the own-work woodshed

on writing as practice, internet fiction, and the right to be untalented

I. Woodshedding It

For some time, I’ve felt compelled to write about writing, and why I bother doing it. Specifically, I feel compelled to write about writing not in the grand humanist sense of why do anything in this miserable AI-riddled world that values nothing, least of all art, but to understand (and perhaps excuse) a simpler practice: why I write when I don’t have to. Why I write when it isn’t good or could be better, or is, worse still, unwanted by “my audience” or “the publishing industry” – in other words, is unsalable.

I am a critic. I write for work most of the time. Sometimes this is fun, sometimes it is toil, usually it is both. Occasionally, even, it is neither. I am alienated from my labor the second I sell it for wages, and so like a resentful child, I often feel compelled to write not for money, but for myself. It’s not that writing for money is somehow denying me my humanity – that would be foolish to say – but money is not the primary reason I write. I started writing when I was eight, when I didn’t know a single thing about money except sometimes my parents had it and sometimes they didn’t. Money is both blessing and curse, as it has always been. It simultaneously gives me sustenance and wrangles me like an animal, putting enormous pressure on me to be productive when I would rather work at my own pace. At its worst, it alters what I want to say via the market’s red pencil (or the publication’s) even when I offer my best resistance. The public decides and the public can hate me at any moment, and then, lo and behold, no money. Despite this double-bind, I realize that to be a writer is an immense privilege. I am thankful I get to survive this way and I know I am incapable of surviving any other way. If I cannot make a living writing, I have no reason to live, and it is that simple. I believe that utterly and no accusations of melodrama will dissuade me from believing it.

I am best known for writing essays, specifically about architecture and culture, and sometimes about professional cycling. I am not known for writing anything else, and yet I am constantly writing other things and always have been. Writing for me is a way of thinking and making meaning in the world. This is its primary function, especially if that writing is “not productive.” All other functions, from money to fame, craft to legacy, are subordinate to those two, thinking and making meaning, if only for myself. Most importantly, perhaps, for myself. Every time I write anything, it is a form of practice. This is more true of extra-essayistic writing than it is of the essay, though essays are also in their own way practice.

Like a polished piece of writing, a performance of a symphony is simultaneously practice, the culmination of all practice, and not practice at all, but something different: the work. Before there can be symphonies, there are individual musicians in tiny apartments and music school cubbyholes “woodshedding it” – endlessly repeating scales and excerpts, sculpting phrases, working on accentuation. It is not practical for the symphony musician in the practice room to say, I will play my whole part – all forty minutes of it – from beginning to end without stopping. And then I will do it again. And again. She works in piecemeal, alone, and then she works in piecemeal with her section, and then, the whole orchestra under the baton of the conductor. Her practice itself is continuous and evolving, but the iterative, practice-like methodology of “the work” is only finished when it is finished, and it is finished only once.

And yet the musician practices many things simultaneously. The work, but also material ancillary to the work such as scales and arpeggios, or etudes for specific extended techniques. The musician also practices old work, improvises, or otherwise plays for pleasure, knowing that this pleasure is also in some way practice, and in other ways that which makes practice bearable. Like a musician – I spent twenty years playing the violin –  I, too, practice in service to the work. Sometimes, at my most arrogant, I strive towards an abstract “craft” of the writer. But sometimes I practice just to practice, to feel myself getting better in a way that may not come to fruition for years. I also practice, and this is hard to believe, for enjoyment, even when that enjoyment also entails a certain degree of frustration. Practice is tautological: I learned to write in order to write, and in order to write better, I have to keep writing, which is the only way to get better at writing. Others can guide and help, and often do, but at the end of the day, you have to go into the woodshed alone. Thus, it is my view that there is no such thing as wasteful writing, because even wasteful writing is practice.

However, the prevailing capitalist idea that all writing has to have a ready-made audience, that it must be immediately polished, good, complete, innovative, and salable is antithetical to practice and therefore antithetical to writing. Tools like AI exist and proliferate in part because in our results-driven world, there is an aversion to practice which is ugly (to outsiders) and generally unprofitable and therefore unnecessary. Generally speaking, we have lost respect for how much time something takes. In our impatient and thus increasingly plagiarized society, practice is daunting. It is seen as prerequisite, a kind of pointless suffering you have to endure before Being Good At Something and Therefore an Artist instead of the very marrow of what it means to do anything, inextricable from the human task of creation, no matter one’s level of skill.

