Jump Then Fall
Follow me headlong into a new endeavor
“Oh, you want to be a writer? Fantastic idea…” —Camera Obscura, “Swans”
If you know anything about Camera Obscura — and you should, they’re the best band on the planet! — then you know that lead singer Traceyanne Campbell means that last bit to be withering and sarcastic. It’s a line that always swirls around in my head when I think about my relationship with writing. I never necessarily wanted to be a writer in any official capacity, but for a certain period of my life writing was a point of pride for me. In school, I was a golden child to all English teachers, and would get a kick out of hearing that my 11th grade English teacher still showed one of my assignments to students years later, or when my friends who had AP Lit in 7th period would tell me about how our stern teacher would read some of my work from 1st period to them and basically say, “Why can’t you do this?” (Disclaimer: You will find none of that talent here — it’s all gone.) Even in college, where there’s this idea that Computer Science majors can’t write papers, I’d feel a perverse thrill during peer reviews in my film classes that my essays were much better than those of the actual Film majors.
It was there in college where I started my first blog, whose name eventually became its current, Gilmore Girls-referencing Oy With The Articles Already. As a lonely, suicidally depressed student who hated my major and holed myself up in my dorm room watching TV and movies whenever I wasn’t in class, it became solace for me during a tough time. I didn’t feel like I could talk to many of my friends about my interests, and nobody enjoyed my dozens of Facebook statuses joking about the cancellation of Bunheads, so the blog seemed a natural place to house those corners of my brain. Somewhere deep down, a part of me hoped that it would lead to me writing for The AV Club, which I read obsessively at the time. (Not sure if you’re aware of the current media landscape, but let’s just say I ended up making the right career choice by not walking down that avenue.) During those first couple of years of the blog I was very prolific, writing feverishly between the hours of midnight and 3:00 AM every Friday and Saturday. Who knows if any of it is worth reading now, but it was a creative time that I look back on fondly, marked with a sense of purpose I stopped being able to tap into.
After that verdant period, I gradually stopped writing as much. Some of that can be attributed to the realities of becoming a working adult and having to negotiate your free time more rigidly, of course. At a certain point, choosing to consume culture as opposed to writing about it felt like the most rewarding option every single time. Plus, the advent of apps like Letterboxd that incentivized bite-sized, less thorough thoughts made it so that I could get my opinions out without any of those pesky concerns about maintaining quality standards. It didn’t help that as a voracious reader of arts criticism, I was constantly comparing myself to the professionals and finding my talent wanting.
Eventually, all of those elements curdled into a genuine fear of writing. Even when I did want to produce something more fleshed out for the blog, the thought of actually doing it was too much to bear. The blank canvas was too unscalable. Countless ideas remained in jumbled notes, never to be wrought into a more cogent form. The one tradition I did keep up was my year-end lists, which became more of a hellish process each time. I’d try to get started months ahead in order to parcel out the misery, but the prospect of even beginning them filled me with so much dread that I’d always find a way to put it off for just one more night, letting those “just one more night”s pile up for as long as I could manage.
Despite it all, there was always a desire at the beginning of each year for this to be the one where I get back into writing more. If something is tugging at the back of your shirt long enough, eventually you have to turn around and look it in the eyes. I may not be good enough for anyone to want to read! I may not have anything new or insightful to say! But I’m choosing to let that go because sometimes you have thoughts that you want to get out on the digital page, and you have to answer the call when it comes to you.
Enter Still Workshopping, a name fittingly born from a bit. I’ve had “Still workshopping this” as my Twitter bio for 12 years, as a suggestion that soon I’ll come up with something better and funnier. It strikes me as a nice ethos to live by too: always tinkering, always striving, always turning over the stones in your head. And what better way to introduce this newsletter than with a post that’s not at all indicative of what future posts will be like? If you’ve read me before on the old blog, expect a similar grab bag of writing about TV, film, and music — and yes, the annual lists will live here going forward! It’s tough to leave behind my old haunt, but a newsletter is much easier, since you can simply subscribe and not worry about having to remember to go somewhere if you want to read me. My hope is that I can be a little more loose and not so hard on myself here as well.
As funny as it would be if this was my first and last post, I’ve hopefully got more to come soon! Until then, keep workshopping.
But the people want to know: will there ever be a new Taylor Swift ranking?