This post is inspired by Kate McKean’s recent newsletter article, which I thought was a great way to visualise, rather than just list, books read last year.
I read 50 books in 2022, which makes me very happy. It’s been a hard year at work and in my personal life, but I’ve still found time for reading. That’s an average of almost a book a week — though I definitely squeezed a final few in there over Christmas to give a satisfying round number.
Genres
58% fiction, 42% non-fiction. I’m not surprised that sci-fi tops the list of fiction, nor by the tie between fantasy, horror and literary fiction. I haven’t done this kind of analysis on previous years, but that pretty much aligns with my gut instinct about my reading tastes. More unusually for me, thriller/crime are >0% — I’m trying to branch out a bit into what is usually a dull genre for me. My guess is that I’m drifting year-on-year from a fiction-dominated appetite to something more balanced.
A closer look at non-fiction
Looking closer at non-fiction, it’s obvious that ‘Craft/Creativity’ was a hot topic for me. These were mostly books about writing or about artists. I’ve enjoyed reading more essays and memoir this year, and my reading list for 2023 is leaning into that. Self-help reading centred around creativity, productivity and introversion/sensitivity.
Book formats
I’m shocked by how few audiobooks I listened to this year. Over the last 10 years I’ve usually had an audiobook on the go most of the time. But this year I’ve been listening to so many podcasts that I haven’t really had time for audiobooks. 24% ebooks sounds about right, though also might be a reduction from previous years. I do tend to mostly read paperbacks, so there’s no surprises here, but there are definitely more hardbacks than I anticipated (lots of these were gifts — if friends/family are reading this, yes please, more hardbacks for my birthday next year).
Minority voices
This analysis is definitely reductive. I haven’t researched people’s identities in detail. In any case, artists shouldn’t have to divulge details of their personal lives to further their careers. I’ve gone with ‘white and/or cis-gender male’ as the easiest questions to answer. A 60/40 split isn’t bad, but it’s not brilliant either. I think it’s better than previous years, but the trend will be clearer if this analysis gets repeated in future years.
Completed vs partial reads
I count books as ‘read’ on my log even if I don’t read them cover to cover. Sometimes books lose momentum or I lose interest, but I still feel that I’ve absorbed the essence of the book. As a rule of thumb, if I get more than halfway, I’ll count it. But it looks like I read 84% of books cover to cover this year. That’s 42 books completed, 8 partial reads.
For reference, here’s the list (see the Book Log for previous years):
The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder
It Happened in ‘Loontown by Lavie Tidhar (short story)
The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley
Siege & Storm by Leigh Bardugo
This Is Water by David Foster Wallace
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
Appropriate by Paisley Rekdal
Why I Write by George Orwell
The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers
The Fisherman by John Langan
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
Odyssey by Jack McDevitt
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken
Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
Art Matters by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell
1Q84: Book Three by Haruki Murakami
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
Permission to Screw Up by Kristen Hadeed
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo
What It Is by Lynda Barry
The Stormlight Archive: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
Acceptance by Jeff VenderMeer
Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg
Mistborn: Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones
Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell
Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life it not possible then one must try to wiggle through by subtle manoeuvres.
Franz Kafka, quote via Daily Rituals by Mason Currey
Kafka’s words, on trying to organise his life around his writing. Kafka’s works are notoriously dark and surreal, but his letters suggest anything but an effortless creative experience. The quote paints a picture of a generally hectic and cluttered life, where the free flow of ideas is staunched.
But closely tied to it is fatigue, and lack of proper rest. The full quote goes on to explain, “The satisfaction gained by manoeuvring one’s timetable successfully cannot be compared to the permanent misery of knowing that fatigue of any kind shows itself better and more clearly in writing than anything one is really trying to say.“
Following on from my last post, Kafka’s words go deeper into why rest is vital for creative output. Fatigue not only cuts off access to creative energy, but degrades the quality of the small amount that does get done.
But the quote offers no solution, only sober reality: the time will never come when conditions are perfect, when life resembles the stillest lake waters and the vistas of the mind are clear of mist. You have to make do with those subtle manoeuvres: rest in those brief respites between between breaking waves, and when you catch your breath, stumble through the mists, and over months and years, maybe make something new.
In some cases, it’s not just the writing that needs a breather but the writer, too. After completing my book The Anatomist, I wrote virtually nothing for almost three years. I hadn’t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep. It’s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out.
My own experience with writing is similar. Some months, I’ll write four blog posts and fragments of three short stories, and a novel chapter, in a weekend. Other times, I’ll go whole months and barely write a thing.
