Just Start: The Work-Or-Nothing Rule
Hey team,
A rule I’ve tried to stick to in the past is that it’s better to do something than nothing: to get things on paper so you can edit them, or to write a sentence a day rather than nothing at all.
Raymond Chandler, one of the Mount Rushmore of hardboiled detective fiction, had a different rule. In a collection of his letters, he explains:
'I’m always seeing pieces by writers about how they don’t ever wait for inspiration; they just sit down at their little desks every morning at eight, rain or shine, hangover and broken arm and all, and bang out their little stint…I offer them my admiration and take care to avoid their books.’
Chandler got a fair amount done, though: he didn’t start seriously writing detective fiction until his forties, but then wrote a couple of dozen short stories, seven novels and a handful of screenplays, including two that were nominated for Academy awards. So how did he do it?
‘The important thing,’ he explains, ‘Is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything else but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored.’
Fantastic advice, I’m sure you’ll agree. There’s just one problem, of course: in Chandler’s day it was (fairly) easy to avoid distraction: you wrote on a typewriter, and the only thing you could do on your phone was call people. Now, it’s pretty likely that whatever device you’re writing - or creating anything else - on can connect you with limitless amounts of distraction. Just writing that last line, I thought about a Bo Burnham song about this exact thing, and it took more willpower than it should have to not immediately look it up. So how can you set aside those glass-flat slabs of time where there’s nothing to do but create? Here are some things I’ve tried:
Walk without your phone. This is actually great, and one of the best ways for me to come up with ideas. It works better on boring routes, when there’s nothing for my brain to process except its own internal stuff. Not great for writing, though.
Use apps to block the internet. Tried this, doesn’t work for me. I’ll find a way around it, like a rat climbing the walls of a labyrinth to get a hit of neat, sweet cheese.
Work in a notebook. Strong recommend, especially if you put all your devices in a room that isn’t easy to get to.
Work in a Faraday cage. There’s a bar in my town that somehow has absolutely no internet: no wifi, no 4g, no way to connect. Sometimes I go there just to edit, and it works great.
Willpower. LOL.
Here’s Chandler to wrap it up:
‘Two very simple rules: A. You don’t have to write. B. You can’t do anything else.’
Have a great weekend!
Joel x
Stuff I’ve done
📝 Article - ‘I guess I’m never going to see you again’: how I learned to appreciate last moments
Something I’ve been thinking about for a while is that life is full of last moments: not just the big ones that you notice, but the small ones that slip by every day. I wrote this column about it for the Guardian, and it seemed to really resonate: lots of people found me on Twitter to mention it, and I ended up talking about it on the radio. It also has the nicest, kindest comment section I’ve ever seen, full of hundreds of people sharing their own last moments — worth a read in itself if you’ve got the time.
🎥 Video - Why I'm Not Doing A Piano Progress Video This Year
For the last three years I’ve done a piano progress video each year, documenting how I’m doing and the pieces I’m focusing on. This year, I’m not doing one. This video tries to explain why, but also gives some (hopefully!) helpful advice about goal setting and practice across a bunch of different areas.
Stuff I like
📖 Book - Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health
I spoke to the Russell Foster, the author of this book, who’s a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University, for a feature I wrote this year, and he was just a lovely, fascinating man, who very generously took the time to make sure I understood the current science on chronotypes, blue light, and tiredness.
And so probably not surprisingly, this is a fascinating read, written by a guy who’s really on top of his subject matter and wants to explain it as well as he can. It’s basically a look at the current science on the idea of the body clock, and how things like the time we eat and even the time we take medication can drastically affect our health outcomes. Easy read, too: strong recommend.
🪶 Quote of the week
“Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.”
Oscar Wilde
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