Writing while sick

Note: I’m taking a break for the next few days, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite posts from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on February 17, 2015.

Over the weekend, I got sick. Really sick. I’ll spare you the details, mostly because I don’t know exactly what happened—although the fact that I’m sharing a house with a toddler who recently got over her own stomach bug probably had something to do with it. It’s enough to say that around one in the morning, lying wrapped in blankets on the living room couch, with sleep only a remote possibility, I’d already given up on the idea of doing any work the following day. But somehow, when it come down to it, I muddled my way through, with the aid of white toast, chicken soup, and Gatorade. I’m not saying that the pages I managed to write yesterday were any good; I haven’t reviewed them yet, but given the way I cranked them out, I have a hunch that they were pretty terrible. Still, they exist. They’ll give me something to revise and tinker with today and tomorrow. And the fact that I was able to get a decent amount of writing done while being constantly distracted by my own digestive system speaks both to the power of routine and to something more useful about working on a project when you’re at less than your best.

A few weeks ago, I quoted an essay by the ecologist Stephen Heard on the matter of revision. He has a lot of good thoughts on the subject—including the tip that you should use the number of characters, not words, as a guideline when revising for length—and in particular, he recommends going over a draft at a time of day when you’re thinking less clearly than usual. If you’re a morning person and read your manuscript at night, your natural fuzziness of thought serves as a corrective to the tendency to take your own ideas at face value:

This isn’t about trying to simulate stupid readers; rather, you are looking to counterbalance your overfamiliarity with what you meant to say with a bit of useful mental fog. If your draft is clear to you even when you’re not thinking your best, great—and if it’s not, you’ve found something to fix.

Working while sick has much of the same effect. It’s the reason why producers like Bill Moriarty like to mix records on “crap speakers,” which more closely replicates the experience of most listeners. If the result works under the worst possible conditions, it’ll do fine on high-end gear. Or, as Brian Eno says: “It’s the very naive producer who works only on optimum systems.”

A sick writer, then, becomes a kind of simulation of a distracted reader, and while I don’t exactly recommend seeking this out, it never hurts to take advantage of such circumstances when they present themselves. Yet there’s something even more profound at work here, and I can’t do any better than to quote Norman Mailer at length from his book Cannibals and Christians:

There’s a book came out a few years ago which was a sociological study of some Princeton men—I forget the name of it. One of them said something which I thought was extraordinary. He said he wanted to perform the sexual act under every variety of condition, emotion, and mood available to him. I was struck with this not because I ever wanted necessarily to have that kind of sexual life, but because it seemed to me that was what I was trying to do with my writing. I try to go over my work in every conceivable mood. I edit on a spectrum which runs from the high clear manic impressions of a drunk which has made one electrically alert all the way down to the soberest reaches of depression where I can hardly bear my own words. By the time I’m done with writing I care about I usually have worked on it through the full gamut of my consciousness. If you keep yourself in this peculiar kind of shape, the craft will take care of itself.

And there’s a very subtle point here that affects anyone who tries to write for a living. Occasionally, you’ll see a book that seems to have been written in a single white heat of inspiration, but more often, a novel or story is the product of extended labor over time, with all the highs and lows of capability this implies. This may seem like a liability, but really, it’s a strength: a work of art that reflects the full spectrum of its author’s experiences, good and bad, is likely to be richer and more full of life than one that the writer tackled only when he felt like it. (It’s worth noting, though, that even Mailer had his limits when it came to what kinds of mental states were acceptable for serious writing. Elsewhere, he says: “Amateurs write when they are drunk. For a serious writer to do that is equivalent to a professional football player throwing imaginary passes in traffic when he is bombed, and smashing his body into parked cars on the mistaken impression that he is taking out the linebacker. Such a professional football player will feel like crying in the morning when he discovers his ribs are broken.”) A few great writers, like Proust, seem to have written only when they were sick. And although we don’t need to take it that far, it’s worth remembering that if a novel is like a marriage, we need to learn how to live with it for better and for worse, for richer or poorer—and in sickness and in health.