Many words have been spilled about the inherent humanity evident in artistic merit and talent; far fewer words have been spilled on something even more human: not being very good at something, but wanting to do it anyway, and thus working to get better. To persevere in sucking at something is just as noble as winning the Man Booker. It is self-effacing, humbling, frustrating, but also pleasurable in its own right because, well, you are doing the thing you want to do. You want to make something, you want to be creative, you have a vision and have to try and get to the point where it can be feasibly executed. Sometimes this takes a few years and sometimes it takes an entire lifetime, which should be an exciting rather than a devastating thought because there is a redemptive truth in practice — it only moves in one direction, which is forward. There is no final skill, no true perfection.

Practice is in service not to some abstract arbiter of craft, the insular juries of the world, the little skills bar over a character’s head in The Sims, but to you. Sure, practice is never-ending. Even Yo-Yo Ma practices, probably more than most. That’s also what’s so great about it, that it never ends. You can do it forever in an age where nothing lasts. Nobody even has to know. It’s a great trick — you just show up more improved than you were before, because, for better or for worse, rarely is practice public. Rarely are the most useful etudes — compositions derived from scale-heavy bitchwork meant to limber up the fingers — meant for popular consumption. Such is my writing, much of which is not necessarily intended to be read but is, in its own way, in service to both myself and the reader by helping me sharpen my skills to the reader’s benefit. This, at least, is what I tell myself.

All writers including myself work on pieces of writing that exist for their own sake, that are not usually for public consumption, are not about “the work” and its legacy, are not stepping stones to get somewhere else in their careers through merit, being seen, or knowing people. They are instead thankless and methodical, rather like the toil of an etude. Picking away at technique, coercing the sounds into harmony, picturing how the form could conceptually come together while still working at the infinitesimal level of every note. All for something that might not even be good, something that might be abandoned, something that might wither away on a hard-drive somewhere. It sounds like work. It is work. It isn’t work. It definitely isn’t “the work.” I call this type of writing many different names because it is always evolving to serve a specific need: it is practice writing, iterative writing, private writing. By private I mean that sometimes it is exactly that – writing for my eyes only, as in the case of a diary or journal. Other times, I mean it is writing that is mine, that I do for my pleasure, that is not for sale or for profit. It may be public sometimes, but it belongs to me and exists for my purposes.

Sadly, however, practice writing is becoming a thing of the past. This is in part because there is no longer a general pedegogy, culture, expectation, tolerance, or space for it. (Teachers teach to standardized testing and a diary, for example, seems rather archaic in the age of Instagram Stories.) This intolerance for private writing is merely an extension of the intolerance towards labor, craft and art itself in a landscape that rewards instantaneousness, entitlement — parasocial and otherwise — to artists and their work, and an unshakable penchant for the derivative because it is familiar and financially safe, all in the pursuit of raw profit. It should be said that tools like AI threaten not just writing in an existential, humanistic sense, but practice itself without which writing would not exist.

However, this is not an essay about MFAs, schooling or the education system – there are plenty of those out there, most of them in The Atlantic – and yes, I agree the prognosis is dire. With the limited space I’m allotting myself (a tactic gleaned through practice) I want to instead explore how I became a writer through vernacular spaces of practice, namely those on the internet, what made those spaces conducive to the development of writing, and how those early forms can remain useful and helpful in my work (and perhaps yours!) even though the world that brought them into being has changed.

II. The Form and Practice of Private Iterative Internet Writing

I needed and still need the internet in order to develop the skill of writing. I did not learn how to write in special writing camps and seminars or in school. Had I been left to the mercy of the K-12 system, I would have emerged from high school a master of only the five paragraph essay. Because I wanted to write and there existed no means for a child from my background to receive lessons, I learned to write by myself, by doing it constantly, a kind of gross compulsion. If I wanted people beyond my immediate vicinity to read what I wrote, I had to take it online, which I did, starting at age twelve.

