Welcome to my newsletter. If you haven’t already, Subscribe Now for regular essays and stories about travel and what it does to us
I began writing this post as a comment on Vita Benes’ blog post called Not Pieces, Masterpieces. Needless to say, my own response ended up being longer than a comment allowed, or even a twitter thread, and so I’ve ended up writing a fully-fledged post of my own. It’s partly a response to Vita’s critique of the class of online writer who spends more time writing about writing about writing, or giving pseudo-guru self-help advice, or just posting little fragments of clever sounding ideas as bite-sized social media posts, all with the aim of growing an audience, the ulterior motive of course, if you’re in any way familiar with this world, is to sell you something.
As far as things I’ve recently read go, this one set off resonant thought after resonant thought and got me thinking about my own trajectory as a writer, and the format in which I’ve chosen to write and release my writing over the last few years. This includes both the medium of the writing (i.e. blog posts of one-to-several thousand words, which have generally been posted on my blog or, more recently, this newsletter, which is like a blog but the posts are sent directly to subscribers’ inboxes upon release.
I’ve also used a variety of social media (Twitter and Instagram mostly) to promote these writings, sometimes directly through republishing of content, sometimes just through posting whatever else comes to mind and trying to direct people to the pieces that matter – longer form essays and short stories. These pieces are what matter, the other stuff is just bait to hook the audience, which isn’t to say these pieces of bait can’t be worthy snippets of art in themselves, not to mention being fun to create.
The more I wrote the more this became a self-centred thinking-aloud piece, as Vita’s piece made me reflect on my own approach to writing, blogging and newsletter-ing, and although I’ve engaged in plenty of social media posting over the past few years, I don’t think his post really applies to me. The core critique of writing pieces and posting them online rather than focusing on writing a cohesive ‘masterpiece’ did make me think about my own approach to writing and self-publishing. Do follow the link above to read the original, it’s an excellent piece and an inspiring one, and does provide some context to the life of an internet writer, and some of the distractions and artistic dilemmas one faces in trying to promote your work online.
Read Vita’s piece here:
Not Pieces, Masterpieces – by Vita Benes
My Own Path
I’ve often wondered if I’d be better off sitting down and writing the books I’m writing in one sitting, or one concentrated period of effort over several weeks or months. I’ve tried this once before, but it hasn’t worked for me. Maybe I’m too set in my blogging ways. Of course, when I started my blog a few years ago (www.gavisgone.com) I had vague notions of being a content providing travel blogger, of being able to monetise my travels in some way like I’d read about from so many other full-time travel bloggers, but alas, any time I sat down to write something I was unable to produce anything other than art. And I’m all the happier for it. This is how my ‘travel blogging’ career has gone, turning me into the storyteller that I probably should have admitted from the start that I always wanted to be. And so the medium for all my output has always been the blog, not the short soundbite or the tweet (though I do like format of Instagram for shorter posts, it’s a bit more fun and I enjoy the photo element).
Since I’ve been writing for the purpose of others to read, I’ve always posted things to my own blog (or more recently, blog-esque newsletter; same same but different). I like the format, I like the length. It has to be at least a certain length – more than the length of a tweet (280 characters, or 40-70 words, multiplied by a few if you make a thread) or Instagram post (2,200 characters, which is about 400 words give or take) – but I’ve often been conscious that my pieces are running a bit too long (every writer writes too much, and needs to practice editing more).
A thousand words or a few thousand is a good length, short but long enough to go deep enough into a topic to get a good analysis of it, or better to build enough emotional tension in a story that there can be a payoff for the reader.
A blog post could hypothetically be any length, but in practice it’s about the same length as a short story or a newspaper article, which could also hypothetically be any length, but in practice have the number of words I mentioned above.
The whole project began as a collection of assorted essays and stories, writing about whatever took my attention next. The vague themes were ‘travel’ (because I happened to be in Asia when I started it) and ‘wellbeing’ (because I was interested in psychology and exercise) – topics so vague that they basically encompass the entirety of existence. The blog remained a blog, nothing more than the sum of its parts. With time though there’s been a clear thread of ideas forming by working in this way – sitting with one topic or story and working on it enough that it’s up to a publishable standard, one piece at a time (though after several years I do of course have a couple of thousand saved documents with ideas or unfinished fragments and sentences and paragraphs, sometimes just titles, sitting in my “Writing” folder on my computer).
