacking in any real excellence.

Everyone he meets in the third book is obsessed with talking about the Dreyfus affair—which I had to strain back to my high school Modern European History class to remember the details of. Proust certainly doesn’t give much background, which I realized at some point is because none of these people really cares about it, or understands much about it either.

Everyone is either a stated Dreyfusard or an anti-Dreyfusard, which sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t overlap with them being antisemitic. (There are several Jewish figures who are rabid anti-Dreyfusards, mostly because they’re worried that supporting him will remind the others that they’re Jewish and they’ll be shunned from all the cool parties). Notably Swann, and Proust in real life, are considered to be Jewish—actually they’re all Catholics, but they’re of Jewish descent which is enough to make everyone suspicious.

There are some very moving parts of the book, in between all the gossiping. The narrator’s beloved grandmother has a stroke, and later dies, and these serious moments only deepen the ridiculousness of the social plots around them—in many ways her death begins to feel like a symbolic death of the whole old social order of France. The world she lived in has, at least, almost completely died off—and by the end of the third volume, it seems like the narrator knows it. (The final sequence involves him rushing through a party at the Princess’s mansion, so he can pay a visit to a prominent man named Baron de Charlus afterwards. The Baron proceeds to rabidly chew him out over some perceived (or imaginary?) slight, swear he’ll never talk to the narrator again, and then almost immediately get distracted (or senile?) and seemingly forgetting about the whole thing.)

Where I’m at now, midway through the six volumes of the novel, it seems as if the narrator has begun to really accept the superficialities and flaws of both “ways” that he considered viable in his youth. Will he forge some other path ahead through these next volumes? My sense is that if he does, it will be a kind of artistic path (a genuine one, not the one the Verdurins pretend to support for social capital) that ultimately leads to his writing the novel we’re reading. I’m especially curious how Proust will navigate this, as I’m always fascinated by those who break the “rules” and write about writers writing.

I have to say that I thought the books would feel dated and strange, and that I’d be lost without a ton of historical knowledge of the world of French art and politics in the early 1900s. But every part of it so far has been quite easy to connect to today. The Verdurins and their snooty salons represent a kind of world I have similarly grown pretty bored of—the gathering of smart people who claim to love art and artists but seem to actually just enjoy gossiping about art and artists, with a lot of energy spent on being “correct” about whoever is in and out of vogue at any given moment.

Proust’s book felt like a wonderful reminder, then, of how eternal those types are—those who don’t, themselves, really make art, but who want to feel as if they are a part of the process. These are the folks who are very happy to say they love your work so long as everyone else is also saying it, and then a few months later will act as if they’ve never heard of you at all. (I’m not subtweeting anyone in particular here, I promise… it’s just a world that, I can assure you, very much still exists.)

At the same time, all the Guermantes stuff feels equally familiar. Swap “Dreyfus” out and swap in whatever the topic-of-the-moment happens to be today—AI, crypto, Love Island—and you get the idea. Even deadly serious stuff like Gaza, or Ukraine, or mass deportations to CECOT, in the hands of these kinds of characters, become games played for popularity points.

In Proust’s descriptions, these aristocratic figures never actually evince any genuine care for Dreyfus—the actual imprisoned human being at the heart of the case. They just know it’s something that everyone important must have a strong opinion about, and so they have one. (To be clear I think there are lots of people with actual, serious convictions out there, and I’m sure there were back then too.) But Proust captures the way in which it all becomes swept up in more society gamesmanship. It’s about who gets invited to the next party, and who gets gossiped about, and who is or isn’t “in” at this particular moment. Basically it’s the eternal high school lunch table, and those many people we all know who continue to care about their own popularity above all else.

And I have to say that—at the same time, the novel never feels pointed or cruel, or satirical. Even as Proust’s narrator begins to see through them, all we really feel is his own internal disappointment. It isn’t about him scoring points off of mocking them—which is really refreshing.

There is only one minor critique on my mind at this point—and if you’ve read ahead of me, don’t spoil things in the comments!

So far, I’m finding a lot of the love stories unconvincing—excepting the famous “Swann in Love” section (which weirdly leaves the 1st person POV and jumps to a 3rd person POV close to Swann—is that going to happen again at any point? I’m very much wondering…). But when it is about the narrator and Gilberte or, later, Albertine, or the Princess de Guermantes… I just never quite feel like he’s convincing me that he’s actually in love with them. This may be because he really isn’t — that like his idealizing of art and aristocratic society, maybe love is similarly a false “way”? It may also be that he’s still fairly young. But if anything I’d expect his youthful crushes to feel even more romanticized than they would be if he was older?