Let me describe what that looked like. The way I, and many other people my age learned how to write long-form was dependent on how the internet was structured during a specific time, the mid-2000s. The middle-internet (i.e. pre-social media Web 2.0) was overwhelmingly decentralized compared to today. Hence, conceptions of the audience, and the potential for an audience were much more modest and intimate than what is expected by new writers in our current landscape of instant monetization and the yearning potential to go viral. Unlike today, anonymity and pseudonymity — now impediments to gaining a profitable following — were normal. In fact, they were considered safe internet practice. Both gave the writer a freedom to have a unique identity specific to the internet, and therefore the freedom to be someone different, to perform without the risks of being linked to one’s government name, a freedom that is gradually disappearing, to our collective detriment. It was bad and unsafe to be a twelve year old girl on the internet, but I was rarely a twelve year old girl on the internet. I was what I portrayed myself to be. I was, and performed as, a writer.

Back then, one either published small and local in forums or blog-rings, tracked down specific communities within large websites such as DeviantArt, published into mass own-work repositories sorted by genre hoping to somehow become noticed, or wrote into the void. By the latter I mean publishing via an unindexed HTML webpage or fresh blog, aware that the writing was very much public and had the potential to be found, while also knowing that no one was probably ever going to find it. To me, the sentiment of void writing was that of a lonely testimony, similar to a message in a bottle or perhaps leaving an unsent love-letter tucked away in a library book, hoping one’s crush would find it. Except one didn’t have a crush (only the potentiality of a crush) and the book was shelved in the biggest library of all time. Reliant on a belief in the permanence of the internet, the hope of void writing was not of virality or the work’s redemption, but of the magic of someone finding something they aren’t supposed to, and thereby connecting with a stranger, the discoverer, who may or may not become captivated. Just one person. That’s all. It was the era’s iteration of a diary.

the frontpage of the own-work repository Mibba.com

Internet-dependent writing has a unique form. Because the basic structure of the internet is essentially that of pages connected by links, the intuitive structure of internet writing is iterative. It is episodic. In other words, when people self-published using basic HTML, they did so at first via the example of desktop publishing: the creation of a new document, paired with the new ability to link to another document all served by an index, or table of contents. In other scenarios, such as forum posting, a new post was linked to and nested within another post — again, an iterative process. These preliminary daisy-chained forms were then extrapolated to middle-internet social blogging platforms such as LiveJournal and own-work repositories such as DeviantArt, Mibba, Literotica, FictionPress, Wattpad, Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own — not to mention the countless such websites that have since been lost. The form of the indexed HTML page, the form of Web 2.0 blogging (which was a more technically advanced version of the same thing wrapped up with a bit of social infrastructure in a more user-friendly package) and the form encouraged by these own-work websites, was, by its very infrastructural nature, a serialized, chapter-based form. This is perhaps why, on these repositories, non-serialized stories, being anomalies, were designated “one-shots”, flash, or vignettes, and had separate tags.

How a writer broke up their stories into parts using the website’s tools was up to them. However, the tools incentivized a certain writing practice: the stories themselves were overwhelmingly through-composed from beginning to end. Many writers will admit to engaging a little bit of retconning or back-editing, but the nature of the form meant that the only way out was through. When reading such works, it’s not uncommon to watch, in real time, writers become better through iterative writing. Stories become richer and more complex as they grow in scope. That scope has enormous range: some stories on own-work repositories regularly accumulate hundreds of thousands of words.

However, such a format comes with inherent flaws. Bloat is one of them, as the work is often not planned or conceived in service to the structural form of its totality but as a progression towards it, and sometimes it just never gets there. The other is continuity. Because much internet-based writing is episodic, if a writer wants to change their mind about how something is structured halfway through, it can become a massive problem. Despite its shortcomings, one thing this kind of writing was especially good for was practice. Many writers, in their author’s notes, solicit feedback for improvement, confess to the readers their flaws, elaborate on what they tried to do with a scene, how they feel about a character, etc. The writing process itself is exposed, intrudes upon the story via the socially acceptable textual interjections that developed within internet writing culture.