The thumbnail rule

In his charming book Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design, the legendary cover designer Chip Kidd writes: “Here is a very cool, simple design trick: If a piece of visual information looks interesting when it is small, then it will look even more so when you make it big.” More recently, in an interview with the Longform podcast, he expanded on the origins of this insight:

Even when I was in school, pre-computer, there’s a reason that thumbnail sketches are called thumbnail sketches—because they are small, and they are distillations, and they are supposed to be a simplification of the idea that you have. So that hasn’t changed. Most graphic designers that I know sketch stuff out small…I’ve been mindful of how this stuff looks like as a postage stamp pretty much from the beginning, and part of that was also because—probably before you were born—there was something called the Book of the Month Club. And the Book of the Month Club used to buy a group ad on the back page of The New York Times Book Review every week, where they showed as many of these goddamned books—all, you know, current bestsellers—at postage stamp or sub-postage stamp size. And so it wasn’t like I was ever told to design with that in mind, but it was always interesting to see how one of my designs would be reconfigured for this ad. And sometimes it would change it and take away some of the detail, or sometimes they would keep it.

As a general design rule—if it looks good small, it’ll look good big—this isn’t so different from the principle of writing music for crappy speakers, as memorably expressed by the record producer Bill Moriarty:

All that low end in the guitar? It’s useless in the small speakers. It’s just taking up frequencies the bass or drums or organs or tenor instruments can occupy. You have to be ruthless in cutting away useless frequencies so the record is loud and jumps out of all speakers. Make the record sound outstanding on little crap speakers since that’s where most people will hear it. I’ve found when I do this it still sounds great on the fancy speakers.

A reduction in scale, in other words, is a kind of editing strategy: by forcing you to remove everything that doesn’t read at a smaller size or at a lower resolution, you’re compelled to simplify and streamline. It also allows you to see patterns, good or bad, that might not be obvious otherwise. This is why I often do what I call a visual edit on my work, reducing each page to a size that is almost too small to read comfortably as I scroll quickly through the manuscript: sections or paragraphs that seem out of tune with the overall rhythms of the story jump out, and I’ll often see things to cut that wouldn’t have struck me if I’d been reading as I normally would.

Navigating changes in scale is central to what artists do, particularly in fields in which the intended user could potentially experience the work in any number of ways. It’s why smart theater directors try to watch a play from every section of a theater, and why film editors need to be particularly sensitive to the different formats in which a movie might be viewed. As Charles Koppelman describes the editor Walter Murch’s process in Behind the Seen:

The “little people” are another one of Walter’s handmade edit room tools. These are paper cutouts in the shapes of a man and a woman that he affixes to each side of his large screening monitor. They are his way of dealing with the problem of scale.

As an editor, Murch must remember that images in the edit room are only 1/240 the square footage of what the audience will eventually see on a thirty-foot-wide screen…It’s still easy to forget the size of a projected film, which can trick an editor into pacing a film too quickly, or using too many close-ups—styles more akin to television. The eye rapidly apprehends the relatively small, low-detail images on a TV. Large-scale faces help hold the attention of the audience sitting in a living room with lots of distractions or ambient light. But in movies, images are larger than life and more detailed, so the opposite is true. The eye needs time to peruse the movie screen and take it all in.

And such considerations are far from theoretical. A director like Tom Hooper, for example, who got his start in television, seems to think exclusively in terms of composition for a video monitor, which can make movies like The King’s Speech unnecessarily alienating when seen in theaters. I actually enjoyed his version of Les Misérables, but that’s probably because I saw it at home: on the big screen, all those characters bellowing their songs directly into the camera lens might have been unbearable. (At the opposite end of the spectrum, Quentin Tarantino, a much more thoughtful director, will be releasing two different versions of The Hateful Eight, one optimized for massive screens, the other for multiplexes and home viewing. As Variety writes: “The sequences in question play in ‘big, long, cool, unblinking takes’ in the 70mm version, Tarantino said. ‘It was awesome in the bigness of 70, but sitting on your couch, maybe it’s not so awesome. So I cut it up a little bit. It’s a little less precious about itself.'”) And we’ve all had to endure movies in which the sound seems to have been mixed with total indifference to how it would sound on a home theater system, with all the dialogue drowned out by muddy ambient noise. We can’t always control how viewers or audiences will experience what we do, but we can at least keep the lower end in mind, which has a way of clarifying how the work will play under the best possible circumstances. An artist has to think about scale all the time, and when in doubt, it’s often best to approach the work as if it’s a thumbnail of itself, while still retaining all the information of the whole. At least as a rule of thumb.

