Bum on Seat

Wanting what I Want to Want.

I went down a Chris Williamson rabbit hole last week, and listened to quite a few of his quite long podcasts. I love Chris Williamson because he has enviable communication skills and almost perfect recall. Like he can be in conversation with someone and randomly conjure an obscure quote perfectly, together with its originator, and usually the book in which it appeared, on the fly, faultlessly. HEAVEN. He reminds me of a young Bamber Gascoigne. Bamber was my neighbour as a child, and he also had this magical skill…remembering amazing facts during a conversation, like they were just right there in front of him, and then he would often invite me in, to show me the book (because of course he knew which bookshelf it was on as well). I remember one summer he got stung by a bee, and he managed to pull the sting out of his skin and mount it under a microscope for everyone to marvel at. I loved him, and I miss him a lot.

Anyway, Chris Williamson is an extremely successful podcaster (and rightfully so) and I think his audience is predominantly young men, and that’s heartening, because I think things are tough for young men in this world right now, and this guy is an intellectual and a polymath, who is asking the question of what it is to be a good man in a world where our brains are literally bombarded with messaging about what we should want and what we should be. Yes, there’s more than a smattering of bro science and stoicism, but there’s nowt wrong with that imho.

He mentioned an essay by a guy called Kyle Eschenroeder called ‘What do you Want to Want’, and I read it thinking constantly about how little time we spend working out which hill we actually want to climb, versus the time spent climbing multiple, random hills, just because it’s sort of important to look busy. He makes several suggestions to help people who want to WANT to do certain things, but the one that stuck with me is to surround yourself with others who want the same thing…thus normalising doing the thing you find hard, and effectively making yourself the odd one out if you don’t make a habit of doing it. Crossfit if you wanted to WANT to exercise, would be a good example of this idea.

I want to WANT to be creative…actively, uncomfortably creative rather than just chugging away at the things I know I can do. So I joined a Fabled Thread Challenge, (embroidery joy) and this week we’ve been drawing animals.

Anti-clockwise from top left Lions, found in a squiggle, continuous line, blindfolded, filling in the negative space and left-handed

First we filled in a random squiggle with a lion, then we copied an image using a single line, not allowing the pen to leave the paper, and then we did the same thing, but blindfolded, and then we took that same image and drew it again with our non-dominant hand and then (and this is key) we all post our drawings to a community board, where we can see the results of everybody else’s efforts. There are lots of us, all doing this odd thing, which is now a normal thing, because we are all doing it. Simple. Effective.

I want to WANT to write fiction too, and I am slowly (very slowly) starting to do that, (literally a measly paragraph every day) although I feel like I could probably benefit from the same kind of group kindling to get that fire going a little brighter. My instinct is to use the same method for writing stories as we did with drawing above; to aim, in a sense, to write ‘badly’, and just get over it, and be un-embarrassed and curious about it, and let it happen, rather than dread doing it every day with the knowledge that I could never execute like the writers I actually admire.

Did you read the wonderful The Other Side of Paradise by Vanessa Beaumont? God it was good. This was her first novel and I asked her how on earth she managed to do it, with young children and life and everything, and she just said ‘bum on seat’ (and she wrote that down for me in the book so I wouldn’t forget).

But bum on seat is only a part of the piece… I am quite practiced at discipline... Sitting down to write and then bashing something out (yes, even when I don’t feel like it) is really not that hard to do. But WANTING to do something you don’t necessarily look forward to, precisely BECAUSE it is challenging…that would be so much better and more fun, wouldn’t it?

Enough. I’ll be back soon with more unimportant things, including some garden updates

x Laetitia