I’ve been thinking lately about the three kinds of writing Joanne McNeil recently described in her newsletter, All My Stars.
- “There’s the writing I want to be doing — that fully engages my imagination, that is risk-taking, and might not command a huge audience, but when it is well-received, there is no better feeling.”
- “There’s the writing that I know will always whip up attention when I want that.”
- “And there’s writing that helps me feel less precious about publishing, such as this newsletter, which I think of as like an ice rink figure skaters practice on that is open to the public. Nothing written here is ever perfect, but it isn’t meant to be, either.”
She has an idea for a critical piece about William Gibson and starts taking notes, but then realizes the piece doesn’t fit in any of those three categories, so she abandons it. “I don’t have all the time in the world,” she writes, “so I have to make choices about what to write and when and why. But it was a nice idea for a moment; so instead I’m describing this discarded idea as I pirouette on my little ice rink.”