Hi hi hi
Thank you for being here. It has been really lovely to get your messages after you read the first post. I like having something that isn’t tied to a deadline and I don’t care about traction or the attention its getting. But it really is so lovely that you’re interested and I hope you stay so.
Today: welcome to the high-low of the first week on a story, one that I waited a little over two years to report on. This one made me very nervous. It had its teeth in me but I also didn’t make any moves to start working on it. I thought I would be overwhelmed; it felt too violent, too raw, and I was scared of what I would have to see/learn for it. I lost my nerve. It just so happened that someone I would have to interview for it would not be available to me for a while, and I had a now-or-never moment. The “never” gave me too much fomo, so here we are.
If you’re not a writer, I hope what you’ll see here is the stuff we* live for, the moments when you feel utterly confident in what you’ve found and your ability to tell it. I would pay money to have that feeling available on tap. You’ll also see the moments when we feel like absolute fools standing at a dead end or a wall we’ve run into. In those times I often think of the fact that both my parents are doctors and if I had any sense I would have become one too and had a normal, good, sane job where I, an introvert (an introvert!), didn’t make my living having to talk to strangers.
(*I say “we” because I have to imagine all writers experience this)
On every big story, I have a moment (say Mashallah, don’t jinx me) when someone says something in an interview and suddenly there’s a click and I know I’ve landed on my opening, the core of the story or the structure of my piece. I’m in the interview and I’m listening to you, but in my mind, I see the piece come together. The different parts negotiate space and organise themselves. When I say I see it, I mean exactly that: paragraphs gently move like they’re in water until they nudge against a bank and come to rest. Here’s my opening, here’s the question I’ve really been trying to get at, here’s how I’m going to tell this. I’m always chasing that click but it takes its own time. I was chasing it here too, and like every other time, I was nervous it might not come.
I also do a lot of my thinking and formulating in the shower (again, so smart to have a job where these sorts of things matter and to live in a city with a chronic water shortage. great combo.). Sometimes I think its the time crunch - I’m not spending ages in there - and the fact that my phone isn’t there to distract me. Or maybe its water - I came up with the structure, organising themes, and first chapter for my first book while in a pool, got out and while sopping wet, wrote it out on my phone.
Something I’m taking great pleasure in this time around is noting the ways in which I’m intuitively working differently. I trust the process more; on the bad days, I’m able to step away and remember that my confidence ebbs and flows. I heard a lot of chatter (in my mind) the last few years about whether I would work on anything with meaning again, I held tight to a throwaway comment someone made about how I needed to put something out “to stay relevant” (thanks pal) and tucked it away to excoriate myself with, I filed away every remark about how I shouldn’t expect the next book “to be as big as the first”. The volume on all the above has turned down, and when it gets loud, I know it is noise that I must ignore. When “who cares?” rings like a gong in me, I answer, “Me.” That is enough, and I’m very lucky that I have a small group of readers that trust that if I’m curious about something, they want to see what I found.
Above everything, I’m finding so much pleasure in excavation: yesterday I had to chop around 7000 words from my proposal as I went back to the drawing board, but that didn’t worry me (yet. YET). I speak with friends, editors and my beloved agent and every time I come away feeling like I’ve gotten closer to the idea. Those 7000 words were circling the idea because I was too nervous to articulate it - what if it doesn’t have legs? what if I can’t figure out a way to tell this story? I’m learning (hopefully) to be more precise. I resist the impulse to have an idea that sprawls out because I think it comes from a fear that I’ll miss out on something. I’m increasingly drawn to slim volumes, short stories, a narrow focus. That is harder, no?
All of this is to say that despite the high-low see-saw, I love the weird ways that work comes together and how I see my approach to craft is changing, cogs turning in the background unbeknownst to me.
At the end - what I’m reading/listening to/watching.
Day 1:
Today is the first day of reporting for this book. I don’t know yet what form this book will take, how my initial idea will change. I’m okay with that uncertainty right now, it feels generative and interesting. I woke up this morning a little nervous, and through the night I kept waking at intervals to check the time, worried I’d oversleep and miss my flight. I’d taken something for a cold before I slept. I’m feeling a bit under the weather, and every time I woke I did calculations - you have 3 more hours to sleep, 1.5 more, 30 mins more…
Some things feel different from the first time:
I’m being more careful with myself. Setting up things so I don’t feel overwhelmed. Not piling interviews on. Setting a definite end date, staying with one of my best friends, adding in a dinner or lunch because I know I’ll need the break mentally.
98% of people I have to interview have seen my work in some capacity. The first time around I went into interviews deliberate in wanting to appear totally blank, a neutral blank that interviewees could speak at. No perfume even, nothing you could pin an opinion on that might affect what you tell me. I’m not blank for most of these people anymore. They’ve seen the work, they follow me on social media, they have details about me or my opinions. I think of how to prove to them that their trust is not misplaced.
I remind myself I’ve done this before. Field work can be exhausting and challenging, but also thrilling. Every find means more. You’re clocking details even when you think you aren’t. I brought my book to give to one of the principle interviewees. I’m packing my bag and I look at it and think - well, we went in blind with this one too, bare bones of info, and somehow this thing came to be. It worked out, it worked itself out, I worked it out. Here’s proof.