It’s hard to ignore that, well, I’m reading this book in the year 2025, fully aware that Marcel Proust was gay—which of course he could not be open about at the time he was alive (though it seems from what I’ve read that it was known in the literary world of Paris back then). I’m told that some of this gets, at least, obliquely addressed in the next volume (which is, scarily, titled Sodom and Gomorrah) so perhaps this is coming into focus soon.

In either case, what does absolutely feel convincing to me are his intense friendships with the other boys in the novel—he seems fully smitten with Saint Loup right now, and earlier with the older Swann, and with Elstir. It strikes me that Proust is quite able to convince me that his narrator adores the heck out of these figures, while with the ladies it is always a bit underwhelming. I’m not sure how much to dwell on this at all, but right now if there’s anything I could think of to criticize the book about, it would be that.

In any case, I’m quite curious to continue with the reading—and at the halfway point now I can see a world in which I finish it all this year, or maybe shortly into next year—a far cry from my original plan to stretch it out. But honestly, this is even better.

One final note, which is that, as I said in my original Proust post, when I was in college I decided not to sign up for a class where I would have had to read all of In Search of Lost Time in one semester, and I’ve always regretted it. One of the things I let persuade me against it, back then, was some advice from another writer I knew, who had done the class and had felt, afterwards, like it had completely overtaken his own style—that being immersed in all these long, looping sentences for thousands of pages had corrupted his own writing somehow. I mean… first of all, imagine being worried that you might end up accidentally writing like more one of the best writers of all time? But somehow this made sense to me then (I had recently just pulled myself out of a Hemingway/minimalist phase) and so I allowed that to be my reason to not take the class.

Anyway, I’m on the lookout now to see if there’s an impact on my own style again—chapters beginning to run to a hundred pages or sentences going for paragraphs on end… but so far I think I’m doing OK. Like I said, a writer could have many worse problems.

So—that’s the update! I hope if you are reading along you’re also having a great experience so far, and that if you are intimidated at all by the size or the age of the book, that I can convince you to give it a go. Hands down so far it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made (reading wise) in a long time.

On to the next two thousand pages!

Hey! If you're a fan of this newsletter and you're looking to get a little fun back into your own writing, you can sign up for my upcoming workshop at 92NY to work together for the next five weeks!

The class meets over Zoom so you can join us from anywhere. 6:30-9pm on Tuesdays.

I built the class around the same theme as this Substack… exploring the ways that we can rediscover the fun we felt when we first began writing, and find ways to bring new enjoyment to the serious work we want to do. Each class will involve discussions of essays and stories on these topics, leading into a series of guided exercises that will help you spark something strange and audacious and joyful on your pages.

You can sign up now at the following link!

https://www.92ny.org/class/fiction-with-kristopher-jansma

A few years ago I began a process of “breaking up” with my phone and social media in order to dedicate more time to my creative work. That's been progressing, and largely successful. I've cut back considerably—keeping my time on Instagram and Twitter down to a few minutes a day. Often I forget to even check.

Though I often now miss the sense of connection it offered (illusory or not!) to other writers, on the whole I think it has been a huge net benefit. My mood has improved, my anxiety is less intense, and my time feels reclaimed. With the time I’ve gotten back I’ve been listening to classical music in the mornings, reading Proust, exercising, and even watching tons of old movies.

But I noticed that in one sense, the experiment did fail… even with far less time online now, I'm not actually writing so much more than before. Why?

Some of the books I read about how to reduce my phone use soon led me into a series of other readings on productivity. I fantasized about mastering the chaos of my days, getting myself organized, and resolving all my ongoing writing projects more quickly.

Soon I had gotten a bullet journal, begun tracking my working hours with color coded scheduling software, and set up some useful rules around excess phone use and email checking.

Productivity books tend to encourage the atomizing of your day-to-day schedule (15 minutes of exercise, 10 minutes of meditation, 5 minutes of meal prep, 12 pages of reading, etc etc.) You develop useful habits, prioritize your work, maximize efficiency. OK. All this sounded good to me, if it meant I got to spend more time writing, and especially if I saw that writing improving.

But soon I noticed that the while I could get a lot done that way, I never got very absorbed in anything on the to-do list. It was great for checking off obligations, but I began to treat my writing the same way, as just one more bullet point on a list, equivalent to laundry and grocery shopping and lawn mowing.