But, like almost everyone, I’m terrible at putting these ideas into practice. What I really want is time to write. Not to become a successful writer (though that sounds great), but to have the time to actually do the act of writing. There’s probably nothing special in that — it’s just flow state. Everyone has something that gives them that timeless sense of being fully engrossed.
But things get in the way. I wrote and edited four short stories I the first three months of this year. But for the last two months I’ve barely touched a writing project. It’s a brittle practice, sensitive to being crowded out by other things that, at the time, seem more pressing.
The ideal would be to have a robust practice, to organise my life so that the stable equilibrium would be a day with inviolable time and energy with which to focus on my writing projects. A disturbance inevitably arises that knocks me from equilibrium, but I relax back to that stable state.
The question is how to build such a life.
That brings me, long-windedly, to rest. Hayes writes:
Don’t work through the pain; it will only hurt. Give yourself sufficient time to refresh.
I suspect a lot of the stops and starts with my writing ultimately stem from chronic burnout, a lack of patience, and not being connected enough with my body to recognise when to stop and recharge.
Our life has been hectic the last few months, to say the least. Supporting my family through some hard times, working at a tech startup (which inevitably leads to working some nights and weekends), buying a house, my partner changing jobs, and ongoing health issues, have all taken a toll.
Whenever I get a spare few hours, a lull in the storm, I dive for the keyboard. For maybe an hour, I manage to convince myself that I can write an entire novel draft in a week, before life crashes over me again. I can do it, if I just arse-to-chair and force it.
Having read, Hayes’ article, I’m wondering whether it’s better to make the decision to not create anything for a while. There’s advice everywhere from creators about the discipline of grinding out your work, even if you’re not in the space (see Mason Curey’s Daily Rituals for plenty of examples). It’s about forming the habit, it’s about discipline.
But what’s the advantage of discipline if you’re barely present in the moment, existing on fumes?
This isn’t an announcement of abandoning creative pursuits, but it’s important to note this counterargument on what to do when times are tough. I have a note above my monitor that says “Stop. Breathe.” Hayes is arguing for us to listen to that more often:
My rule of thumb in fitness training is two-to-one: for every two days of intense workouts, a day off. However, “in cases of sustained high-level output,” according to my manual, full recovery may take longer. This is what had happened with me creatively. I needed a really, really long rest.
Like millions of other people, I would have Neil Gaiman’s babies (we’d sort out the mechanics). His world-renown literary works aside, he also gives a bloody good interview.
What really grabbed me today was Neil’s comments on writing longhand. He always writes his first drafts out in a notebook, and it affects not only his process, but he has observed it affecting others, too.
Neil notes that before PCs with word processors were mainstream, he edited an anthology of short stories. Then, the word counts averaged around 3,000 words. Only a few years later, with more computers around, he edited another anthology, only to find that the average word count has more than doubled.
On a computer screen, words are cheap. There’s no paper or ink to waste. There’s no selection pressure on the choice of words — just use them all. I wonder if short stories are fundamentally more difficult to write by computer than by hand. Does the brain process the task in a measurably different way?
Gaming environments for success
Neil has a well-known writing habit: if he doesn’t write then he is free to do nothing, but he is only allowed to do nothing. In minutes, doing nothing tends to lost his charm, and he so he writes. Procrastination is short-circuited.
But he also does something else. Neil produces his second drafts by copying his longhand manuscripts onto the computer. When he does this, if he realises he doesn’t need a page or so, he just doesn’t copy it up. Instead of deleting a whole chunk of digital copy, feeling like he’s losing work, he in fact saves himself the labour of transcribing.
This approach of using technology, environment and ritual provides an environment where Neil maximises his chance of doing the things he’d rather do. It doesn’t have to always work, it just has to be better than the default state.
Prime your environment to make the next action easy.
First drafts are just meet-and-greets
In any case, Neil doesn’t try to catch lightning in a bottle. Even the master doesn’t spit out perfect prose right away (though I suspect his first go is usually still disgustingly good). I’ll close out with his thoughts on what first drafts are for.
… Nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolutely go up in flames … it is you telling the story to yourself.
I have a post-it note on my desk that says RADIANT GENIUS. All-caps, no explanation. Just RADIANT GENIUS. It’s been on my desk for a while now. I have no idea what it means, so it’s useless, the product of a less refined moment.
But I can’t bear to throw it away. Adorable that I thought that note would be useful later. How could anyone forget the entire phantasmagorical world of ideas unlocked by those infamous words of power: RADIANT GENIUS.