I find that when I take on these big stories, especially these women’s stories, I put a lot of stock in signs. At every turn, I think that if I’m not meant to find some details, if this person and their secrets are to elude me, I’ll know and I’ll stop. I don’t ever want someone, especially a person who is no longer alive, to feel like I invaded their privacy. An example of a sign: I can’t find a fixer/driver for days and a random conversation leads me to message a journalist in Australia who connects me with a person who is exactly what I need (one simple requirement that acts as a yardstick: I sleep like the dead in the car after some interviews and I need someone who I feel utterly comfortable being around in that state). The only problem with signs: I am currently at the airport and wanted to write down some questions and my pen - brand new - has totally dried up. Well. Okay. What the eff is that supposed to mean
Day 2:
Do I need to tweak or reframe this idea? Can I stick with it as it is?
Did I take on the trickiest story as the sample chapter just to see if I could wrangle the material?
Right now it feels like a number of elements that I am slowly nudging, moving into place, seeing what is taking shape.
It feels luxurious to let it sprawl out a little, let it take up as much space as it wants because I don’t have any deadline other than my own.
I’m grateful today is a lighter day and that I managed this balance. I didn’t do that last time and loaded on as much as I could. What was I rushing for?
1.20 a.m.:
Did I just waste a lot of money coming here
Did I not load on enough interviews
Are these people enough
What even is the story here
Its so convoluted and messy.
This idea for the book is sprawling too much I don’t know how to harness it and how will I cover all this
I need to make it manageable
I cant write about what I want to
I haven’t even made proper time here for people and things like the archives
I need to do a story in my own city I’m tired and I want my own bed and the dogs
Feel scared that it might come to nothing, a big zero point zero
Day 3:
I really hit a wall today. I wondered why I’m here, why I’m chasing these interviews and people, I did mental calculations of how much I’ve spent to come here and if it was worth it. I cant remember a story with these many diversions and complications that is actually so so simple. It is so average and everyday in what it throws up and I wonder how people close to it live with it. How does their anger not burn it all down? I have never had to contend with people in such complexity before. It is a good lesson. Is this one I’m going to learn from? Will I be grateful down the line? Maybe. For now I feel tired and very silly… maybe not silly but confused. I’m glad I know the story. That has taught me, I think, and brought up a lot of ethical considerations. But what am I supposed to do now?
Day 4:
I’m interviewing people with trauma and some remember vivid details and others have lost chunks of time. They feel guilty for forgetting. Part of my job now is to assure them, and to follow up with them the following day to make sure they’re okay. I haven’t had to do that before. Why did I not think to do it? People have cried in interviews before. Did I not care for them adequately?
10.48 a.m:
in the shower i think of the opening and how to manage what i cant say. What i know and won’t write. I’m sitting on the bed dripping and i write the opening to the chapter. I hope it has heft. That it will tell those who read between the lines that i couldn’t say very much.
I’ll return to it later.
I went to see a friend’s mother. I needed a break. On the way, I thought, ‘I feel bad for her. She’s getting the worst version of me. Me where I’m elsewhere, I’m too preoccupied to be any fun.’ Thank God for mums who feed you.
Day 5:
What the fuck even am I doing
This book has no shape. How am I even supposed to make it. How will I find the right people, the right stories.
Who travels for an hour to interview someone so they can confirm one (ONE) detail ffs this job is absolute clownery sometimes
I had to go to places and see things that I could not photograph or record and so every day I have to go over what I remember, commit it to memory, see every detail. Its homework of the worst kind. I don’t want to see these things. I write down what I remember, every minute description. Until this is done, I have to do this damn homework every day. Who the hell wants this stuff in their mind. Sometimes I think I delete other stuff to make space for these things and they’ll stay until I no longer need them. In the mean time I will forget the things I’m supposed to remember in my own life because the work takes all the space.
12.09 a.m.
Somehow it will work out and take shape.
I’m glad i’m going home tomorrow
Day 6:
Fuck yes. It’s sludgey but I’m moving through it. I grasp at a bit of thread and it gives just a little, enough for me to pull it closer, have a bit more in my hands
8.54 p.m.
Sitting at the airport.
Tired and hungry, but I feel proud. I got a lot done in this week. These are contacts and connections that came from my work, trust I have built, its just me. That blows my mind. I loved seeing Q at some of the interviews when people brought the book with them for me to sign or see. One person led me to the next, and that one to the next… a chain I made.
I have flashes of how the work will show up. It is slowly unpeeling. I’m feeling my way through, rather just stumbling. I have to keep checking in with myself. Reminding myself to talk to me, to be gentle, to be patient. To trust. To not try and see too far ahead. Just for the next step, then the next one.
Gosh this piece in Harper’s is phenomenal. I keep it open on a tab in my phone, hoping for some osmosis.
“Sexual assault, she told me, is the only type of incident in which she has ever seen a victim be blamed for her own complicity in being terrorized” - recommend this, on the freeze response.
“I sometimes have an image of gently lifting the corner of some fabric; or of zeroing in on one image, on one sentence. Of starting from a very small detail, a particular place, and having faith that something will build from it.” - Katherine Angel’s Substack is great.
“I had the weird fear that what I was writing had already been written much better by a hundred theorists or whatever—which maybe it has, but it was definitely new ground for me. I feel really glad that I chose to listen to the part of me that knew there was something there and that it was important, and to follow it for as long as I did when there were so many other voices in my head that were like, “There’s nothing here.” I feel like those voices rumble to life when I get close to the good shit…” - great interview with Melissa Febos.
I started this book and it is fascinating. Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution, by Yasmin El-Rifae.
I am thinking a lot about girlhood and so I went back to the OG to get myself into that headspace.