the outlier
you can just write things and spiralling
hello,
And welcome back to a full-plumaged outlier. I’m feeling very creative right now so look out for more missives in between our usual weekly correspondences.
Last week’s call for questions saw Dru ask,
Whenever you find yourself growing grim at the mouth, what do you do? Do you take to the sea?
This is the kind of thing I’d like to expand upon so if you have any more ideas, leave a comment or send me a reply.
the books📖
Work-wise this is an exciting time for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I’ve found an agent! I’ve signed on with Maddy Carty’s The Void, who will principally represent me for my content creation work but potentially more broadly too. Maddy brought me in a fantastic gig with Amazon before Christmas and this is easily the best fit I’ve found in my various conversations with agents. I’m really excited to be working with her.
Then, after a great reception to my first talk for UK Sport, I’m now hosting the rest of their event series for their athletes across the UK. This means that next week, I’m off to Loughborough, a place of various student rugby trials and tribulations, for a day talking to elite athletes thinking abut their next step (who will all receive a copy of Endgame into the bargain).
UK Sport have also commissioned me to create some content around athlete entrepreneurship for their private athlete resources. If you know an Olympic-type athlete with an interesting business, preferably based in London or Manchester, then let me know.
There’s a temptation with this kind of project to make it a whole ‘thing’ – to basically start a business that does solely this sort of stuff – but I think that would be a mistake. I’d rather retain a studio-style flexibility to work on different things as and when rather than subject myself to constantly pitching for projects. Nevertheless, this one is a nice extension of the work I used to do for LAPS and will get me out and about and meeting interesting people so I’m excited about it.
you can just write things
‘You can just do things’ has become a bit of a meme. There are the broad, sweeping ideas of ‘this is how the world works’ but actually, the world often rewards people who take initiative and do things without being asked.
As publishing is a big, traditional beast of an industry that tends to move very slowly, there are all sorts of opportunities to move a bit faster and be a bit different that are easy to overlook due to the inertia its traditional operations. I’m constantly searching for ways to share work – when I speak publicly I use Amazon to print and deliver my books but I’d love to create smaller, more pertinent pieces for certain events for which Amazon wouldn’t work well – and I’ve come across a tide of interesting ways people are publishing work.
Patrick Collison is one of the cofounders of Stripe, a payment processor that greases the wheels of online commerce. He and his brother are a pair of Irish geniuses, interested in all kinds of things but particularly in books (check out his reading list) and the wisdom within. Their core business runs to billions so publishing is a passion project for them but as Ben Blumenrose said,
Stripe Press sold 1000 books/day last year. That’s about $25k/day or over $9M/year off of 16 books! Incredible work and shows what you can do when high quality products meets distribution…
That is an amazing business. What Stripe do well is have a thesis, ‘Ideas For Progress’, that they pursue with an eye on beautiful design. I’ve read their book Get Together, about building community, and thought it was fantastic.
Then more recently, I found a way of making work very quickly that I might be able to use more broadly and I found it here on Substack.
I’m aware of zines (a writer I enjoy Molly Young seems to adore them) but they’ve never been especially interesting to me, mainly due to my lack of artistic talent and craft skills but for some reason, despite the abysmal name, the simplicity of chapbooks appeals to me a lot. I could see myself creating small keepsake books for the boys’ literacy project, or adapting bits of this newsletter into physical objects.
Lucy’s chapbooks reminded me of this manifesto I found in a lovely bookshop in Exeter one time, a quickly elegant way of distributing the written word. I’m going to experiment with a workshop format for creating these mini books but if you want to go ahead and do it yourself right away, check out Lucy’s post.
spiralling
I’ve mentioned before how even writing a short piece can take years. At the moment I’m pondering one phrase that struck me, rolling it round in my mind until I have enough to say about it and the ideas for Endgame, a relatively short book, took me 5 years or so to coalesce. I had the idea but not the experience, the headings but not the learnings and the will but not the distance for that work to become what it could be.
Zoe Scaman has a lovely term to think about the creative process. She calls it The Noetic Spiral, (from the Greek 'noesis' meaning the highest exercise of reason or a pure form of thought) and Scaman and it has 4 distinct phases that flow into one another:
Gathering – the active accumulation of material, done with intention and and purpose.
Rest – where it looks like nothing is happening but our unconscious mind processes what we’ve accrued.
Integration – the shower revelation stage, where disparate pieces connect seemingly without any effort.
Expression – where everything comes together.
Scaman’s spiral is a beautiful image, where your ideas bend, and swirl in and around each other, pushing together to move around and upward in a form seen throughout nature and I’d agree that creative work does work like this, often requiring multiple spirals. There is a requirement for rest, a need for the kind of lax but mysterious contemplation that happens when showering or running and a moment when everything comes together but eventually you have to stop the spiral.
Creation should not continue forever. Endlessly spiralling your idea will not necessarily lead to better and better work. At some point you have to finish it, publish it, leave it fossilised for the future to find and move on to something else. You owe it to the work but also to yourself.
a book
My friend Seth Insua’s debut novel Human Animal (amazon / independents) is out today! I’m about halfway through and intrigued to see where it’s going with its multiple narrative tale of family legacy, personal identity and animal rights as a dairy farm comes under attack from vegan activists. As well as being a hotshot debut novelist, Seth also makes beautiful illustrations.
a listen
This song is slinky and cool.
a quote
If you ain't got no sauce, then you lost. But you can also get lost in the sauce.
– Gucci Mane
lastly
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I’ll see you next time.