There’s another note on my desk. It says Robots and Dragons. And there is a little smiley face on it, to emphasize the calm confidence I had in those words at the time. Clearly it was a genius idea — though I’m not sure I’d call it radiant genius.
I’ve written a bit about notetaking and systems for developing creative ideas. But the above are evidence that there’s another side to scribbling everything down: some proportion isn’t useful and is at best clutter, and at worst is confusing.
A few might be comedy gold, fodder for the pinboard. But the whole effort at keeping notes falls flat if it isn’t searchable to some extent. The whole system has to be purged periodically for it to be of any use.
For me, that just means reading over everything, collating things into a blog post or my .inbox file on Evernote (inbox sorting in Evernote is explained here), or a list of quotations that I keep on Notion (twinned with things that sync from my Kindle using ReadWise). Occasionally things go into Obsidian, where I’m building a sort of personal Wiki (they call it a Second Brain, but that sounds a bit grand for what I’ve got going on).
Keeping things running smoothly does mean throwing things away, which I find difficult, especially when I feel like the note is just on the cusp of reminding me of something good. But if it doesn’t serve as a decent trigger for your memory, the note has failed, so it has to go.
I wrote a few weeks ago about my generally scattered mindset at the moment, and how that’s been refelcted in a messy workspace. So my focus for the next little while is keeping clutter to a minimum. Though I’m going to keep RADIANT GENIUS a while longer.
I live with frequent brain fog. I’m not sure why. Could be chronic stress, bad sleep patterns, over-dependency on caffeine to function, general anxiety. Who knows.
What I do know is that I only get about an hour a day of clear thinking, if I’m lucky. It’s difficult to compare between individuals, given natural variations in energy levels and attention span, so let’s be specific.
Most of the time I function just fine: I can socialize, run errands, exercise, do admin, and perform the less intellectually demanding aspects of work. But anything insightful, thoughtful or creative is walled off behind a snarl of vines, iron wool and vertigo.
As a rule, the wall comes down once a day.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern in what triggers the spells of clarity. They just come, leaping from the shadows, unbidden and grinning.
Sometimes I’m lucky, ready at my desk or a quiet corner or a train. I can drop what I’m doing and take to the keyboard or a pad of paper before the wall is thrown up again.
Other times, I’m not so lucky. Maybe more often than not, I can’t possibly take advantage of the clear spells, like when I’m in the shower, out on a run, or during a conversation.
Catching the tails of creative bursts over a week usually produces a sprawl of notes like this… (see half-baked wisdom point #2 below)
Recently, I’ve had more free time and a rested mind, so I’ve been able to catch the clear spells more often. Maybe half the time.
In more usual circumstances, I’m a caffeine-addled, sleep-deprived, anxious mass, carefully groomed to look like a high-functioning adult. I might catch a clear spell once a week.
I’ve tried to use my recent ample free time to maximise the number of usable clear spells. I’ve experimented, and come up with five things that work for me that I think are worth noting (and I stress: they work for me; this is not advice).
Today’s Nuggets of Half-Baked Wisdom
1. Scheduling: I hate schedules, but they work. This is advice that’s been repeated again and again by creatives in every medium. See Daily Rituals by Mason Currey for dozens of examples. If you want to create, or even to think, it’s never going to happen if you don’t set aside time for it. That’s the bare minumum. Like condoms: better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
2. Notepads, notepads everywhere: I’ve heard one person say they keep a waterproof notepad in the shower. I haven’t gone that far, but I do have notepads stashed everywhere else now: in my pocket, my coat, my bag, beside my bed, beside the treadmill. It might not replace access to a journal or keyboard, but the little snippets and notes build up.
3. Strategic drug-taking: Calm down, I’m not onto mescaline… yet. But I’ve started taking caffeine at scheduled times to optimize its effects, giving a small kick without overloading me or causing a crash later. See books like Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, and Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, for the science. And if I’m stressed and too rigid to move, a wee dram of whiskey greases the wheels.
4. The Gaiman Method:Neil Gaiman says his writing method is simple. He sits down at his desk to write, and it doesn’t matter if he produces nothing. But he’s only allowed to stare out the window. He’s free to do that all he likes, but eventually his mind gets bored and starts making stories. Crafting an environment to induce boredom not only removes opportunities for procrastination, but actually incentivises your mind to invent its own distractions.