The nature of iterative internet writing is at once vulnerable, personal, and social. Writers collaborate on editing duties or on joint works, and often write for specific communities or audiences of people. The idea of the work being read or discovered beyond those communities is usually anathema. Serialized writing made it possible to continually build followers for individual stories and authors on these largely-anonymous platforms. But most people published to the internet not necessarily to become famous or infamous, at least outside the boundaries of the platform itself, but to merely share their work. To tell stories. To make something. To get better at making something. If you received feedback on those stories, it was always a pleasure, a bonus. But often, being seen was enough. It was thrilling and exciting. The only alternative to being seen on the internet was handing one’s writing over to someone in real life, and for many reasons that should be socially obvious, it’s understandable why someone would prefer instead the gaze of an indifferent, mysterious stranger.

Fandom, of course, became an early use of own-work communities, and continues to be the predominant use of private internet writing, to the point where many folks reading this essay would simply assume that fandom is the default subject about which I am writing. Back in the middle internet, however, innumerable types of communities developed. These communities were sometimes so small, only a handful of people knew about them, and were never limited to fandom. I was participating in fandom, yes (Kingdom Hearts!) but also in communities for historical fiction based on the lives of the great composers, communities for dystopian fiction, and communities of enthusiasts for the English Romantic poets.

However, these days, fandom is one of the only remaining progenitors and torchbearers of serialized private internet writing. The most lively and sustainable of the own-work repositories, Wattpad and Archive Of Our Own are both fandom repositories. To be clear, it is not bad that fandom continues this work. Internet fandom is as old as the internet itself, and is a rich social tableaux replete with its own traditions and practices. It is sad, however, that so many other outlets for private writing have entirely disappeared, have collapsed due to social and infrastructural changes in internet usage, or have become enshittified. I find it tragic that there exists so much abandoned potential, so many decaying testimonies to individual creativity. It is a profound waste that a platform like Tumblr, once so conducive to creative writing, has become clogged with features no one asked for and has all but purged any not safe for work content from its webpage, essentially barring any depiction of the violent or the erotic, two cornerstones of human nature, under penalty of censorship disguised, as it so often is, as safety. Safety itself is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The wolf is the profitability of ad-based revenue, as brands do not want to be accidentally associated with anything sordid.

At any rate, like so many others of my generation, I spent innumerable hours dumping hundreds of thousands of words into repositories, onto blogs, into the void, most of which went unread and sucked abysmally. The toil was often praiseless, though sometimes I met people who briefly alleviated an all-too-common adolescent loneliness. More importantly, through this work, I grew accustomed to sharing and being in semi-public, understood that writing was part performance and part attempt. I gained, through practice and through having a minute readership, the confidence necessary to keep writing and thusly began to see myself as a writer. Someone who writes. All of this, from the web hosting to my labor was free and voluntary, backed by a naive belief in self-expression and the utopian idea of community and not much else. That was the point. The only point.

Now, the prevailing model of writing on the internet is different. It takes place through algorithm-driven social-media distribution paired with monetization, via platforms like the Amazon Kindle Store, Substack or Patreon. I use and make the majority of my living from the latter two platforms. I am thankful that they offer a large degree of freedom and autonomy especially as the publishing industry shits the bed. Without them I would not be here and I would not be able to feed myself.

Economically invaluable as they may be, none of these platforms are conducive to practice. After all, you don’t sell people your scraps, your works in progress. But beyond that, maybe you don’t want to sell your writing at all. Not so much owing to a lack of confidence in its quality or salability, but because it’s simply not for sale. It exists for its own sake. There are hundreds of use cases for private writing that are presently displaced. Maybe you just want to write for yourself, but you’re also open to people reading it for what it is, which is practice or private writing. Maybe you’re an amateur or hobbyist just doing this for fun and simply want to let a few eyeballs in on what you’re up to. Maybe you don’t know how to find an audience, want to participate in a shared interest with others, are seeking some like-minded friends. Maybe you want to void write. Maybe you don’t want an audience at all or fame or obligation. If you already write, maybe you want to write things that people wouldn’t normally associate with you, things that are different than usual, riskier in any sense of that word. In our era of systemic link rot and internet decay, our era of centralized platformization that starves any website not hooked up to the algorithm machine, our era of beholdenness to the instantaneous and spectacle-driven nature of social media, where does one do that now? I don’t have an answer. So, as I have always done, I made something of my own.