Just like with everything else, I found I was barely present in the action.

One example: I had resolved to read a new short story every morning as I made my coffee. Eventually, I thought, I'd work through a my teetering pile of old New Yorkers and make all kinds of creative discoveries in the process.

But instead I ended up sort of hazily skimming the stories every morning, barely able to remember them an hour later. I tried reading out loud, reading twice… it didn't make much difference. My experience of the stories was mechanical, perfunctory. Shallow.

In any case, when it came to writing my own stuff, it went about the same way. Based on the productivity books I’d read I set a daily word count goal: 500 words a day, a target that comes up in numerous writing guides. It's what I tell my students to shoot for as well.

500 words a day, 5 days a week gets you to 80,000 words in 32 weeks, or about 8 months. Writing a (short) novel turns magically into a neat little math problem.

Well. The good news is that it turns out I can rattle off 500 words in around a half hour. On busy days I could even get it done in two 15 minute sessions, by hand in my notebook, or in my phone notes on a lunch break. Once I dictated my 500 words via voice-to-text in the car during my commute. It was so easy I barely had to think about it. And that, of course, was the problem.

You can see the appeal of this approach. It's a low lift, easy to recommend to anyone with a typical, busy life who dreams of cranking out a book without making a ton of sacrifices in your family, career, or friends. And why not? (Even experienced, successful authors are told not to quit their day jobs now.) I'm a writer who is always looking for ways to write well without turning into a grumpy homunculus whose friends and family want to toss him out the window for being unreliable, neurotic, and obsessive. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, etc etc.

But writing in these short bursts, at least for me, meant a kind of detachment from the heart of my work-in-progress. The images were vague, sentences sloppy, plots messy… if not today incoherent. Surely those things could be fixed in revision, I would tell myself, clocking out at the 500th word. At least I was getting something on the page.

But even when I went back and reorganized and revised, this just revealed a larger problem. After a while I could make the writing pretty good, but the book was all just… shallow. Just as I had sleepread those New Yorker stories in the mornings, I had found myself sleepwriting. The half hour a day was barely engaging half my brain, creating stuff that wasn't alive or exciting at all. Creating it just to have created something.

Allegedly Truman Capote once said, of Jack Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness style, “That's not writing, that's typing.” Perhaps its not a fair charge against On The Road (which despite Kerouac's pretence, he actually revised many times). But it was about right for what I was getting done in that period.

Working slowly and steadily, I quickly lost interest in the stuff I was assembling… if I ever had much to begin with. Usually there's a lot of fun and wide-ranging exploration in the midst of a new project. Zadie Smith calls this “Middle-of-the-Novel Magical Thinking” in her essay “That Crafty Feeling.”

“The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses. You sit down to write at 9 A.M, you blink, the evening news is on and four thousand words are written, more words than you wrote in three long months a year ago. Something has changed; And it's not restricted to the house. You go outside. Everything, I mean, everything flows freely into your novel. Someone on the bus says something—it's straight out of your novel. You pick up the paper—every single story in the paper is directly relevant to your novel…”

It’s a great feeling, elusive, and hard-earned. When it comes, you feel purposeful, brilliant, powerful… it gives you the elusive confidence you need in order to believe that your book is really meant to be. And it’s so exhilarating that just the anticipation can get a writer through months of blockage and slowness.

But you can’t get there overnight and you can’t stay there with only quick-hit sessions.

Instead of moving through a full, lush landscape, I was hopping from one indistinct island to the next in a long dreary chain. The words were coming, and at the pace I had set for myself. But the whole thing felt bored and disjointed. So I stepped away from the wreckage and tried to think what else to try. There had to be something between being too programmatic and totally chaotic.

Eventually, I read two books by Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism, which had been a help in the phone breakup.

These later books were called Deep Work and Slow Productivity, and in both he talked more specifically about the sort of work I was trying to do.

Suddenly I saw that the productivity books I'd been reading before were surely helpful for those dealing with some jobs, just not mine. I wasn't processing mail orders or responding to IT tickets. I was trying to create, well, art. It felt silly and effete to think of my writing as being inherently different from other kinds of work, but I soon saw how, exactly, it was.

Newport, in his later books, observes how his own strategies had to change from writing short columns to now, writing long books. Streamlining emails and meetings might free up a few hours during the week, but to accomplish the “deep work” of a longer and more complicated project, he had to carve out larger blocks of uninterrupted hours, every day, in order to allow fuller immersion and an arrival at deeper ideas.