Writing while sick

Over the weekend, I got sick. Really sick. I’ll spare you the details, mostly because I don’t know exactly what happened—although the fact that I’m sharing a house with a toddler who recently got over her own stomach bug probably had something to do with it. It’s enough to say that around one in the morning, lying wrapped in blankets on the living room couch, with sleep only a remote possibility, I’d already given up on the idea of doing any work the following day. But somehow, when it come down to it, I muddled my way through, with the aid of white toast, chicken soup, and Gatorade. I’m not saying that the pages I managed to write yesterday were any good; I haven’t reviewed them yet, but given the way I cranked them out, I have a hunch that they were pretty terrible. Still, they exist. They’ll give me something to revise and tinker with today and tomorrow. And the fact that I was able to get a decent amount of writing done while being constantly distracted by my own digestive system speaks both to the power of routine and to something more useful about working on a project when you’re at less than your best.

A few weeks ago, I quoted an essay by the ecologist Stephen Heard on the matter of revision. He has a lot of good thoughts on the subject—including the tip that you should use the number of characters, not words, as a guideline when revising for length—and in particular, he recommends going over a draft at a time of day when you’re thinking less clearly than usual. If you’re a morning person and read your manuscript at night, your natural fuzziness of thought serves as a corrective to the tendency to take your own ideas at face value:

This isn’t about trying to simulate stupid readers; rather, you are looking to counterbalance your overfamiliarity with what you meant to say with a bit of useful mental fog. If your draft is clear to you even when you’re not thinking your best, great—and if it’s not, you’ve found something to fix.

Working while sick has much of the same effect. It’s the reason why producers like Bill Moriarty like to mix records on “crap speakers,” which more closely replicates the experience of most listeners. If the result works under the worst possible conditions, it’ll do fine on high-end gear. Or, as Brian Eno says: “It’s the very naive producer who works only on optimum systems.”

A sick writer, then, becomes a kind of simulation of a distracted reader, and while I don’t exactly recommend seeking this out, it never hurts to take advantage of such circumstances when they present themselves. Yet there’s something even more profound at work here, and I can’t do any better than to quote Norman Mailer at length from his book Cannibals and Christians:

There’s a book came out a few years ago which was a sociological study of some Princeton men—I forget the name of it. One of them said something which I thought was extraordinary. He said he wanted to perform the sexual act under every variety of condition, emotion, and mood available to him. I was struck with this not because I ever wanted necessarily to have that kind of sexual life, but because it seemed to me that was what I was trying to do with my writing. I try to go over my work in every conceivable mood. I edit on a spectrum which runs from the high clear manic impressions of a drunk which has made one electrically alert all the way down to the soberest reaches of depression where I can hardly bear my own words. By the time I’m done with writing I care about I usually have worked on it through the full gamut of my consciousness. If you keep yourself in this peculiar kind of shape, the craft will take care of itself.

