Notes from a compulsive noter

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled(Crown), 1982

It’s always impulse. Nothing more profound than that, though God knows I've tried to dress it up as something loftier. This was well before I routinized my writing on Substack. Seemingly out of nowhere a raw desire to write took hold. As for who put it there, I have no earthly clue.

It happened in strange places — in between sets at the gym, on a walk around the neighborhood, wherever. This habit began to form where I would open my notes app, the moment an idea struck, and begin typing furiously. Onlookers be damned if I looked manic. There was no slowing down because slowing down meant watching the only worthwhile thought I would ever have slip through my hands like the sand in one of those hourglass timers.

Often what I wrote would, when I sobered up, come to resemble a rusted old penny, not worth the effort to polish. And so I had this sort of unspoken rule: it had to be one sitting or nothing at all. A fevered burst of typing, editing on the fly (letting the internal critic scream but never quite listen), thus depriving time of its enervating quality. And then, why not? — blast the thing off to my ig story because, in that second, the idea of a disappearing act seemed kind of poetic, or at least justified by the fact that the stakes felt non-existent. It’s better not to care what people think anyways, right?

Writing like this felt like play — the kind where you're so absorbed you forget to be self-conscious, which is probably what those phenomenologists were really getting at with their flow-state theorizing, except I was just thumb-dancing in my notes app like a teenager with a crush.

The irony is that in times like these, writing freely, I felt least like a writer. Shouldn’t I be bolt-upright in a chair, word document open, Roget’s at the ready? Crank out a crummy first draft. Read it, then give it an intense furrowing of the brow as I ceremoniously crumble and toss it. Spin up a second draft — better, hopefully, nowhere near ready, questioning all the while what it even means to be ready.

But throwing out process entirely would be like yapping into a voice transcriber, pretending to be Midas shitting gold. I only wonder whether something is lost when practice insists on squaring up against play, a match I’ve witnessed enough times to know that play always submits when put in a de-oxygenating rear naked.

What I’m after is some kind of third way — a way to carve out space for play without it devolving into some lazy man’s excuse to dodge the real work. Not just indulgent unstructured wandering for wandering’s sake (though God knows there’s a seductive pull in that), but a deliberate kind of looseness where you let the mind drift just enough to stumble upon something unexpected and sharp. Sharp until you sit down to edit. There’s nothing quite like the agony of editing your own stuff — this brutal, almost solipsistic exercise in self-surveillance where every word is a reflection, and every reflection feels like a judgment. It’s what I imagine every girl in her twenties faces as she applies makeup in one of those mirrors with the magnification cranked up too high, forced to confront every pore, every wrinkle she’s somehow managed not to notice until now, and there’s this twisted satisfaction in “perfecting” what’s already imperfect, knowing full well that the more “perfect” she becomes, the more glaring the flaws she started with seem. This is purely fictitious, of course.

Where does that leave me?

So I’m stuck mediating between two versions of myself — Process Zach, who treats sentence variation with biblical reverence, and Playful Zach, who's basically a crow distracted by shiny objects but somehow stumbles into better sentences. When Process Zach gets too loud (you can tell because he starts having strong opinions about em-dashes), I have to let Playful Zach out for a walk. And yes, I mean actual walks, where I pretend to birdwatch like some retiree with binoculars, though it turns out there's something to that whole noticing-things business. But let Playful Zach run the show too long and suddenly I'm that guy posting stream-of-consciousness drafts to Instagram at 3AM, which is its own kind of problem.

One thing I've learned is that I don't expect to reach some big epiphanic moment where everything clicks, and I suddenly know the exact ratio of play to process, inspiration to perspiration, or whatever. It's more like this ongoing exercise in recalibration, constantly tweaking the dials and listening closely for the frequency of me resonating through my writing. Does it sound too flat? Loose-brained? Does it hum, or does it whine? Sometimes I think I'm getting closer to that sweet spot between structure and chaos, like a radio picking up a clear signal through the static. Other times I'm just a guy staring at his phone, deleting and retyping the same sentence while pretending to notice birds. I need to go for a walk.