As he put it, writing a weekly newsletter was a task that was totally manageable within a range of a few focused hours. He could produce a few thousand words of decent quality because the purpose was direct; he had a simple thesis and he set out to illustrate it and back it up with evidence. There was a kind of comfortable formula to it. But that’s not going to cut it with something bigger.

Because writing a book, he soon realized, did not just mean writing a bunch of short columns, multiplied out over several months. Because a column only needs to share one or two ideas at a time. A book has to synthesize the ideas of many different chapters, plus it has to deliver something much bigger in the process.

A reader expects you to arrive at something deeper. (Otherwise they’ll just read the columns.) So this requires more organization, research, and longer time spent in thought. Writing a book means being undistracted for greater periods of time, sustaining a creative “flow.” This is what Zadie Smith was talking about in her essay.

OK, fine. So how does someone get that much time and focus at their disposal in the modern age?

One key seems to be focusing on time commitment instead of word count. Because sometimes you are better served by writing 100 great words in a half hour instead of 500 fine ones. Committing to time, not volume, should help with quality, over quantity.

But is a half hour going to cut it? Can you get “deep” in that little time? Unfortunately it doesn't seem that you can, according to Newport. My experience so far bears the same out.

Even setting aside an hour a day doesn't really get you there. You need blocks of at least two hours, Newport argues, possibly three. Ideally you need something much bigger, more like a sabbatical, or a long retreat. He tells a story about a professor who doubled up his teaching load in the Fall to do five classes in one semester and then have the Spring totally free. Instead of writing at a crawl all year, the guy wrote nothing for the first semester and then tons in the second. The result was deeper, more focused work. Even if the page total ended up exactly the same, the quality in the split schedule ended up being much higher.

Sadly I don't think my institution would let me do this, and it would be far more impossible for most people in non-academic life. Some writers do live this way, working part-time and gig jobs until they have enough saved to not work for a while as they write. But from what I’ve seen, it’s a very very hard way to operate, and usually one that backfires without a lot of very careful planning.

And even when I have several months when I'm not teaching (like right now, in the summer) there's still a daily flow of “interruptions” anyway. It's the leaking bathroom, the check engine light, the friend in crisis, the sudden interview request, the PTA orchestra concert, the neighbor who needs a ride to the train. Every day comes with potential derailments, and that's not even counting the various BREAKING NEWS alerts. And then all the ordinary things? There’s grocery shopping, meal prep, the sink full of dishes, dog walking, lawn mowing, room cleaning…you get the idea. It makes you think you have to be a hermit to get anything done… in fact Newport gives more than a few examples of great thinkers who essentially ran off to the woods to work, abandoning their families and their responsibilities in the process.

Not happening.

Thankfully Newport's books describe various organizations in which all these things could be dealt with in blocks of time separate from blocks of time for deep work. After much study, he decides that a two or three hour block is ideal, so what about mornings for writing, and afternoons for everything else? Or double up on Mondays-Wednesdays, writing in two three-hour shifts. Then use Thursdays-Sundays for the rest. There are a few ways to go, depending on what might work best for you.

And these have been a bit more achievable for me at least. It's still rare to get two full, uninterrupted hours in, but when I can I do notice a depth to the work, and more excitement for me all around it. I’d still rather have five hours, or eight, but with two or three it is workable.

During this same stretch, I read a book by Oliver Burkeman called Four Thousand Weeks that shifted my thinking in another key way.

Burkeman explains that, mortal as we are, our lives consist of around 4000 weeks on Earth, give or take a few.

In taking this long view, he argues, we must reflect more meaningfully on what we're using that time for. Out of 52 weeks in a year, how many are spent doing the things we really want our lives, in the end, to have consisted of?

Rather than aim to jam as much productivity into those 4000 weeks as possible, Burkeman urges us to recognize that the more work that we get done, and the faster we do it, the more new work we will find to fill the time we freed up.

That is to say that the harder we work, the more work tends to come to us. If we respond to all hundred emails we get in a day, and bring our inbox to zero, then we've established that we are capable of that amount of work, and we'll get the same the next day, and the next.

If, on the other hand, we respond to the twenty most important emails and ignore the rest, we'll establish that as the baseline instead. Burkeman suggests that we ignore anything that seems optional. Don't go to an extra meeting, don't go to lunch to network, don't have drinks after work with a connection. Unless that's what we really want to be doing with that time. But if we're just working to work, or just pushing ourselves to push ourselves, as we tend to do out of habit, or fear, then we might want to reorder our priorities.