III. Why Siegfried? Why Write at All?

I’m not changing the world with this, but I keep an old-school website hosted on Neocities.org on which I publish all kinds of things. Don’t get me wrong, this is not because I think we need to become internet Luddites or return to the past. That’s silly. Time, like practice, only moves forward, and if anything, we need to dismantle the internet we’ve made for ourselves and rebuild a new, better, more stable one than the one our ancestors left to the wolves. After all, what point is there in creating a LiveJournal 2 if it’s not intuitive to how the internet works now, and is therefore unsustainable and prone to abandonment? We infrastructurally cannot revert to the old way of doing things. The very machine of the internet has been irrevocably changed, its free, anonymous nature denuded, stripped for parts. All we can do with it is what I’m doing here: historicizing. No, the reason I created my webpage was less heroic, more simple: because I needed it. I needed somewhere to practice, and unlike an isolated document, a website can be visited and interacted with by other people in a very basic, convenient sense. I chose Neocities in part because I only know basic HTML, which is enough really. Black background, white text, images set to screen width. The form itself is limited, which is why I choose it. I’m writing to the form.

Unless you follow me on Twitter, you’re probably not aware of my private writing, which is fine. This essay isn’t an advertisement for it. In fact, it is little more than a lengthy excuse. At any rate, for the last two years, I’ve been working on a long, continuous set of projects. These projects concern the town of Ptuj, in Slovenian Styria, as it was in the late 12^th and early 13^th century during the rule of the Lords of Pettau. These projects have swallowed up countless nights and weekends. The research alone involved 20 trips to Ptuj while I was living abroad, countless translations of papers and theses from Slovenian, and books about everything from 13^th century agriculture to Slovene folklore to the Investiture Controversy to the Third through Fifth Crusades. (To help me in this endeavor, I also made an interactive Google Map of the castles of 13^th century Slovenian Styria featuring painstakingly detailed descriptions of each estate.)

Across the years, I have tried three times to write a historical novel. Each time, I reached about 20,000 words or so and then abandoned the manuscript. I have started and deleted countless individual documents ranging from 1000 to 30,000 words. Vignettes, flash, short stories, novellas, character studies, you name it, I have abandoned it. The sum total of failed writing on this topic is well over 300,000 words, if not more. My fascination with Ptuj often makes me feel rather like the protagonist of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Spadework for a Palace, a mad librarian stuck between the dual obsessions of Herman Melville and the architect Lebbeus Woods, dreaming of and wishing to actualize the perfect library, housed up in Wernecke’s AT&T Long Lines building where it can never be seen by amateur human eyes.

All of this writing was failed, yes. I am a failure! But it was also practice. Through practice, I realized, well, I suck at this! (Isn’t that exciting?) More importantly, I realized that, despite all this writing I’d been doing, I had forgotten the cardinal rule. I wanted the work to be crystalline, totalized and finished from conception, perfectly formed despite my not knowing at all how to write it. In truth, I’d never written anything like this before, yet somehow expected to be able to do so automatically because I was “a writer.” Having spent too much time away from the concept of practice, I had become impatient. I lost sight of the fact that what drew me to the Lords of Pettau was not trying to get published again or becoming an upstart in fiction writing or fashioning some intricate bauble with the hope of winning a Nobel Prize. What drew me to them was the opportunity and desire to depict a world I was constantly dwelling in, and, at the end of the day, tell a story. In order to tell that story, I had to, well, you get the drill.

Given the subject matter’s content and duration, I decided, finally, to return to serialized private internet writing. Why not work how I’ve worked before, in installments at my own pace, especially since the whole thing exists just for its own sake? It is, at heart, in my nature to make things and share them with others. This story is not concise, and so it needed a form that was more open, perhaps even interminable. This is to say: something in me gave up. I had to start from square one and relearn how to write.

Instead of meticulously plotting, analyzing, agonizing, I began to write freely, the way I used to when I was younger. I narrowed my scope from the entire pageant of the Great Interregnum to a single character, one I had originally created two years ago to serve as a romantic side-plot and a spate of comic relief. This was Siegfried, the lord’s steward, a brilliant commander of numbers and languages, terribly witty, deep-feeling, a womanizer. Siegfried is a bastard, half Slav, half-German, half peasant, half ministerial, and the product of a violent affair between the old steward and a laundress — in short, a man who walks the line between the fraught social classes of the Holy Roman Empire. He does all kinds of things, each of which is well within the boundaries of medieval genre fiction. (I’ve given up on becoming the next Andrić or Krasznahorkai. I just want to see how far I get.)

