Private Nightmares, Digital Ghosts, and Anti-Productivity

An intuitive triptych in search of a theme

Dear Living Dark reader,

Recently several short pieces—mini-essays, in effect—have spontaneously come out of my pen, or rather my keyboard. Sometimes I share such things on social media or at my author website. Today I decided to group three of them here and share them with you.

They are nominally unrelated to each other. Then again, I’m a great believer in the truth that Donna Tartt noted when commenting on the eleven years it took her to write The Goldfinch, which had its origin in things she had written in her notebooks a decade earlier, long before they began to suggest and shape themselves into a book:

“I was writing for a while not knowing what I was writing. That’s the way it’s been with all my books. Things will come to you and you’re not going to know exactly how they fit in. You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you’re doing.”¹

In that spirit, here you go:

Horror from the Inside Out

Unearthing Your Own Private Nightmare

Recently an online acquaintance asked me if I have any advice about horror for someone who’s just getting started in the field. “Do you have any hard-earned nuggets of wisdom that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?”

I started typing, and here’s what came out:

Advice on horror depends on which angle you’re asking from. Writing craft? Approaches to publishing? Philosophical perspective? Recommendations for reading, viewing, etc.? From the craft and philosophical perspectives, I’ll simply offer my own riff on what Thomas Ligotti told Jon Padgett as Jon was undergoing his personal authorial mentorship under Tom’s guidance:

Zero in deeply, deeply, on what really frightens and horrifies you. Become absolutely clear on that. Use any writing or other creative activities that you do in this field to help you accomplish that act of inner knowledge. Seek the supremely perfect articulation of your personal horror, the summit of your private, individualized Mount Doom, the apotheosis in language of whatever naturally offers itself to you—and only to you, in your for-all-time uniqueness—as the absolute nightmare. Explore and perfect ways to describe this nightmare to yourself.

If you approach the writing of horror in this way, as the most deeply personal discipline of self-interrogation and dark epiphany that you can achieve, what you write will automatically, and paradoxically, prove magnetic to other people.

Additionally, and speaking solely as myself on a spiritual or philosophical note: Always remember that your horror is only as real as you are. This is both the way in and the way out.

The Ghost of Reading

Marking Up Books in a Digital Age

Books, articles, and essays are so much more meaningful, so much more intimately engaged and engaging, when you mark them up physically, leaving an annotative trail of your personal experience.

The rise of reading on cold, flat electronic screens risks losing that.

The experience of marking up a digital text with highlighting or typed notes, especially on a backlit screen, is simply not the same. The very nature of the interface creates a sense of distance, of abstraction and removal. It inserts itself between you and the author in a way that physical books do not.

We humans are embodied beings. Reading and marking up a digital text feels like interacting with a ghost.

The words on the screen are only a momentary spectral configuration of pixels that will shift in a moment. And more than that, they may well shift into oblivion. The existence and continued functioning of the screen and the device itself depends on a vast technological infrastructure and ecosystem, which itself depends primarily on electricity. If the lights went out, the whole ecosystem would collapse, and the words of every digital book and text on the planet would blink out of existence and be irretrievably lost—unlike the paper books on your shelf, which would remain sitting there silently, patiently, awaiting your attention.

(Yes, I know, in the long view all matter is continuously churning into different configurations. Thus, all paper books will eventually be lost, too. Their sense of permanence is only due to our limited temporal perspective as humans. But within our actual life experience, paper books are permanent and enduring in a way that electronic ones are not.)

The expansion of reading opportunities via the internet is wonderful. I benefit from it every day. But I also return frequently to the awareness that it’s a deeply and intrinsically different thing from the world of physical media that preceded it.

Personally, the best strategy I have found for bridging the gap is to read on an e-ink device while marking up the text with a digital pen. This provides a passable simulation of relating to a physical book. The way an e-ink screen looks to the eye, and the tactile engagement of the hand with the “page,” generates some of the same closeness and satisfaction as working with paper. I’m grateful for this technology.

I am also constantly aware that it, too, is just another entry in the gallery of evanescent spectral media that we have collectively chosen to go all-in on.²

The Art of Not Knowing

Three Principles of Anti-Productivity

If you, like me, have felt the allure of endless productivity advice wear thin and grow cold over time, why not try something else? Why not experiment with anti-productivity? Here are two preliminary and interlinked suggestions, accompanied by a third item that expands on the accompanying outlook:

1. ON GOALS

Productivity says: “Always visualize your goals. Articulate them clearly. Start with the end in mind. Know where you’re headed.”

Anti-productivity says: “Embrace ignorance at the outset. Have no idea where the hell you’re headed. Let it reveal itself one step at a time. Welcome the darkness of unknowing.”

2. ON METHODS

Productivity says: “Have a clear, organized plan. Break your work down into manageable units. Arrange them in logical order. Proceed in sequence. Establish priorities. Use techniques to manage your energy (Pomodoro, time-blocking, whatever). Stick to a schedule.”

Anti-productivity says: “Abandon any pretense of a chosen plan. Dive in wherever the energy beckons you. Use any technique or no technique, whatever moves you. Let your schedule and sequence be to just show up and see what happens. Follow the Stephen King approach: Just flail away at the goddamn thing.”

3. ON ENDS AND MEANS

The most problematic thing about productivity is that it tends to become an end in its own right, and a suckingly hollow one at that. Its Apollonian allure strokes the ego by promising it the position of CEO in our creative projects. This leads us to exclude the possibility of transcendence in principle, to replace the holy fire of inspiration with an illusion of being in control and choosing our own meanings and destinations. There is nothing actually, intrinsically wrong with articulating goals, having a plan, or using time-and-energy-management techniques. Where these things go wrong is when they promise what they can’t deliver—meaningfulness, fire, inspiration—and substitute themselves as ends instead of means.

One of the most direct ways to confront this trap is to dive deliberately into the sense of being at sea without a bearing, walking a lonely dark road at night with just a dim flashlight for illumination, following the road and the current wherever they take you, and using whatever techniques you have at your disposal just to keep moving and avoid disaster.

I have sometimes called this anti-productivity approach “living into the dark”—a phrase which, as you already know if you’ve been coming here for a while, was the original title of this blog/newsletter. It is, if you want to think of it this way, a strategy for meeting your muse and divining your daimon, for calling on invisible creative help by broadcasting the acknowledgment that the real ends and meanings you serve are beyond you—or at least beyond what you conventionally think of a “you.”

Warm regards,

1. Julie Bosman, “Writer Brings in the World While She Keeps It at Bay,” The New York Times, October 20, 2013.

2. For more on the fleetingness of our digital media environment, see Richard Heinberg’s brilliant—and in my view canonical—2009 essay, “Our Evanescent Culture and the Awesome Duty of Librarians.”