What’s it like to write a book?
Part I: the tyranny of choice
Perhaps the most difficult thing is the choice.
As I write this I have been bogged down for days trying to write a couple of short sections for which I have all the material and evidence I should ever need. It’s all ready to go. I just need to choose what bits to use, put them into the document, work around them and there it is, done.
And I just haven’t been able to do it. Or is it that I don’t want to do it? The latter seems closer to the truth of the matter – and yet of course I do want to do it. I want to get it done and move on to the next thing.
Perhaps this is the greatest difficulty with book-writing: the battle with the self; the self’s attempt to treat itself as an employee who can be ordered to turn up at a given time, carry out routine tasks and get the job done on schedule to the satisfaction of the employer, who is the same person.
Sometimes the employee part says, ‘No. I can’t be arsed with this. I’m tired. I don’t want to do it. What are you paying me anyway? What’s the point of it? I don’t even care anymore.’
And the employer part can’t really answer, because it’s the same person. It’s tired too and can’t think straight. It doesn’t really understand. All it can do is try to get the employee to show up at the office at some point, to at least be there. And sooner or later the process of work will start to flow again. Hopefully.
For a while drone music seemed to be doing the trick, providing a semi-musical, noise environment for me to fulfil my role as an efficient employee of myself, knocking off the word count, getting the thing done.
However as soon as I started relying on it, it stopped working. The droning just became an accompaniment to me not doing anything, or finding other stuff to do that wasn’t useful and related.
It’s a funny thing, work and music. Sometimes it really does work. While writing my first book I used to listen to Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony (recent article on it here) a lot. I’m pretty sure its slowly shifting undulations found their way into my writing. At other times in my work I’ve used minimalist music; modernist and atonal music; the less dramatic end of rock music (stuff like Elbow and Sigur Rós); the French composers Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. Even sometimes Brahms, Mahler and Bruckner. But not Beethoven. Definitely not Beethoven.
While listening to Erik Satie’s piano music one day, I came up with this conceptualisation: that, to work for one’s work, or at least this sort of work, writing work, music must be interesting but not intrusive. It should stimulate but not distract.
However, demanding these qualities of music seems to miss the point of it somehow. You end up treating music as yet another service provider fulfilling its allotted role in the machine of life and no more, inviting condemnation if it dares make too much noise or whatever. And perhaps the more music tries to fulfil a role and the more we employ it like that, the more it loses its power. I don’t know.
My father has now been in hospital for around eight weeks and will spend Christmas in there. He has recovered many of his faculties, but is still struggling with his memory, which affects his ability to follow instructions and therefore sets back his recovery.
Our experience of the NHS has been mixed. At times Dad has received wonderfully attentive and skilled care; at other times the nurses have seemed largely uninterested and the doctors absent. No one seems to be in charge. There appears to be a lack of expertise, drive and coordination at times. It’s all rather haphazard, as the journalist Harriet Sergeant highlights in this article published in January about her father’s time in hospital with Covid.
I wonder how all this has affected my book-writing. I’ve been visiting hospital roughly three times a week, which doesn’t seem like much on the page but takes up most of the afternoon and leaves me strangely exhausted afterwards.
Maybe the stress has affected my work. But earlier in the process I was flowing nicely. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.
This actually taps into an underlying theme of The Progress Factory: of how it’s difficult to understand what’s going on with ourselves sometimes, let alone other people and the world. For one thing, it’s difficult to remember things. In writing my book I’m forgetting all the time the wonderful things I was going to say and do, of how this bit was going to flow easily into that one and it should only take an hour or two to do.
However, the people who talk at us from ‘platforms’ in public life all seem to have it sorted out. They all seem to understand, even when they obviously do not. They are great at presenting themselves as knowers, which is a skill and a technique. They can show that they understand not just you and me and themselves but the whole world and where it’s going.
From working on this book and indeed for a while before, I’ve realised how the progressive way of being, of seeing yours and the world’s destiny as improvement, provides a crucial framework for the way we know in public. It’s essential to our society. All of us are accustomed to tapping into it, of using its characteristic idioms (‘it is inevitable that my opponents will lose because they are idiots’, etc), even if we oppose progressivism as a thing in public.
I don’t know if I’m going to be able to render this adequately in the book. My trouble comes back to choice I think. Since the ideology of progress seems to touch virtually everything and everyone, virtually anything and everything is a potential subject matter. That becomes something of a burden and a curse, offering a continuous stream of alternatives to the plan. Being back on Twitter probably doesn’t help in that regard.
As a writer I must choose, and choose again, and choose again. And that isn’t easy, especially when you’re in a bit of a down spot.
You can pre-order The Progress Factory: The Modern Left and the False Authority of History on Amazon here.
The publisher Swift Press published a blog on it here.