I’ve always tried to put some sort of aim or structure on where I’m going with the pieces I write, individually and as a whole. Naturally, to begin with finding coherence was virtually impossible, given my stated topics. In practice then you must be able to seize on ideas as they arise, and they do arise, such is the nature of writing it is the thing that reveals the path ahead of you as you walk it. The farther I went, the more it began to gather into a clearer a more whole artistic vision.
The more I’ve gone on, the more certain I am that this format is working for me, making pieces that will ultimately fit into a masterpiece. I absolutely agree with Vita’s point that it’s unlikely we’ll find these in fragmented tweets and social media posts, particularly when they’re written for ulterior purposes (i.e. self-promotion).
As I’ve said, no matter how much I’ve tried to act on these ulterior purposes in my writing, it has never worked for me. One could look at it objectively that I am a pathetic businessman, or that God won’t allow me to waste my talents on such frivolous pursuits as copywriting, content production or clout-chasing and self-aggrandising social media posting (though I believe there’s no shame in self-aggrandising if it’s for the right reasons).
Part of the reason I’ve enjoyed writing blogs is my attention span isn’t long enough to continue any further (My attention span is as bad as anyone’s, just in case you thought I was above distraction and time-wasting on social media).
At times I look at the fragments of my blog and newsletter and wonder where it’s all going, if I’m not digressing by writing about this and that, if I should not be focusing on getting each iteration of the greater vision, rather than worrying about putting the parts of them out one at a time.
And then another I’ll be writing out a story that’s been bubbling around in my head for a year, or two, and will find myself writing out a line of the story that’s exactly the same as a conversation I had the week before, or seemingly new idea, and you realise that what you’re working on over a period of years are not the masterpieces you thought they were, that this is in itself just another piece inside the greater masterpiece that is your life.
Everything is just a piece of a greater piece. Your job is not simply to get out of your own way long enough to see the pieces clearly, then act on them. Getting out of your own way involves standing back for long enough so that you can see the right pieces all at once; like drawing on a bow you only get so long before you’re snapped back into life and are unable to see the whole clearly again. The more you mature as a writer, the longer the length of time you get to draw back on the string before you’re forced to fire yourself back in again.
Used correctly there are so many positives to sharing ongoing work online. Part of the reward of social media is this interactivity. You want to build relationships with your readers, not just an audience, and the various online platforms are perfect for doing this. Comments, likes, shares and later forums and servers. You get to share your work with your readers, and they get to see you not just work in progress, but your growth as a writer. Readers feel a part of something, and there’s a growing sense between both writer and reader that this is all going somewhere. I’ve never felt that a newspaper columnist is going anywhere with their weekly narratives, though I see it all the time with writers and artists in various online spaces, and I hope this is happening here too. I know it is.
Slowly but surely.
If you’re enjoying reading this, then why not share it? The more readers the better
The Window of Inspiration
The window of inspiration is limited. With enough time spent working on your craft everyone begins to recognise this. Those titles and paragraphs Saved As are mostly ideas, great at the time but which don’t make sense when revisited 6 or 12 months down the line, sometimes just a week later you wonder what you were thinking. There’s an urge you must act on, because if you miss it, it’s gone. There’s some sort of relationship between the writer, the idea and the wider zeitgeist or collective consciousness. When the three are no longer aligned it’s not as good. If you act on it at the right time, you strike gold. Everyone benefits, reader included.
My fear with writing in individual posts and iterative pieces of the whole is that I may spend too much time on the pieces, and the moment of inspiration for the masterpiece may pass. The vision is right there, and has been formed for some time. There’s a strange phenomenon where even if I were to then act and write the whole book, word for word as it was always intended, the time would be gone. It wouldn’t be as good any more. It would be irrelevant to the world, and to me. And what a tragedy that would be.