5. Don’t Force It: Probably the most important of the five. Everything has limits: we know when we’re too tired to go on, when our limbs are twisted to breaking point, when we’re about to lose our balance. Nothing good comes from pushing too hard. I’ve found that once I managed to make use of a creative spell, I often tried to squeeze it for all it was worth. But ultimately, what came out of it just wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, because I tried to climb a mountain in one leap.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
– Mary Oliver
If you let it, the chaff of life will crowd out your true purpose. Without conscious curation, life falls onto default rails, and and it is possible to spend years on what is fundamentally unfulfilling.
Over 10 years ago, when I was 19, I finished my fourth novel. I was surprised to find it wasn’t obviously a steaming turd, so I decided to try and get a literary agent. (An adorable story, involving me writing my age on the cover letter, as though to assure them I wasn’t actually three toddlers in a trench coat.)
Ray Bradbury’s gloriously messy workspace. (Image Credit: this Medium article about Bradbury’s recipe for a good life.)
Some of my friends laughed at me, for writing nerdy fiction for nerds, and for aspiring to anything loftier than a birthday party at All Bar One.
I wasn’t quite old enough to realise that friends who laugh at you for trying to grow are not friends at all. Nonetheless, I didn’t have time for their crap. As Ray Bradbury famously said:
“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
I read every guide on the publishing business I could find, and started querying.
A year later, I signed with an agent, delirious with excitement.
It didn’t go well. By the time I was 21, we parted ways and I set out to publish the books independently admist the self-publishing revolution. It was 2013, the crest of the ebook gold rush.
I still have the original letter from the literary agent who offered to represent me.
I released five books over three years, and featured in a series of short story anthologies. My degree and subsequent PhD gradually took over, and the writing got pushed onto the back burner. I was satisfied with what I’d accomplished, so I let it slide further and further back, until it became not something I do but something I used to do.
More recently, with my doctoral studies coming to an end, it looked like I would finally have the time and energy to return to writing in a serious way. I couldn’t help wondering why I had stopped in the first place. I’d had a great time, after all.
Except, I have a journal that says otherwise. It tells a totally different story. As a friend of Greg McKeown once said to him:
“The faintest pencil is greater than the strongest memory.”
Looking through that journal, the signs of burnout are obvious. There had been ups and downs, but it’s clear that, at some point, it had simply stopped being fun. I suspect that juggling it all meant that I ended up treating it like a chore, rather than something I enjoyed. And something with a long payoff horizon is unsustainable if you get no enjoyment from it.
The key to avoiding burnout in doing what fulfils you is to have some fun with it.
The key is play.
The ideal work is that which feels like play. We’re socialised to think the opposite from a young age. Ken Robinson has a spectacular TED talk about the school system killing creativity (see below). I remember first watching the talk in 2015 and emphatically agreeing: play and exploring are vital to self-actualisation (see Maslow’s Pyramid).
Then I proceeded to grind away in a playless desert for years.
Being aware of a fault doesn’t automatically change your behaviour. Habits are difficult to form deliberately. As explained in this Freedom article, “According to a 2010 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it took study participants anywhere from 18 to 254 days to carry out an eating, drinking or activity behavior habitually, with an average time period of 66 days.”
Maintaining the space and time for play requires commitment.
Sounds odd. Committing to play.
But in the modern world, that’s exactly what it takes. Greg McKeown talks about this very thing in Chapter 13 of Essentialism: subtraction. Cut away all the non-essential chaff of life, leaving the single thing you want to use your energy on (more about that here).
McKeown quotes what is apocryphally attributed to Michaelangelo, which I’ll paraphrase here:
When asked how he accomplished the feat of carving his masterpiece, the statue of David, Michaelangelo replied: “It’s easy. You just chip away everything that doesn’t look like David.”
Warning: if you don’t like nerdy things and/or keyboards, better skip this one.
I’m not good with anything fiddly. Lego, IKEA furniture, arts and crafts. I last about two minutes before I throw it across the room. God help any future children of mine who ask me to put the stickers on their Christmas presents.
I usually describe myself as a big-picture thinker. Pedantic details don’t interest me. That’s good for being creative, but not for finding pleasure in the simplicity of small things.
For me, finding a hobby often sounds more like a should-do than a want-to — which we are trying to abolish, remember.
Right now there’s a craze of DIY mechanical keyboard modifying. I love a good keyboard, so I decided to try it despite my general dislike of anything requiring physical dexterity and patience.
You need a few things:
anti-static tweezers,
lubricant and a little paintbrush to apply it,
a key-puller (for pulling off the keycaps),
a screwdriver.