Because working harder doesn't mean we actually get to play harder. It usually just means we work harder and then later, we work harder again. Maybe we want a promotion, but does that mean more responsibility and more work?

Making more money is great, of course, but not if we don't have time to use it on the stuff we enjoy. Would a promotion and a 10% raise mean I could write more next year? Not really. Actually it might mean I wrote less, because of the new responsibilities it came attached to. It’s at least worth thinking about, he argues, instead of simply always doing whatever brings in the most income. Over and over he urges readers to take a real look at what they are doing with their time, and asking if it actually matters.

Interestingly, he also specifically talks about the work of writing books, but with this frame around it.

Are we really likely to write a book that changes the world, or that even impacts a significant number of people? Sadly the answer is no—it is likely that, these days, a few thousand people total will read your book (and that would be a pretty decent showing!). Chances are that even a pretty good book will have fairly few new readers within months of publication, and certainly in a year or two it'll be much fewer. Only a handful of books ever will have a lasting influence on a large number of readers, no matter how incredible they are.

This, obviously, is quite depressing.

But Burkeman presents it as liberating. If we can free ourselves of these unrealistic expectations around our writing, then we won't get so frustrated when the book we write doesn't win the Pulitzer or get picked for Oprah. We become free to simply write what we enjoy writing most. At least you will have written a book that's truly a free expression of you and your imagination.

Ironically (and awesomely) this, I find, is also what ends up making the best writing for others. Give me writing that's audacious, that makes me ask, “who told you that you could do that?” What's most marvelous to me is that someone else would risk all that, for little old me, a reader they've never met.

And, to Burkeman’s point, if that's not something we think is worth dedicating a hundred or so weeks, out of our four thousand? Then we should definitely do something else with that time instead.

Burkeman's book is a great reminder of the true time commitment that writing a book really takes, because as Newport stresses, it also won't be something we can bang out in a few hours a few days a weeks, few months.

And even if incremental writing is an important first step in the process, at some point we're all going to end up needing larger blocks of uninterrupted time to deepen what we started. It may mean rewriting whole sections again, or chucking things out entirely, or simply slowly and carefully ratcheting things tighter and tighter. This, I think, is where the initial fun of creation begins to feel like a whole lot of work, and I suspect it is where we lose a lot of would-be writers who decide it shouldn't be so hard.

Burkeman's perspective has been helpful to me in two more big ways. First it made me ask myself if, honestly, writing another novel was the best use of a hundred weeks of my remaining two thousand (if I'm lucky!). Especially when I face the reality that to do it properly will mean dedicating large blocks of time, and inconveniencing myself and others. It will mean saying “no” to students asking for more independent study work. It will mean saying “no” to colleagues asking me to serve on more committees. It won't be accomplished by just sitting down with the project for fifteen minutes twice a day.

Quitting social media was, partly, a matter of this same calculus. Would I trade an hour of writing for an hour of doomscrolling? No doubt.

But would I trade it for an hour walking with my son in the park, or reading with my daughter, or making dinner with my wife? Seeing friends? Just taking a long walk alone, even, or watching a great movie? It is not always such an easy trade.

So, I ask myself, is this particular novel idea really worth a twentieth of my total time left? If it isn’t, I know what else I’d like to be doing with that time.

Having to think about it in those terms is scary, but also a welcome glass of cold water to the face. Being able to really consider it and decide, “yes” is deeply affirming. And if it's a “no” then let it be a relief, that you have just avoided misspending so much of your life.

And some other, better idea may come, before long, which makes that feel cost worthwhile again, or even like a bargain.

But the second thing Burkeman's book did was cause me to reconsider things from the other side. When a reader picks up your book, they're spending something much more precious than their money. They're spending their time. Your book might cost them five hours, or five days, or five weeks of their time. What they want to know is if it will be worth it, in the end? Will that time have resulted in catharsis, inspiration, relief, joy, excitement, wonder? Will it channel their grief, or their rage? Will it shake them to the core? This is why we read. And it should be why we write, too. That's what the depth is for, and that's what the slowness allows.

Prizes are nice, and bestseller lists are great, and going on tours is fun… but knowing at the end of the day that you have given a reader something worth their precious time? That's what these trade-offs are really about in the end. What risks can I take with my time, to add something meaningful to yours? If I’m thinking about that each day when I sit down to write, whether it is for fifteen minutes or five hours, I know I won’t sleep through it. Because only something with depth, that takes real time, will be worth it.