What I Learned From Finally Writing a Book
Writing, Life, and 'The Undeveloped Camera'.
I’ve always wanted to write a book.
To finally achieve this, the day before I left my twenties forever, feels like an achievement worth celebrating. However, I’m still left with an overwhelming sense that it is merely the journey continuing. That and the strange fact I can no longer relate to something I started writing over two years ago.
There is something special about working on a project of your own. I wouldn’t say exactly that you’re happier. A better word would be excited, or engaged. You’re happy when things are going well, but often they aren’t… So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you’re an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive. — Paul Graham
After two years, The Undeveloped Camera emerged from a coffee shop in SW London, following two hundred-plus coffees, people, and raw in-the-moment living.
One rainy day in June ’23, around halfway, I stared at a poster pinned to the wall across from me. The same poster I must have gleamed over a thousand times, that read: “It’s not about feeling good all the time, it’s about getting good at feeling.”
I took a moment to feel what I was feeling, and thought, ‘That’ll do as a book description’.
It’s about the human expectation to feel like rollercoasters, triple scoops of ice cream, and waterparks all the time, but oftentimes feeling like traffic lights, mundanity, and grief.
Though explored through the context of relationships, it’s about finding the extraordinary within the ordinary, and the sublime that follows the ridiculous. And the sense that everything is short-lived.
Nevertheless, the hedonic treadmill seems unperturbed and it tumbles on.
I don’t mentally celebrate ‘wins’ much… often… ever.
But even if I don’t need to celebrate too much, the lessons I’ve learned can be applied to life in general.
Agency always.
I used to have an English teacher who, if a student failed to produce the required homework, dismissed them with a cutting phrase: ‘It’s your life’.
He may have been genuinely pi**ed off, or he was using a bit of reverse psychology, either way, he was right.
It is your life.
I saw an even better phrase on a YouTube thumbnail this week: ‘Your life is your fault’.
All of this is to say that a thing called ‘agency’ is the single most important mindset you’ll need. The sense of control and purpose over your life direction.
If you’ve got it, it’s the most empowering feeling in the world. Bitterness and resentment may come and go, but if you’ve agency anything that happens will always be your fault, and by extension, only you can do something about it.
The destination may change.
When I said I wanted to write a book, I initially figured something along the lines of the great American novel, a Kerouac-esque deep dive into modern life, that would read like Didion, sell like Ogilvy, and ruffle feathers like Hunter S.
And that might happen one day.
I thought a book would just pour out of me. This didn’t happen — I didn’t know what to write, how to think, structure, or keep a story infused with meaning for long enough.
I discovered Medium and with it, the kinds of personal development-type blog posts like the one you’re now reading. All of which I once despised.
But still with no novella in the pipeline.
One day I randomly decided to give poetry a go. I figured it would satisfy me in the short term, knowing I was producing something long enough for me to figure out what book I’d eventually write and how to write it.
Over two years, I compiled a collection of 35 poems before whittling that number down to the final product.
Where you are in life matters to your writing.
As much as I want to say I just stumbled into poetry, this would be untrue.
After a few early, weak attempts at poetry, I found myself writing, to my great surprise, about one theme again and again — relationships.
Very Montague, Capulet, and cringe — the result of going through a break-up. It was heavily influenced by Cole Schafer’s After Her poetry chapbook.
What’s happening in real life has a direct effect on your writing.
Hunter S Thompson was right. Writers should go and do things and have as many different life experiences as possible. Gonzo-style.
Joan Didion moved to, lived in, and left New York, culminating in a fabulous piece of prose.
Anthony Bourdain didn't write Kitchen Confidential until he was 43, after decades in the trenches of New York kitchens.
Emotion is a powerful fuel for getting things done.
‘Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems until their father dies. They go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart. They don’t love you anymore. And all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life. And has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud? And that’s when art’s not a luxury. It’s actually sustenance. We need it.’ — Ethan Hawke
I’m no longer sure if the poetry book helped me to make sense of the engulfing madness of a break-up, but what it did do was allow me to sit with it.
Maybe it helped me process it. Maybe it unnecessarily prolonged the suffering.
Either way, it was beneficial.
A sense of urgency and adventure.
I’ve written before how reading and writing are central pillars to all things development.
In the end, all we can offer the world is the life we came here to live and the gifts our souls would have us give. When the end seems near, genuine security can only be found in taking the kind of risks that lead to a greater sense of life and a more encompassing way of being in the world. When the enemy is fear itself, only boldness and imagination can save us from it — Michael Meade
Whenever I hear him speak, Robert Greene really drives home the need for urgency.
It’s easy when you are young to think it lasts forever.
Every once in a while it’s useful to remember that everything is ephemeral.
Bundled up in dissonance
I will rise right up for you
let’s go dancing ‘neath the mirrorball
as we’re only passing through
That last line I once wrote is a good reframe to help create a sense of urgency.
As is the mental model that few remember their great-grandfather, and virtually nobody remembers their great-great-grandfather. In three generations you will be forgotten.
I don’t mean to sound morbid but that kinda takes a lot of pressure off.
This poetry book is laced with a feeling of passing through. I certainly don't feel the same as I did in writing the poems two years ago, and barely even the ones from a year ago.
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose…All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” — Jorge Luis Borges
Falling for me?
I mentioned that this is the journey continuing, so if you want to follow it subscribe here to Liminal Lens. I set it up just to see what would happen to my writing. It was once weekly, just to see what consistency could do. Now, it’s less frequent but will remain central to said journey.
Now that I have shown my previous fears to be fallible, I’m armed with the belief that any new ones that arise will be too.
My poetry chapbook, when broken down into its finer fragments, can be seen as a culmination of writing weekly poems up to last year, and months of editing.
My ever-evolving definition of confidence is having an undeniable stack of proof that you can do what you set out to do and to demonstrate vulnerability. Both of which, I have much too slowly come to accept, and that I sucked at.
I talk a good game to myself inside, rarely breaking into the public domain.
But here’s one such instance.
You can now buy The Undeveloped Camera here.