Last weekend, I holed up for several days to bang out a chapter of my book — the first chapter, actually, and probably the most challenging. I have been a writer on this earth long enough to know that you don’t start writing anything at the beginning; you start at the hardest part and work your way out of it. (Unless you don’t know what the essay is about, in which case you start with a good lede, but I digress.)
It was the Arendt chapter, which I wrote about last week in this here newsletter. Arendt is the only non-artist in the bunch that I plan to write about. Are you curious about the others?
Here they are, as of right now, though this is subject to change and I have a sneaking suspicion they won’t all make it into what is going to be a rather short book:
Alice B. Toklas (the writer, and maintainer of Gertrude Stein’s moveable feast)
Sara Murphy (maven, gadfly, and convener of the Lost Generation)
Edna Lewis (the legendary cook and cookbook writer who is more or less responsible for turning Southern food into its own cuisine)
Maya Angelou (the poet, memoirist, activist, and, as it turns out, legendary hostess)
Chantal Akerman (the filmmaker, who gives me a good counterpoint)
Agnes Varda (also filmmaker and personal icon; homing in on The Gleaners and I)
Laurie Colwin (novelist, writer of food books, patron saint of contentment)
Octavia Butler (brilliant, groundbreaking sci-fi writer)
Ella Baker (Civil Rights activist who went for the grassroots, recently cited in Joe Biden’s nomination acceptance speech)
Elizabeth David (food writer, generally fascinating woman)
Shirley Jackson (the novelist and crafter of exquisite ghost stories and also, as it turns out, kind of a domestic goddess — she wrote two books about it)
And Hannah Arendt, of course.
Anyhow. I had finished my draft (about 800 words too long at present) and tweeted about how I always change the font of every draft when I re-read it. I have … sort of assumed this is what people do. I know it wasn’t my idea.
Well! People apparently don’t do it! Not all of them, anyhow, and I blew a whole host of people’s minds. Just change the font of anything you write, and suddenly the “voice” changes, or at least it does for me. Now it’s being read back to me in an entirely different tone, and I can spot things that need a bit of tweaking or reshaping. It’s the easiest revision technique I know. (One friend said he prints everything out, which is my other favorite trick, except at the moment I don’t have a printer available to me, though I plan to get one as soon as I can scare up the cash.)
It is crashingly boring to make everything a Life Lesson, but I realized this morning while out running through the autumn leaves in the park that changing the font is a bit of a metaphor for how I’m getting through This Time. I have very little patience as a rule, and I like to know what’s coming. My life is not full of drudgery, but it is full of a lot of repetitive tasks I’d rather not do (grading papers, for instance, or writing endless lists of movie recommendations), and usually I hang onto the future as something to look forward to and give meaning to today.
Now I don’t have those, except in a hazy way — which is to say, I don’t know when “the future” is going to get here. At the moment I feel like I’m living in an endless now.
But, mentally, I’m trying to change the font — to see things from a different angle, which is to say to count on today. Today, I am healthy. Today I have a job (well, two). Today I have a book I am writing. Today I have more food in my house than I can eat, and a patio, and a washer and dryer, two insane amenities in New York. Today I live in a city I love, where I can walk around and feel happiness. Today will give way to tomorrow, and some day, there will be a tomorrow with good news in it.
Gotta shift the font back eventually, but it is, for now, something good, a little something to tweak and reshape the present.
And also if you are writing something, this trick rules.