One of the things that has been striking me lately is that regardless of your ideological or political beliefs, it seems that no one right now is feeling especially positive about the world or the future. A sense of ennui seems to hang over many of us, not necessarily making everything feel black, but casting an overall gray pallor.
(I don’t mean to generalize and if you are one of the people feeling rosy about things right now, please do share it with the rest of us. Having some positive perspective would be welcome for many of us, I think.)
But one of the areas where I’m seeing this sense of melancholy, and experiencing it, is in our creative work. I’ve talked to so many authors feeling a bit what’s-the-pointy about their careers or their writing amid a challenging and ever-changing publishing environment, AI encroachment into creative work, increased competition, blah blah blah. You all know the realities.
But let’s leave aside this broad view for a moment and zoom in on something micro.
Read more: "When the World Sucks Your Creativity: Zoom In and Zoom Out"
If you have never tried one, sourdough starters can be testy little bastards. I killed several during the pandemic, when so many of us were trying them: They are phenomenally sensitive to temperature, humidity, how you feed them, when you feed them, and what you feed them with (the little princesses need filtered water, for instance). They may be bubbly and tall and beautiful one day, and two days later sit there lethargic and flat when you would swear you did the exact same thing you have been doing that seemed to be making it thrive.
They are mercurial in performance. One day it might take five hours for your starter to peak to the point where it’s ready to be used to bake a loaf, and the next time you try it takes nine. Timing is everything, and no matter how hard you try, it may not keep to the schedule that you painstakingly worked out and chained yourself to the house all day to allow you to accommodate the different rises and stretching and shaping to get a damn loaf of bread on your counter at some reasonable hour for you to eat it, as happened to me this past weekend.
In fact I have yet to get a loaf out of this fucker, because like a big whiny baby it crapped out on me yesterday when I had set aside the day to try my first loaf: retreating from the two-degrees-colder temperature that had fallen in the house overnight, rallying a bit when I warmed it up in a cold oven with the light on, and then completely deflating just as I came in to use it.
It is a stupid starter, and it’s too hard, and why do I want to make sourdough bread anyway, when so many other people are already doing it so much better and more advanced than I ever will and I can’t even manage to produce the most basic of sourdough bread loaves?
Read more: "What If Your Creative Flame Is Flickering?"
I warmed the water I was using to feed my starter (her name is KJ, if you must know, after her mother—not her “mother” as in the original starter she was spawned from, but her human mommy who created her progenitor and cloned off a glob for me), reduced the amount of starter I was maintaining, and put it on top of the refrigerator on a tea towel and wrapped in a blankie. (Yes. Wrapped in a damned blankie like a baby.)
I don’t know how the little bitch is doing. I haven’t looked yet.
But I’m also not sure it matters that much. I realized this morning that much of what I’m enjoying about trying to keep this damn thing alive and thriving is the experimentation of it. As maddening as its mercurial behavior and all of the ludicrously complex variables involved in nurturing something literally made of two fucking ingredients, I’m actually enjoying figuring it out.
Read more: "Turtle Truths about Writing"
This little shithole of a starter may be vexing me right now, but I seem to be invested in it, even somewhat fond of it, and determined to figure out what this asshole wants of me. Not because I want it to yield endless loaves of perfect sourdough—although even one would be a nice bit of encouragement, KJ, wouldn’t it…?!—but because I like the process of working on it, trying to solve it.
There is so much to learn and to know, and it’s challenging and annoying and frustrating and sometimes overwhelming, and last night I had decided to just quit this stupid experiment and stop letting this little crapbag keep fucking with me. I was ready to scrap the endeavor entirely and just focus on baking regular bread and cookies and cake as my hobby.
But then today…oh! She was glorious: high and bubbly and jiggly, and I was SO PROUD OF HER! And of myself for creating and nurturing her!
Any of this hitting a chord, authors?
When I am enmeshed in the complexities and vagaries of my sensitive little sourdough starter, I’m absorbed. I’m contentedly learning, experimenting, playing.
And sometimes she yields something delicious—like sourdough crackers or sourdough pizza crust or sourdough brownies. (Yet STILL no actual sourdough loaf yet, you saucy MINX!)
Read more: "Is It Worth It?"
I think about her all the time. I feed her faithfully every morning and I eagerly monitor her progress during the day, keeping a log of the temperature and humidity and results. I research ways to keep trying to make her better, to master the skill.
I talk about her with my friend who gave me the starter from the “mother,” comparing notes every day and trying to puzzle out our respective issues about it together, because my friend is as obsessed with hers as I am with mine. I love the connection and community of finding other people as absorbed by this pursuit as I am.
KJ is fascinating and compelling and challenging, and I LOVE HER even though I don’t know if I will ever figure her out, if I will ever reliably create tall, round, perfectly aerated flavorful boules like the ones that call to me on Instagram.
I just love her.
And right now, with the world on fire, the enjoyment and engagement and (occasional) delight I get from working on KJ feels like enough.
In fact it feels like a gift.
Authors, I hope it’s readily—nay, painfully obvious that I’m drawing an allegory here to our creative work. So talk to me about your own obsessions, be they writing-related or otherwise. What gives you this kind of enjoyment and absorption? What will you work at, without any intention of material payoff or reward, for the sheer pleasure of doing it? And how might we bring some of that delight in the process to our creative work—even when things are vexing and hard and frustrating and sometimes depressing?
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.
(I don’t mean to generalize and if you are one of the people feeling rosy about things right now, please do share it with the rest of us. Having some positive perspective would be welcome for many of us, I think.)