And there’s a very subtle point here that affects anyone who tries to write for a living. Occasionally, you’ll see a book that seems to have been written in a single white heat of inspiration, but more often, a novel or story is the product of extended labor over time, with all the highs and lows of capability this implies. This may seem like a liability, but really, it’s a strength: a work of art that reflects the full spectrum of its author’s experiences, good and bad, is likely to be richer and more full of life than one that the writer tackled only when he felt like it. (It’s worth noting, though, that even Mailer had his limits when it came to what kinds of mental states were acceptable for serious writing. Elsewhere, he says: “Amateurs write when they are drunk. For a serious writer to do that is equivalent to a professional football player throwing imaginary passes in traffic when he is bombed, and smashing his body into parked cars on the mistaken impression that he is taking out the linebacker. Such a professional football player will feel like crying in the morning when he discovers his ribs are broken.”) A few great writers, like Proust, seem to have written only when they were sick. And although we don’t need to take it that far, it’s worth remembering that if a novel is like a marriage, we need to learn how to live with it for better and for worse, for richer or poorer—and in sickness and in health.

Music for crappy speakers

It’s the very naive producer who works only on optimum systems.
—Brian Eno

There’s a moment in Once, one of my favorite movies of recent years, in which the leads, played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, stuff themselves into their recording engineer’s tiny car so they can hear how their freshly mixed debut album sounds on the worst speakers imaginable. It’s a cute scene, and it contains a germ of good advice. A while back, the record producer Bill Moriarty made a case on his blog for mixing records on “crap speakers,” rather than high-end studio monitors, to more closely replicate the experience of a listener playing the album at home. The original post seems to have disappeared, but a long quote is available here, including my favorite part:

All that low end in the guitar? It’s useless in the small speakers. It’s just taking up frequencies the bass or drums or organs or tenor instruments can occupy. You have to be ruthless in cutting away useless frequencies so the record is loud and jumps out of all speakers. Make the record sound outstanding on little crap speakers since that’s where most people will hear it. I’ve found when I do this it still sounds great on the fancy speakers.

At first, this advice may not seem to be applicable to writers, since the words on the page don’t change from one format to another. Like me, you may prefer that readers experience your book on the physical page, rather than on Kindle or squeezed onto a tiny cell phone screen, but there’s no real loss of information. But if there’s an equivalent for the speaker—which turns an electrical audio signal into sound—in the reading process, it’s the reader’s brain, which transforms words into actions and images. And even if you ignore the natural variations between readers, there’s no question that people are going to be encountering your story in many different states of mind. Some will be reading it closely and attentively, although this may only be your copy editor; others will be looking at it critically, with an eye for flaws; many will be distracted, tired, or simply looking for escape; and nearly all will be giving it something less than their full attention, both because there are so many other available distractions and because close attention is something a book earns.

This only means you need to be mindful of how your book will read under less than perfect circumstances. Many novels, including mine, are designed to be read straight through, which is something you rarely, if ever, get in practice: readers pick books up and put them down, often in the middle of a chapter or sequence you’ve carefully constructed to read as a whole, and days or weeks may pass between one page and the next. And just because you’ve introduced a key plot point on page 50 doesn’t mean the reader will remember anything about it when it reappears on page 200. In particular, I’ve learned from hard experience to keep the characters as clear as possible. If a novel has a large cast, I try to give each character a distinctive name, often beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, and I’ll unobtrusively drop in a reminder of who this person is whenever he or she has spent a long time offstage. Not every writer follows this rule—George R.R. Martin, for one, takes pride in trampling on it—but I see it as a small courtesy for a reader who may not be reading the story with as much attentiveness as I’d like.

But this doesn’t mean that every novel should be pitched at the level of a reader who is glancing at the book between sips of sangria at the beach, any more than an album designed to play well enough on a squeakbox from Radio Shack can’t also sound great on the top of the line from Bose. It’s more about optimizing the frequencies that all readers will hear. The best books—like the best stories of every kind—work on more than one level at once: ideally, there’s a thread of story that will draw in even the most distractible reader while deeper registers of meaning are available for those who want to discover them. Nabokov constructs Lolita like a thriller; Jonathan Franzen knows that his novels have to compete with multiple other forms of distraction, and he structures them accordingly; and Shakespeare, above all others, understood the value of plot and suspense as a vehicle for the most agonized intellectual explorations. For those with the patience to hear them, the subtler frequencies are there, but even on the most distracted of mental speakers, the underlying music ought to come through.