against overthinking

on creative anxiety

A couple of years ago I met up with an old friend who now worked for a publishing house. We were at one of those trendy ramen places in Soho with a sexually suggestive name where it’s very dark inside and you have to half-shout at each other to be heard; the batter had come off my breaded vegan chicken and was sort of floating wetly in the broth. I told her about a short story collection I was ostensibly working on. The most finished story was about a girl whose birth control transformed her into a werewolf - even at the time, I knew it was derivative and a bit half-baked. Actually I’d just discovered it was far too similar to an existing short story from the 80s, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. “Write it,” she half-shouted to me, “but write it soon - that sort of thing is in right now.”

It was one of the first times someone had explicitly said to me I could get published, which was gratifying, but I felt uneasy on the Tube back home; if my sort of thing was in right now, what was I supposed to do when it was out? And it already was on the way out; it wasn’t my friend’s fault, I knew she was right. Joyce Carol Oates had already tweeted that thing about wan little husks of autofiction. Everything I wanted to write about was over-done or gimmicky, but then the only reason I wanted to write about it was it really had all happened to me. I really had been in weird, power-imbalanced casual relationships in my late teens, I really had dated mostly men but been bisexual in an ambiguous sort of way. My hands felt hot and raw under the harsh Tube lights; I was picking at a hangnail and accidentally bit into fresh, ripe skin and it started bleeding, and I remembered reading about a girl doing that in a book, too. I’d just missed the boat to be the person who wrote about any of this first, or second, or even one hundred and eighth. I couldn’t imagine writing about anything other than experiences similar to my own, and my own experiences were, unfortunately, unoriginal.

What was going to be in next? Would women’s writing be forever stuck on a trend cycle, the pendulum swinging, with increasing speed, between leaning into and disavowing your female-ness? Or maybe women’s writing itself was a mere part of the trend cycle, and we were about to circle back to men’s writing for the next few decades. I typed all of this into my Notes app in a tipsy, self-satisfied flurry, feeling like I’d just been very clever.

---

It feels like Winter has come early to Cambridge; the leaves have skipped the fun crunchy stage and already line the gutters in wet brown wads. Sunset leaks through at 5pm and threads the tall grasses of the cemetery with gold; the River Cam is bloated and honeyslow. It feels like the people in our new neighbourhood are having a competition to be the most quirky, a quirk-off, if you will. There is the front window full of vintage bobble-heads of celebrities; the giant, waxy-looking cactus, its four arms sprawled out on the floorboards, so large it may as well be renting the living room out for itself; the tiny book-swaps housing titles in French, Ukrainian, German, books called ‘How the Homosexuals Saved Civilisation’. Everyone gets boxes of wonky seasonal fruit and veg delivered weekly; everyone wants you to know that they are a climate voter.

I go to the gym now, perhaps to feel like I fit in here. I’ve always hated the idea - it seems like such a product of capitalism, all of us sat at desks eight hours a day so that we have enough money, and then spending that money to go on special machines to simulate running and walking and cycling and all those things we could be doing for free if we were allowed to leave our desks for more than an hour while it’s still light out. But I can’t lift heavy boxes or run very far, and there’s no point in deliberately staying weak just to stick it to the man.

I’ve also started writing a novel. It’s set between Oxford and London, with an interlude in Florence (I spent a hazy day there in late September wandering around the backstreets with my camera and mentally formulating most of the plot). It’s semi-autobiographical, and probably a little tropey, but I’ve realised some of the things that get called tropey in literature at the moment are also things that often happen to women in real life. More importantly, I’ve started telling everybody I’m writing a novel, because I’m determined not to feel embarrassed about it, and if people know I’m writing it then I have to actually write. So far this is proving pretty foolproof.

I’m realising how solitary writing is, perhaps more so than any other art form. Even when two people are writing in the same space together, they are still immersed in their own individual worlds; exchanging a few words, or making a cup of tea, is like coming up for air. Rosa and I do this a lot. Sometimes we will swap laptops so I can read what she’s been working on, and vice versa, and our responses never fully satisfy each other. It seems like Rosa should be in my world with me, but she isn’t, she’s still half-submerged in her own. Mostly all we want is to surface, be told that what we’re writing is very, very good, and then duck back under. Mostly all we want is to know there’s a point to us trying at all.

Neither of us are alone in this; it’s a sentiment I’ve seen echoed on Notes here too many times to count. I keep forgetting that on here we’re not writing for a general audience; we’re writing for mostly other writers, and writers are a nervy, strange bunch. We’ve created, I think, a uniquely insular and anxious website. This isn’t me saying I disagree with most of the discourse - I’m tired of Substack-the-company prioritising ‘content’ over writing; I’m tired of individual women’s experiences being flattened into an archetypal ‘girlhood’. But I’m also aware that discourse, typically about women writers, is what gets clicks and views on here, to the point that I think we’ve become oversaturated with snark. We’re all reading and writing more cultural criticism than anything else; we’re reading countless savage literary takedowns, then takedowns of the takedowns, then opinion pieces lamenting that the entire publishing industry is dead, and if we’re not on BookTok we may as well throw in the towel. We swarm around new books by women authors, desperate to get our hands on a copy of Intermezzo or No Judgement or My First Book so that we can churn out a take on it while it’s still relevant; we’re algorithmically incentivised to continue endless arguments instead of writing anything new. And parts of it are fun, and satisfying, and scratch a shameful itch, but it’s also so, so claustrophobic. If you’ve been a critic before you’ve been a writer, if you start writing your own bad reviews in your head before your novel is even finished, then of course writing anything original at all feels suffocating. Of course it feels like art and writing is eating itself before you’ve even found a seat at the table.

Mostly I think completing a novel requires you to take yourself seriously. In fact, to write anything at all requires you to be the first person to take your writing seriously. That’s why it’s so hard to tell people that you write, or that you want to write; it means that you trust yourself to have something worth saying, and keep trusting yourself for months and months of editing, rejection, frustration and tears. I’m still not entirely sure I can do that, or if I should do that - but I think I’ll regret it forever if I don’t.

---

I feel like this piece is a jumble of angst and life updates, so I hope it reads coherently. I couldn’t have thought a lot of it through without wonderful conversations in the pub with

eve

- thank you for your wisdom!

unrelated, but song rec this week is an absolutely beautiful one - I Saw Another Bird by Mount Eerie 💙