hello,
It’s been a glorious week here in London so I’ve been out pounding the streets as much as possible in between bouts of whatever else I have to do.
Aside from that, I’ve been pounding the airwaves by finally turning the outlier into a podcast! Substack makes this very simple so now you can get my various video editions in audio form on many/most/some of your favourite podcast platforms. The letter will still be a letter but it’s great to have multiple mediums of expression integrated in the same place.
I’m really pleased I’ve finally bothered to do this and excited at the prospect of doing more with it. There are now two author talks available, my first with Ranjit Saimbi and Sunday’s chat with debut novelist Seth Insua and some Q&As with yours truly.
Paid subscribers will receive exclusive audio recordings over the coming weeks so sign up and join in!
the books📖
This week has been spent making content for others, for World Book Day and for a further athlete career project which involves a little bit of coordinating days to shoot, bring camera guys along, all that kind of thing.
Then I’m lining up some more audio gigs, hopping back on the content train and drafting Substack pieces. It’s feeling like fun right now.
keep choosing
Someone asked me a question about creative work this week,
‘How do I know when I love something?’
And conveniently for me, it reminded me of part of the chat I had with Seth.
In his book, the father and younger son are at odds over their different conceptions of the world but while the father initially seems like an old stick in the mud, an anachronistic grump, we discover that the two have more in common than they might suspect. Seth said,
He is an individual shaped by his own experiences, just as his parents were before him. Ultimately, we are all just grown-up children, vulnerable in our own ways. Just because someone holds a position of responsibility and has experience and wisdom doesn’t mean they aren’t still figuring things out.
For reasons I won’t broach, the father warrants more sympathy than we initially thought but while my impressions of him evolved, I never considered that he didn’t care. He finds certain things about his son aggravating and confusing, but in his own way, he is reaching for a solution. Then, to paraphrase what we said in our chat,
Some things aren’t problems to be solved—they are people or perspectives to be accepted. And how you choose to navigate that will shape the remainder of your relationship with someone. The easy thing to do is to walk away. That provides a sense of resolution, however painful, because you don’t have to think about it anymore. But to love someone and remain in a relationship with them—whether parental love or any other kind—is harder work. It’s ongoing. You have to keep choosing it.
So in the context of creative work, it’s the stuff you’ll keep coming back to over and over, whether it’s easy or hard, whether it’s seen or ignored and when perhaps the rewards are not obvious.
So maybe that’s the answer – if you love something, you’ll keep choosing it.
craft and commerce
I’m sure someone has written about this but I’m so interested in this increasingly popular method of online artistic production where the filmed process of producing the art is obviously the real valuable (&profitable) output while the art piece itself is relatively incidental
– Rayne Fisher-Quan (tweet)
The idea of marketing your art by showing the process of creation has been around for a while. Austin Kleon has a famous book called ‘Show Your Work’, the idea that people want to see behind the scenes. Virgil Abloh used to refer to how showing your work was ‘evidence of the human’ and in the age of AI, seeing how you did it is also proof that real labour did go into this.
Then as often demonstrated by the numbers, behind the scenes content often performs better than whatever the finished piece was supposed to be – my friend once found that while marketing watches, the behind the scenes time lapse video of the model setting up to film the content performed better than the content she made. This feeling even extends to Hollywood films, an industry that appears to be doing worse even while content as prosaic as press junkets regularly go viral. Famous actors behind the scenes are compelling to the masses, even if their actual work is not. It’s similar with sports documentaries. All sorts of non sports fans I know are very happy to watch tv series about rugby or sprinting or golf, even if they’re not bothered about watching an actual contest.
Sometimes, we’re not there for the message. If the finished piece is a plate of food, a piece of pottery or some blown glass, indistinguishable from many others, while the behind the scenes video was performed by a hot girl or boy suggestively manipulating their ingredients, in these cases the reason for its success is obvious. The creator is what’s appealing, not the product.
But the process is part of the story and it’s the part you normally don’t see. The luxury of creating artisanal work is that the making is aesthetic (particularly if you’re good-looking) so even if you’re having to perform the additional labour of turning your process into content, at least you can. It would probably make sense to optimise your work for the process rather than the end result, given that one is vastly more interesting to a viewer than the other. Half done art has a wonderful suspense about it but as I’ve often been forced to reflect, half-done writing is not aesthetic. It’s usually just bad. Almost none of it is even close to shareable.
Perhaps the solution to showing your work with writing is to reveal everything but the writing – it’s to document the time spent sat at your desk, perhaps romanticised by having a quill in hand, and making it last for as long as you can. You could monetise the time spent labouring with product placement or by playing the tortured artist for views rather than actually trying to sell your words.
I do slightly jest. But in a world where craft is increasingly becoming entertainment, there’s something doomed and wonderful about the unprofitability of writing. It’s worth nothing until it’s over.
a book
Days of Abandonment is my first Elena Ferrante. I’ve got long-held dream of reading her Neapolitan Quartet in Italy and given that I both keep failing to go to Italy and keep not reading one of the great modern writers, I thought I’d dip a toe into her work with this short novel, about a woman suddenly abandoned by her husband without reason. The stylish prose contrasts with the sudden explosions of raw, crude emotion from the narrator and I’m both anticipating and dreading where it’s going.
a listen
I’m going to have to signpost to my own podcasts this time around and if you take out a paid subscription, you’ll receive a reading of one of my favourite poems in the next day or so.
a quote
‘The whole point of rugby is that it is, first and foremost, a state of mind, a spirit … the game’s very name is a magic word.
– Jean-Pierre Rives
lastly
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I’ll see you next time.