Writing is a weird thing to do. Setting words down on a page is massively impoverished next to a conversation. You can’t read the room, or the single person you’re talking to. Chances are you aren’t even there to see it when the message lands. There’s no room to pivot, no room to restate yourself when you catch it not quite hitting. Whatever you put there is what is there, in perpetuity, for whoever finds it. Writing is, in a word, fairly terrifying.
The upside is specificity. Speech is hurried in a way writing simply isn’t. You can write a thing, read it, decide it’s shit, burn it, and start over. Once words are spoken they’re gone, but writing lets you hold them a second, malleable, like clay on the wheel, until you’ve worked them just enough to set them loose on an unsuspecting public. Or friend. Or lover. You know, whatever.
And good writing, the kind where you’ve stopped wrestling the medium and started wrestling the ideas out of your own skull, is deeply personal. It’s the distillation of a person at a single moment in time. Their thoughts, their feelings, their petty jealousies. The body, the page, the pen or keyboard, they all fade. What’s left is the ghost of a person reaching across time.
You’d think the time-bending thing would make a writing project infinitely restartable. Random internet person, I assure you, it does not. Some projects are about one specific idea. Not like whether a new flavor of beam search holds up in planning (it does, see you at HSDIP baby~), but something softer and more complicated. Relationships. Love. Duty. As dead as the author is supposed to be, while the writing is actually happening she is very much in a conversation with herself about how she feels about the thing.
And that conversation does not keep. How I feel about love writ large changes month to month, because it turns out I’m over here having experiences, and thoughts, and feelings. They let us out of campus now and then, for enrichment, you see. You can’t step in the same river twice, for some value of river, or I guess where river is equal to a conversation your past self was having about a volatile yet inviolable idea like love.
So when I come back to a piece about a big idea, I’m not picking up where I left off. I’m sitting down across from an older version of me, and it has been my consistent experience that past-Jordan is kind of an asshole, did not set me up for success, and held genuinely cringe opinions on damn near everything. Talking to Jordan-of-yesteryear about love is a lot like talking to a racist uncle over Thanksgiving dinner. It’s awkward, it’s unpleasant, and you’ll take any excuse to leave the table. (Pro tip: OTC emetics are available at nearly any pharmacy, even on bank holidays, and are the andon cord of life.)
What actually governs this, though, isn’t whether the idea changes. It’s whether I’m expected to hold a fixed relationship to it. Love gets treated like a monolith. Love is love, inviolable, the same yesterday, today, and forever, like an office job. There’s this quiet expectation, mine as much as anyone’s, that I ought to have a stable and coherent take on it. When I don’t, when I notice I used to believe sad, wrong things about love, current-Jordan retches. Picking the draft back up means reconciling with the weird, wrong things I used to think, and man, I don’t wanna. Wasn’t personal growth enough in the first place? Do I really gotta confront my past self? But it’s Saturdaaaaay…
Some ideas don’t come freighted with that expectation. Take my transness. Please. (With apologies to Mr. Dangerfield.) But seriously, as the example: I do not feel the same way about being trans across a given week, let alone across years, and the important part is that nobody, me included, expects me to. There’s no monument I’m on the hook to keep polishing. So coming back to writing about it isn’t a reckoning. It’s just a Tuesday. I pick it up wherever I happen to be in my endless journey of self discovery (somehow, not a joke about onanism, go figure).
So topic is most of it, but only most. It is not all of it, because I have cheerfully abandoned pieces about fluid, low-stakes, who-even-cares ideas. Returning to somewhere you’ve been can fail because it isn’t there any more, but it can also fail because you refused to leave yourself a map.
Take “A Sincere Plea for Your Attention”, the essay collection I’ve been chipping away at. It had a spine before most of it existed: a clear theme, a fistful of titles, topics called out well in advance. That is a roadmap. Any single essay in it might still be a love-shaped pit (siggggghhhhh I should call her), but the collection as a whole is endlessly resumable, because the skeleton does the remembering so I don’t have to. I come back, I find some gap that calls to me, and I write it from wherever present-me is standing. I never have to climb back inside old-me. I just have to fill the next named box.
The shape of the essay collection helps, of course, but you can get there with longer form fiction. Resuming ‘Little Black Notebook’ after my move across continents wasn’t too bad. I had a whole draft, for starters, but also notes about characters, what chapters they appeared in, what their individual arcs were, and so on. I didn’t start with those, of course. If I’m excited enough about something to write it, I have to write it right now god damn it and nothing will stop me. But I did bother to generate some artifacts when I did my first read through of the full draft, and those have paid dividends.
Now, would the scaffolding have helped if my relationship to romantic love had changed drastically between draft 1 and draft 2? Probably not, but I think of the scaffolding both as map and tourniquet. Yes, my feelings about relationships and how they work has changed after an additional six months of being alive, but the drift hasn’t been enough to rip me away from the project, and the artifacts let me know what I’ll have to suture up when I return to the project if I want the book to still speak for me.
Notes and structure are kind of a trap though. They don’t make the work good, and they don’t make me want to come back to it. They do let the thing outlast the version of me that wrote it in the first place. Scaffolding is how a project survives its own author. I left myself a map back into Little Black Notebook, and a map back into the collection. So far, the little notes I took eased the friction of restarting the project just enough to keep me from bouncing off.
The notes wouldn’t have worked if I’d already moved too far away from the feelings or thoughts that birthed the book. No map can take me back to a place I have no interest in visiting. No character sheet reopens the version of me who was writing about love and acceptance in the midst of her coming out and early transition, and honestly, good. That shit was traumatizing enough the first time. Some rivers you really do only get to step in the once, mercifully enough.
At any rate, restarting a project isn’t a sure thing. Any effort to pick an old work back up and start on it anew begins with it an implicit critique. The reader, you, has to feel like it’s worthwhile to pick the thing back up. If you can’t convince yourself of that, probably better to lay it down anyway. Writing is made to be read, after all.