But one of the areas where I’m seeing this sense of melancholy, and experiencing it, is in our creative work. I’ve talked to so many authors feeling a bit what’s-the-pointy about their careers or their writing amid a challenging and ever-changing publishing environment, AI encroachment into creative work, increased competition, blah blah blah. You all know the realities.
But let’s leave aside this broad view for a moment and zoom in on something micro.
Read more: "When the World Sucks Your Creativity: Zoom In and Zoom Out"
The Struggle of Starter
Regular readers may recall that I have recently decided to develop hobbies, baking among them, and that has resulted in my nurturing a sourdough starter. (Warning for the delicate of sensibility: “language” ahead. Avert your eyes if you must.)If you have never tried one, sourdough starters can be testy little bastards. I killed several during the pandemic, when so many of us were trying them: They are phenomenally sensitive to temperature, humidity, how you feed them, when you feed them, and what you feed them with (the little princesses need filtered water, for instance). They may be bubbly and tall and beautiful one day, and two days later sit there lethargic and flat when you would swear you did the exact same thing you have been doing that seemed to be making it thrive.
They are mercurial in performance. One day it might take five hours for your starter to peak to the point where it’s ready to be used to bake a loaf, and the next time you try it takes nine. Timing is everything, and no matter how hard you try, it may not keep to the schedule that you painstakingly worked out and chained yourself to the house all day to allow you to accommodate the different rises and stretching and shaping to get a damn loaf of bread on your counter at some reasonable hour for you to eat it, as happened to me this past weekend.
In fact I have yet to get a loaf out of this fucker, because like a big whiny baby it crapped out on me yesterday when I had set aside the day to try my first loaf: retreating from the two-degrees-colder temperature that had fallen in the house overnight, rallying a bit when I warmed it up in a cold oven with the light on, and then completely deflating just as I came in to use it.
It is a stupid starter, and it’s too hard, and why do I want to make sourdough bread anyway, when so many other people are already doing it so much better and more advanced than I ever will and I can’t even manage to produce the most basic of sourdough bread loaves?
Read more: "What If Your Creative Flame Is Flickering?"
Figuring It Out
And then, after getting into some of the online sourdough communitieswhere people post their struggles and helpful fellow sourdough bakers/lovers help them figure their issues out, this morning I woke up with some ideas.I warmed the water I was using to feed my starter (her name is KJ, if you must know, after her mother—not her “mother” as in the original starter she was spawned from, but her human mommy who created her progenitor and cloned off a glob for me), reduced the amount of starter I was maintaining, and put it on top of the refrigerator on a tea towel and wrapped in a blankie. (Yes. Wrapped in a damned blankie like a baby.)
I don’t know how the little bitch is doing. I haven’t looked yet.
But I’m also not sure it matters that much. I realized this morning that much of what I’m enjoying about trying to keep this damn thing alive and thriving is the experimentation of it. As maddening as its mercurial behavior and all of the ludicrously complex variables involved in nurturing something literally made of two fucking ingredients, I’m actually enjoying figuring it out.
Read more: "Turtle Truths about Writing"
This little shithole of a starter may be vexing me right now, but I seem to be invested in it, even somewhat fond of it, and determined to figure out what this asshole wants of me. Not because I want it to yield endless loaves of perfect sourdough—although even one would be a nice bit of encouragement, KJ, wouldn’t it…?!—but because I like the process of working on it, trying to solve it.
There is so much to learn and to know, and it’s challenging and annoying and frustrating and sometimes overwhelming, and last night I had decided to just quit this stupid experiment and stop letting this little crapbag keep fucking with me. I was ready to scrap the endeavor entirely and just focus on baking regular bread and cookies and cake as my hobby.
But then today…oh! She was glorious: high and bubbly and jiggly, and I was SO PROUD OF HER! And of myself for creating and nurturing her!
Any of this hitting a chord, authors?
The Pleasure of the Process
I don’t plan to eat a whole bunch of sourdough bread—too much bread actually makes me feel sluggish and bloated. I certainly have no delusions of becoming a professional sourdough baker. I just like working on it.When I am enmeshed in the complexities and vagaries of my sensitive little sourdough starter, I’m absorbed. I’m contentedly learning, experimenting, playing.
And sometimes she yields something delicious—like sourdough crackers or sourdough pizza crust or sourdough brownies. (Yet STILL no actual sourdough loaf yet, you saucy MINX!)
Read more: "Is It Worth It?"
I think about her all the time. I feed her faithfully every morning and I eagerly monitor her progress during the day, keeping a log of the temperature and humidity and results. I research ways to keep trying to make her better, to master the skill.
I talk about her with my friend who gave me the starter from the “mother,” comparing notes every day and trying to puzzle out our respective issues about it together, because my friend is as obsessed with hers as I am with mine. I love the connection and community of finding other people as absorbed by this pursuit as I am.
KJ is fascinating and compelling and challenging, and I LOVE HER even though I don’t know if I will ever figure her out, if I will ever reliably create tall, round, perfectly aerated flavorful boules like the ones that call to me on Instagram.
I just love her.
And right now, with the world on fire, the enjoyment and engagement and (occasional) delight I get from working on KJ feels like enough.
In fact it feels like a gift.
Authors, I hope it’s readily—nay, painfully obvious that I’m drawing an allegory here to our creative work. So talk to me about your own obsessions, be they writing-related or otherwise. What gives you this kind of enjoyment and absorption? What will you work at, without any intention of material payoff or reward, for the sheer pleasure of doing it? And how might we bring some of that delight in the process to our creative work—even when things are vexing and hard and frustrating and sometimes depressing?
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.
