No. 8: Blow Up Your Life
How a Big Swerve Personally Can Make a Big Impact Artistically
Beyonce’s new song got under my skin.
I hadn’t been a reliable listener of hers — something about her music always seemed to elude me. Just mismatching frequencies.
“Texas Hold ‘Em” hit differently. It is, to understate it completely, a swerve. An artist adapting all their skills and arts to an unfamiliar canvas. This is not Beyonce Does Country, as lazy media will put it. This is a willful detonation of an old sound. I listened to it with no context, no pre-hype, no expectations or fandom, and found myself with tears in my eyes, even though it was 5:45am on a rainy, chilly drive down an underlit highway.
I’m still trying to understand the tears, because they come every time I hear the song. And I think it has something to do with the notion of a swerve. The idea that we all have new chapters inside us if we have the courage to leave old ones behind.
I’m testing this theory in my own life.
For the last ten years, I lived in glitzy skyrises in Manhattan, writing fairy tales.
Then a year ago, I blew up my life, moved to St. Louis for love, where I spend most of my time on a goat and cattle farm, and am writing… well, something as different as a goat farm is to Manhattan.
And perhaps the reason I found Beyonce’s swerve so resonant is because she made this swerve… with no good reason.
She’s on top of the world. Nothing is exerting pressure towards dramatic reinvention.
Why, then?
I can only look to the pale comparisons in my own life.
A year ago, my life was great in Manhattan! I loved my apartment. I loved my friends. I loved being single. I loved writing fairy tales. Anyone, including me, would tell you it was a wonderful, fulfilling life.
And yet, something about that felt like I was cheating.
That I hadn’t really gotten to the bottom of it, whatever it is.
It’s the same feeling I get when I look at a paragraph in my book and think… “I’m missing it.” Like I’m aiming my drive at the wrong hole. And when that happens — some might call it writer’s block — I usually just throw up my hands, accept that I’m a fool and have no idea what I’m doing, and wonder how I have a career at all… and in that doubt and humility and surrender, the answer always comes.
Now, writer’s block was taking over my personal life. I couldn’t bring myself to renew my Manhattan lease. I couldn’t write another fairy tale. None of it was a rational decision. There was just the feeling that things had peaked — I’d finished writing The School for Good and Evil series and prequels. The movie had come out. To continue on the same path would inevitably lead to chasing old ghosts.
The universe seemed to agree. Strange opportunities started popping up. The chance to write a DC comic (listen to my Tim Ferriss podcast to hear how that went). The chance to appear on a new series of Indian Matchmaker as their first gay bachelor. The chance to write a big-budget movie. And yet, even as all of these opportunities seemed compelling, they crumbled when I got too close.
In other words, the muse was taking me elsewhere.
Goat Farm elsewhere.
I wish I could say I plunged into this new life with unabashed zeal. Instead, I was stressed and scared. I’d tell my therapist: I don’t really know how to be a boyfriend. I don’t know how to make friends in a brand-new city. I don’t know how to keep baby goats alive at 2am in a -20 degree freeze. I don’t even know how to drive! Meanwhile, I’m working on a book for a new publisher in a genre that… doesn’t really exist. All of life was one big I Don’t Know, personally and artistically. The risk of failure so big in all dimensions of my life that failure is all I could see.
And yet, a year later, I’m happier than I’ve ever been and doing the best work I’ve ever done. A happiness and artistic fulfillment I couldn’t have found until I deconstructed all the old ways of being, personally and professionally. As Professor Manley says in The School for Good and Evil, “Only once you destroy who you think you are can you embrace who you truly are.”
In that destruction, I’ve found some key tenets to hang on to.
Some new rules for swerving, personally or professionally (or both at the same time!!!).
1. There will be a new normal after a swerve. You just don’t know what it feels like yet.
Twelve months after moving, my partner and I have found our flow. I have a steady routine. I’ve made friends I can rely on. I no longer have nauseous anxiety when I drive. The book I’m writing feels comfortable, confident, on-track. None of this seemed remotely possible in the first six months after I moved. There was no magic solution. It was just day after day of being bad at things and chasing down clues and letting time heal and trying to stay open to whatever came. Almost like a baby learning how to walk. It happens in its own time, in its own way, regardless of what you to do to influence it.
2. Artistic swerves means a lot of bad work.
I can’t imagine Beyonce’s first drafts of “Texas Hold ‘Em.” Because when you swerve in such a big way, you do everything you can to hold onto the old at first. Your initial passes are patchwork Frankensteins. In my early first drafts of this new book, for instance, I literally had a Sophie character vamping around being Sophie in every way but name only. I had references to swans and fairy tales. I debated using evil twins (AGAIN!!!). You have to write through all this. Your conscious and unconscious minds are at war. Your fear and creativity. But if you hang in there, the right sides will win. (Meryl Streep pointed this out when a documentary team wanted to film her rehearsals: “It just will look like a lot of bad acting.”)
3. Diaries can help.
Part of the reason I chose to write Diary of a Novel is because I was keeping one for myself anyway. I’d never been a fan of diaries, but in this case, I needed one as a moment in time so that I could look back and see that I was making progress in my new life… the same way I needed those before-and-after pics during my initial years of working out. Keeping one then during big changes in your life can help you see the healing and growing process in real time.
4. Go with what feels good
When you’re on uncharted paths, you can’t use experience as your guide. You have no relevant ones to rely on. In other words, when I’m writing a contemporary thriller… I can’t look back at my fairy tale fantasies for a compass. Same goes for my relationship with my partner when I’ve never been in one for this long. It’s just all new waters, so racing for familiar shores won’t end well. My compass then is simple: what feels good? It’s a fizzy, warm feeling in the heart, far away from the rationalizations of the head. At first it’s so subtle you’ll miss it for months. But once you recognize it… it feels like a superpower.
5. You’ll antagonize your old self/life.
This is the strangest part. You’ll go back to your old haunting grounds… your old friends… your old books… And you’ll feel utterly alienated at times. In fact, you’ll feel oppositional. Taylor Swift pointed this out once — that one thing she doesn’t like about herself is that she has to turn negative on her previous albums in order to make the new one. But it’s instinct. Your body, brain, soul are in an unfamiliar place. It has to reject the old in order to keep moving forward, even it’s just a temporary veil.
I’m sure I’ll have more of these rules as my new life keeps surprising me.
Have you ever made a big swerve, personally or artistically, where you’ve learned a lot about yourself?
And what did you think when you first heard the Beyonce song??
See you next week…
Yesss!!! I absolutely love this. I'm not a Beyonce regular either but for some reason that song hooked me. And here's the thing about swerves...I actually think there are some logical reasons why they make sense, even if it might not seem so on the outside. I think ALL the time about the quote from Walt Disney, where everyone was telling him to make more and more Three Little Pigs cartoons, and he said, "You can't beat pigs with pigs." Yeah they made more of those, but they never did quite as well as the originals. In your case, maybe there's simply an element of "you can't beat Manhattan skyrise fairytales with more Manhattan skyrise fairytales." I really, really admire people who've done what you've done and are not resting on the laurels of the epic amazingness they've already achieved, because creatively I do think resting on our laurels starts weighing them down.
All this is basically just to say, creative swerves keep us going! They keep our creativity alive! Swerve on, and hug those goats!
This is super interesting to think about! I always find myself gravitating towards the same ideas and characters and worlds, which is great because that's what I'm interested in, but I wonder if I should try going in a completely different direction sometime and see what comes of it!