The thought sometimes puts me into a panic that I must finish what I know is ready right now, post-haste. Though every week I put a new part of the whole out I am reassured that this is the right way to work. It’s the only way I know how. Not every post is part of the whole anyway. Though I’m no longer worried I’m diverging or going off track with certain pieces (like this one, for example). Because when you step back from the vision of one masterpiece, you see that everything is part of an even greater whole.
A danger with trying to follow those who’ve gone before you too closely to try and imitate their success, in aping the morning routines of either twitter gurus or Dostoevsky, is that you cannot hijack someone else’s life path, whether they’re a small-town rival or one of the greatest who ever lived.
Time is a variable that is never accounted for in ‘How to be a writer’ guides, or any guide. Sometimes you just need to keep working in vain until your time has come and your work is ready for your to complete it. There’s also a life to be lived in order to uncover those connections – as Vita refers to Chuck Palahniuk’s process, ‘writing’ is all the stuff you do in life before you sit down to ‘keyboard’ what you’ve uncovered.
You can make the process a lot smoother and more aligned by working diligently on your craft, and as joyfully as possible, chipping away at your masterpiece, piece by piece. ‘Time’ in this case also means work, a rather Christian idea.
The further I continue in this fashion, too, the more I’m convinced that the release of each piece comes at just the right time for the reader, too. It gives you time to think about each one, perhaps time to form some ideas about where I’m going. And I hope to challenge those ideas piece by piece, in a way that would be too rushed if the whole were delivered in one sitting.
Don’t forget to subscribe. The support means a lot, and it’s entirely free
Piecing Together the Masterpiece
I’d often sit down and take stock of what I want to write about for my next few posts, over the coming weeks and months. It’s uncanny sometimes to see things you planned for at the start of the year, before getting completely side-tracked a short while later, reveal themselves in things you’ve written, just in a totally different way some months later. It makes you realise that the conscious plan is only part of it, the unconscious plan is much more dominant and important. This is what leads you to the masterpiece.
The unconscious plan is followed by writing and working with authenticity, and it comes together piece by piece. Not in writing what you think you ‘should’. “Do that which is meaningful, not that which is expedient” as a famous contemporary Canadian psychologist would say.
There are moments then which remind me that working piece by piece with authenticity is the right thing to do, and that this is how my plan is meant to come together.
If you were following my adventures on the Camino (the journey being retold piece by piece, of course) you’ll recall that one of the dominant themes of the journey is that of creation and destruction; the symbolic acting out in real life of the fundamental forces of the universe: chaos and order, rationality and intuition, life and death. Our lives are an eternal cycle of spiritual death and rebirth, of chaos and order, of destruction and reconstruction.
I started writing in part about travel, but also partly as a blogger about psychology. My journey of self-discovery has led me from formal education to travelling explorer of the self, through writing (and crucially, regularly publishing) as much as the adventures themselves.
Just this week I was reminded of something on the topic of creation and destruction, something I wrote over three years ago. In fact, it was the very first thing I ever posted on my blog, while I was still living in Vietnam, before I’d even formally launched it as gavisgone.com (an occasion which itself was several months before I ever shared it with another living soul). A throwaway piece, it was the first time I’d sat and typed a few hundred words before editing it into something publishable (you’ll see why I’ve never made any money from writing, it’s little more than a snapshot of where I was sitting in my room in Ba Dinh at the time). It’s about the eternal (interminable) cycle of construction that goes in the rapidly-developing city
The title?
“Construction and destruction in Hanoi”.
When I see where the pieces have led like this, I’ve no doubt the masterpiece will come.
If any of this resonated with you, then do please leave a comment. I respond to all feedback
Thank you for the post. It's the kind of reflection I hope to inspire.
A couple immediate thoughts:
1. Overall, I think if the choice is between producing pieces or nothing, then it's clear.
2. Creating self-contained stories or essays is also crucial to honing our abilities.
3. My argument is aspirational, even (or perhaps mainly) for myself. I made it to make people look beyond each piece and see if there are connections to be made, themes to be discovered, and links to be forged. There may or may not be, but the act of looking for them is what counts, if there are any links to ever be discovered in the present or the future.
4. Our lives may well be the ultimate masterpieces, as our minds are the only thing linking all of our experiences together.