The Power of Stupid
I'm stupid and you can too
Once while using a stapler I accidentally drove a staple all the way through the middle of my thumb. In high school, while picking up a girl for a date, her concerned-looking father asked me which of two rival sports teams I supported. Instead of telling him I didn’t follow sports, I told him I liked both. What else? In the third grade, I was bored during music class, so I began tying the drawstring of my shorts to the chair in front of me. I then occupied myself by untying the knot. I repeated this process several times. This activity was a success in that the rest of class flew by. I was barely halfway through a particularly difficult knot when music class was over and everyone except me rose to file out of the room. My teacher approached to investigate the matter. My whole class also turned to see what was happening. And what did they see? Against all odds, Seth Fried was tied to the chair in front of him. When my teacher asked what had happened, I told her that my shorts had simply, “gotten tangled.” She examined the intricate midshipman’s hitch connecting me to the chair in front of me, then shook her head gravely.
“No, Seth,” she said. “This isn’t tangled. Someone tied this.”
That’s when I looked her dead in the eye and said, “But who did it?”
Why am I telling you this? Because the same conclusion can be drawn from all these stories: I’m an idiot. I’m a bit of a doofus too, which is similar to being an idiot but really its own thing. I’m also a weasel, who often refuses to tell people the simple truth because he doesn’t trust or like them enough. But here’s another thing that’s true about me: I’ve written and published books. For a lot of people, writing a book seems to be regarded as an insurmountable, bucket list type challenge. Whereas I’ve done it more than once and I’m one of the dumbest, least courageous people I’ve ever met.
How is this possible? Is it that people are actually more complicated than the conclusions that can be drawn from examining only their flaws? Is it that someone can be deficient in some areas but brilliant in others? Is it that our impulse to sort people into easy categories is a type of spiritual violence against not only them but ourselves?
Not at all, friend. It’s tricks. I write books using tricks. The goal of my newsletter in general is to share some of these with you in case they might be helpful. Today’s trick is a simple one: Be stupid.
This can seem counterintuitive, since books have become a cultural shorthand for intelligence. People are always saying things like, “She read every book on the shelf,” or, “You’re so smart you should write a book.” But especially for the early stages of a manuscript, the strange truth is that being an idiot helps. A lot.
I can’t tell you how many talented writers I’ve seen talk themselves out of working on promising projects. These writers tend to grow frustrated because they’re trying to think their way through their drafts instead of allowing themselves to experience the messiness and spontaneity of those drafts. They want to hang back and wait for perfect pages to spring out of them as a result of patience. They would rather avoid problems than risk facing them. They say things like, “If I take the time to write a novel, I’ll want it to be really great,” or, “I want to figure the whole project out before I start writing.” When discussing the work of published writers, all they see are imperfections, things that could have been refined or done better.
Don’t get me wrong. Being able to think about texts critically and analytically are valuable tools to have as a writer, but they usually come into play only during revision, after the hard work of drafting is mostly over. And if rational analysis is the only tool you’ve nurtured in yourself as a writer, it can make getting through those early stages of a book nearly impossible.
An important thing to keep in mind is that a productive writer and a struggling writer are typically producing first drafts that are equally terrible. The productive writers I know just tend to accept this as an unavoidable part of the process. They’ll talk about how their manuscripts are a disaster in the same way someone else might comment on the weather. They’ve accepted that they aren’t writing a book but producing raw material and trusting that it can later be shaped into a book. They’re adhering to the wisdom in Frank O’Connor’s famous advice, “You can’t revise nothing.”
If they’re working on a novel, they’ve accepted that they will be in this uncertain stage of the writing process for months, maybe even years. The mindset required to work on a first draft is similar to the mindset required to dance at a wedding. You just have to shake out your nerves and get into it. Now imagine getting up every day for 18 months and getting into the headspace required to dance at a wedding. It requires a certain stamina of idiocy that can be daunting.
Even for me, someone with a preternatural gift for stupidity, getting into this frame of mind is the hardest part of every writing session. But here are the specific approaches I’ve found that can help make it easier.
Get out of your head and into your body
Do whatever you can to relax your sense of focus. Go for a walk. Noodle on a musical instrument. At the start of a writing session, try focusing on your breath for twenty seconds. Or concentrate on a sensory detail, like the way your hands feel on your desk. Giving your attention to something external and calm can help you step out of your anxiety. You can then start to follow a relaxed train of thought, which first drafts thrive on.
Quick sidebar: When I say do whatever you can to relax your sense of focus, I don’t mean booze. Trust me when I tell you that lots of writers have thought of this loophole already. Sadly, it doesn’t work. With alcohol you get about 15 minutes of writing done, then you spend the rest of the night pacing in your apartment and lecturing your cat about how everyone in the publishing industry is a coward. It’s true, but your cat has more important things to think about.
Fun first
If there are aspects of your project you’re concerned about, give yourself permission not to think about them right now. Focus on the parts that get you excited, the parts you feel ready to write. Those fun stretches will give you momentum and you’ll probably end up solving those concerns of yours by accident.
If there isn’t anything about your project you’re excited about, why not? Are you making the classic mistake of writing the book you think you’re supposed to write and not the book you want to write?
Are you obsessed with baseball? True crime stories? Ancient burial rites? Celebrity breakups? The Wikipedia page for hot dogs? Articles on the deadliest spiders in North America? Cheesemaking tutorials? It’s those things we can’t stop thinking about even though we don’t understand why (especially when we don’t understand why) that tend to be pay dirt for writers. Give one of these things your attention in a few writing sessions and see what happens.
Write fewer words more often
Let’s say there’s a friend you love dearly, but every time you call them they keep you on the phone for hours. It’s always great to catch up, but the calls are a huge drain on your time and energy. In fact, it makes you less likely to call them. The unintended result is that the next time you call them there’s even more to catch up on. The calls become even more of an ordeal. If this friendship is worth salvaging, you might consider calling that friend more often. Every time you call, you’ll lessen the burden of what needs to be contained in a single phone call. The friendship might even start to feel fun again.
This is a metaphor. The telephone is America, obviously, and the friend is Watergate.
Focus on the act of writing, not the completion of a project
When you’re down in your own sentences, you’ll start to have fun. You’ll solve little problems. You’ll hang one decision off another. You’ll make small discoveries and surprise yourself. It’s only when you start to think about the book as a finished product or about what people will think of it that you start to tense up. So do what you can not to think about that. If you start to have those thoughts, notice them without judgement and redirect yourself to the sentences at hand. Try to be patient with your book in its current stage. It doesn’t know how it’s going to turn out anymore than you do. Be idiots together.
“It's like driving a car at night,” E. L. Doctorow once said. “You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”