In the interest of concision, the basic gist is this: Siegfried is raised as a peasant in the fields, his mother dies when he is a boy, saddling him with terminal maternal guilt. He lives with his father, is trained as a knight, becomes a squire, goes to the court of Duke Leopold V in Graz, fights in tournaments for pocket change, falls in love with a prostitute, frees her from bondage and returns her to her family, gets ambushed, returns home, helps defeat the Hungarians in 1199, sets off on the Fourth Crusade but the Crusade ends before he can reach Constantinople, returns home again, becomes steward, develops the tally stick, kidnaps a monk for literary purposes, sleeps with innumerable women within the boundaries of his bizarre ethical constructs, barely escapes a judicial duel, participates in political intrigue, helps raise the lord’s son whom he loves very much, and is generally too special for his own good. And, then, just as his mother made him, an ordinary woman from the same peasant class enters Siegfried’s life and unmakes him. It’s what he deserves. He’s not a hero. He can’t be split between two worlds. The two worlds split him instead.

In working on Siegfried, something interesting began to happen. He became less a character and more an exercise in dialectical thinking. Wanted and unwanted, noble and ignoble, free and unfree, he is allowed ascension through merit yet is bound by his circumstances, seeks pleasure but denies himself love, is a (minor) participant in the forward motion of history, yet is also inherently tied to the fate of its subjects. That type of dialectical thinking is practical outside of fiction. It’s made me more nimble and nuanced as a writer in ways perhaps only I can notice. It also can’t hurt for an architecture critic to describe the same castle a hundred times or so.

When I work on Siegfried, even though I know eventually where he’s going, I’m never sure until I block out a chapter, how he gets there. Due to the nature of serialization, sometimes the pacing goes briskly, sometimes it slows down to the level of deeply involved dialogue and long inner ruminations. As writers have always done with their private work, I often use Siegfried for my own ends: to explore political quandaries, social themes, even feelings and problems in my own life. Other times, I want to practice certain techniques, such as atmosphere, pacing, dialogue or setting. The internet-iterative form, as well as the medieval source material, both allow a certain liberty in switching between perspectives and telling instead of showing. Each chapter is a blank page, white text on a black field, without distractions. You never know when the poet is going to return to town. There is freedom in that, too.

The question remains: is it good? I’ll be honest: I know that this is not my primary way of working. Hence, sometimes the writing is better than others because I need to practice. Within Siegfried, there are moments I feel are more sentimental and purple than precise and luminous. In others, there are flashes of something like talent; in others still, glimpses of the essay form. It’s not perfect, it can’t be perfect. The point is not to be perfect. I do it because I want to, and because something compels me. Sheer, dumb, stubborn creative instinct. Directionless, but out into the world. Like I use to when I was a teenager, I’ve chosen to let strangers into that world, available only via a single link, for no other reason than this: Writing is a lot of work, and it gets kind of lonely.

Besides, why not share it? What’s the harm? There is no point in feeling embarrassed about practice work because it is a means to an end and the end is writing. It’s true that, unlike my blog or my essays or my book, my audience for Siegfried is middle-internet limited. A handful of people, if that, with diminishing returns over time — because iterative work is also annoying — at least until it becomes something complete. Yet it is a shame that such a confession immediately invites the question: why bother? Why bother, when you could be enjoying your weekends? When you could be writing something else and getting paid? When you could be hustling and grinding doing the thing people know you for, growing your career, capitalizing on your audience and success? Aren’t you afraid of wasting time, of squandering your opportunities, of muddling your good (brand) name?

To close the circle opened at the beginning of the essay, my answer is this: at the end of the day, the only true reward in writing something is having written it. That is enough. It has to be enough. If that is not enough, why write anything? Before you can even ask for money for writing, you have to have something to write and then you have to write it. If you can’t write at your worst and your silliest, if you can’t stand doubt or self-questioning, if you can’t explore, can’t embarrass yourself a little trying something new, if you can’t endure the dark forest of sucking shit for as long as it takes to improve and wish that you could take a helicopter over it instead — if you can’t stand to practice — the robots are right there waiting to drain all the water from the earth on your behalf.

Call me medieval. I don’t care, maybe I am. I’d rather stay in the woodshed.