the outlier №240 - all at once
things go slowly, then all at once + thinking shorts
Unusually for me, I’m ahead of my game and have a couple of great Boys and Books talks to bring you.
The first is with Secondary School Teacher of the Year Oli McVeigh. Oli found me on TikTok and brought me in to work on boys’ literacy at his school in Dorset from where our scope has expanded. He’s got boots on the ground experience of teaching young men and is extraordinarily dedicated to them. I’ll try to get this out tomorrow on YouTube and Spotify as well as here.
Then I spoke to Josh Silver, author of the fantastic YA novel Traumaland. Josh was a RADA-trained actor before retraining as a mental health nurse, a profession he’s used to inform his first three novels before he turns his hand to an adult novel next year. It was a treat to speak to him and you can listen to this next week.
Traumaland features in this roundup of some recent reads:
And I’m off to Hay Festival for a couple of days so I’ll be pretty busy with all that that entails. It’s a great time and I’m only sorry that my days don’t correspond with all of the author talks I want to attend! You’ll get a full report on this trip next week.
Consider a paid subscription! There’s an extra, well-sized subscriber perk arriving in the next month so it’s a good time to jump on board…
all at once
One of Ernest Hemingway’s characters in Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises describes how one goes bankrupt as,
Slowly at first, then all at once.
John Green puts a twist on Hemingway’s maxim in The Fault in Our Stars, saying,
I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
To achieving financial ruin, dropping off to sleep and falling in love, I would add writing a book. It feels like nothing’s happening until suddenly you’re two thirds done and thinking about how to wrap it up. This was certainly my experience with my books, memoir Fringes and athlete career change handbook Endgame – they felt unthinkable until they were entirely obvious, even enjoyable.
Speaking to Josh Silver, I was impressed to hear he wrote his latest book in about 5 months (if my memory serves me correctly) but I know, and I do know, that these are not the only months he spent writing that book.
His experiences, his thinking and his skills had to all ferment and coalesce over time to reach the just right temperature for him to hammer that draft out in those months. Given that he also draws on reserves of rage to write, he also needed to get angry enough to sit down and commit pen to paper.
Right now I keep seeing things that are adding to my own cauldron of influences.
Quotes on fantasy and fairy stories from old masters and new writers, how a fifth of the population of Finland are Sparta-referencing trained soldiers or how real-world geoengineering experiments like releasing sun-reflecting particles in the stratosphere, brightening reflective clouds using sprays of seawater and pumping water on to sea ice to thicken it are being funded by the UK government.
There’s something ambitious for me to do and I’m tickling around the edges of it, feeling it out, finding the rough edges I can pinch together into something cohesive but that’s the thing about writing a book.
It happens slowly, slower than you’d like maybe, until it happens all at once.
thinking shorts
faith / fairy tales / a good life / handwritten letters / arsenal’s transfer plans / working in wellness without being one of those people / which running shoes to get next / going back to france / future britain / writing fiction
a book
I’m finishing up Husk by Nat Eliason, which is really kicking off at this point, and am getting going with one of this year’s big fiction releases, The Names by Florence Knapp.
a listen
Can’t believe I never really listened to these guys – this is an obvious pick but an all timer nonetheless.
a quote
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending . . . is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure. . . . It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
lastly
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