The basic idea is to take the keyboard apart, including dismantling the mechanical switches, lubricate and dampen them, then reassemble it. This (hopefully) improved the typing experience. I also got some foam padding to reduce the vibration inside the casing, and some thick plasters (band-aids) to soften the impact of the stabilisers (pins in the big keys such as the spacebar and enter key).
It’s a whole thing. I definitely don’t know what I’m talking about. If you’re interested you can read all about it here. I used this Youtube guide by Tech Hyped as my primary reference, which uses the same Keychron K6 keyboard I was modifying.
This keyboard has what are called “hot-swappable” switches, meaning you can simply lever out the switches from the board and take everything apart completely (*nervous groan*).
The Process
There’s no way of getting started other than diving in, so that’s what I did. At first I really thought I would give up, especially when I took the first switch apart and a bunch of tiny pieces flew across the room.
But once I settled down into the labour of it, I realised that there was no rush. Nothing was riding on my success of failure besides my enjoyment of the tinkering. I put on my headphones and listened to The Hobbit audiobook as narrated by Andy Serkis (excellent, you should try it), and I just got lost in it. I worked my way through all sixty-something keys over about a week, probably spending about 6 hours in total on it.
I’m just coming to the end now. I don’t know the outcome of it yet, but I’ve realised that it doesn’t matter. I thoroughly enjoyed just sitting there and… fiddling, with fiddly things – the thing I usually hate so much.
The inside of a switch. Imagine painting every piece of over 60 switches with lubricant, then reassembling the pieces without getting lube everywhere. Yeah.
So many pieces! Aaaah.
Verdict: Pass the lube
So often we bang our heads against a wall, trying to find our way through and blaming ourselves, only to realise that we just had to find the path that’s right for us. I’ve always been jealous of how other people focused and relaxed when they do something simple repetitive. But I had been focusing on what other people spent their time on, rather than finding what relaxed me.
Depending on the outcome when I put everything back together, I’ll either be looking for some new things to try, or I’m going to need more keyboards.
Mid-year has been and gone, but I’ve been busy with completing my thesis and defending it. Having finished feels like a good enough milestone for a mid-year (ish) review of 2021.
Post-PhD decompression: Sunset at St Agnes, Cornwall.
If I had to describe the year in a single word, that word would be precipice. The edge before big changes. For the first time in a long time, I don’t know what comes next. Thankfully, after being stuck inside for most of 2020, even being able to walk outside is a revelatory experience. So there’s not much of a bar to beat.
The year to August has been full of small changes, and some big ones:
Completing my doctorate. After 4 year of research, I passed the final oral exam separating me from PhD status. Needless to say, this is the big milestone. A major lifegoal achieved.
Ran my first 6k. I’m almost as pleased about this as the PhD. Just under two years ago, I was told I had a fissured meniscus in my knee from an injury around 4 years before. My knee had grown progressively worse, so that I couldn’t squat my own bodyweight or run at all. Even walking was getting hard. Doctors were telling me I would soon get arthritis and surgery might help, but probably not. However, some great physiotherapy and a simple piece of equipment banished it in under three months. Last week I ran 6k, which would have seemed totally unfeasible before. My aim is 10k by the end of the year.
Restarted this blog. I’ve written in blogs on and off for about 16 years (nothing remains of them except backups on old hard drives). My last one dried up about six years ago, when my degree started to take over my life. Now that I’ve graduated, one of the best things about life is writing this blog — mostly for my future self.
Ran a beta-reading club for a book. It’s a truly lucky thing to know people whom you trust to take the time to read a book you’ve written, and give some tough love in their feedback. Scary but rewarding. It’s totally different to a beta-reading group composed of strangers, because people who know you can infer more subtle things about what you’re trying to do.
Developed a journaling habit. I spoke about this in an earlier post. I’m still finessing a system that works for me, but I’ve made good progress so far. I can’t overstate the value of having a habit that gets thoughts out of my head and into some physical format. I would have said it was a hobbyist’s thing before I tried it; now, I couldn’t go without it.
Consistent meditation and yoga/stretching. I injured my back twice during lockdown, and even months later my muscles were like taut wires. I always thought, in an absent sort of way, that yoga was something that felt nice and technically counted as moving, but didn’t do much for your body. Obviously, I was hopelessly wrong. Twenty minutes of stretching or yoga every morning has totally changed my relationship with exercise — and it’s a similar story with meditation and mental flexibility/strength. Turns out the solution to almost everything is sitting quietly, breathing, stretching and recording thoughts.
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