How’s the Writing Going, Michael Seidlinger?

This is a column called How’s the Writing Going? It’s the question no writer wants to be asked—but which every writer wants to ask others. We want to know that other people are struggling the same way we are, or to learn other writers’ hacks and antidotes for blocks and other challenges.

Here I chat with author Michael Seidlinger about his frequent tweets poking fun at how emotionally trying writing can be.

Michael J. Seidlinger is the Filipino American author of Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma (Future Tense Books, 2021) and other books. He has written for, among others, Wired, BuzzFeed, Thrillist, Goodreads, The Observer, Polygon, The Believer, and Publishers Weekly. He teaches at Portland State University and has led workshops at Catapult, Kettle Pond Writers’ Conference, and Sarah Lawrence. You can find him online on Twitter (@mjseidlinger) and Instagram (@michaelseidlinger).

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Sari Botton: I always enjoy your tweets about how hard the writing process can be. They’re always funny and relatable. So I wanted to check in with you and hear what’s behind them.

Michael Seidlinger: I tend to be a hyperproductive kind of writer. That doesn’t mean I never have writer’s block or difficulties. I’m also hyperaware of feeling writing despair and doubting the work. One writing session might go really well and you feel great. At the end of it you’re like, “Oh yeah, I think that could be a cool scene that I just finished writing,” or whatever. But there are so many sessions where you climb out of it with words on the page but you feel like it didn’t really work out. Maybe you’re not on your A game, and that can just send a writer into a spiral.

SB: What are you working on right now?

MS: I’m working on a novel. I’m about seven chapters in or so. It’s one of those rare instances where the editor pitched me on the idea. They had liked my book My Pet Serial Killer. They said, “You’re the one to write this—Scream meets girl in the publishing industry.” So I’ve decided to pinpoint the main character as an assistant agent, which is, like, one of the worst jobs in the industry. It’s going to explore the toxicity of publishing. Publishing doesn’t really help our creativity. It kind of makes us doubt ourselves as we’re writing. The idea of success is so layered and so relative anyway. But then when we see all these book deals popping up, and news of people winning awards, we feel bad, and there’s a counterproductivity to that.

I had one of those not-so-good writing sessions yesterday. I’m going to have to rewrite what I wrote. It’s like that David Lynch meme that goes around, like, “Okay, let’s try it again, but this time good.”

SB: When I have that kind of writing session, I tell myself, “Well, at least what I’ve written exists.” I try to pay attention to when my perfectionism is getting in my way and keeping me from just getting stuff down that I can later reshape and improve. Do you ever sort of console yourself with that idea?

MS: When I started writing eleven or twelve years ago, I feared multiple drafts. I always tried to write the only draft. [Laughs.] I would stop and reedit as a I went. I know now that I was just too lazy to go back and take on reviewing and reworking one hundred or more pages with discipline. It took me a while to get to the point where I realized there’s value in a crappy first draft. In fact, it’s better to have that, because you get all this stuff out, and you might discover things along the way that you didn’t even anticipate. When you go back into your second draft, you gain control over the narrative. You’re no longer in uncharted territory.

SB: As I was completing the manuscript for my book last spring, I had to stop myself from editing at the same time that I was writing. I was trying to eliminate future drafts. When you’re writing on a digital device, it’s too easy to edit while you’re writing. I keep forgetting that editing and writing are two very different functions, and they are not compatible. You can’t really do them both well at the same time. And so I had to stop editing and just get the first draft down. Then you can massage later. Actually, my favorite way to generate first drafts is longhand, but then I run into the problem of transcription, which takes a lot of time. If I don’t keep up with transcription, I wind up with this enormous backlog, and then I just completely shut down.

MS: I have a tendency when I edit to go back into creative mode. All of a sudden I’m writing again. But over time I’ve been able to develop a sort of faculty. It’s almost like a mercenary approach, where I walk into it knowing that once I’m done with the first draft, I have to approach the second draft with a certain role in mind. The first draft is like the proverbial playground, where I get to try everything out. But when I go back in for the second draft, I have to be more methodical and have clearer intent. I reread, make notes, and create a second outline based on the first draft. And then I write the second draft with all that new information and clarity. From there I edit as if I’m a hired editor and it’s not my manuscript, and I get more granular, with line edits. Then I write another draft, and so on, until it’s done.

SB: It’s always amazing to me how much attendant neurotic bullshit there is around writing. And also the mind games we need to play with ourselves to counteract all of that. I’ve tweeted a couple of times asking literary and media Twitter whether there’s a special kind of therapist for writers who just deals with this writing-related angst. I want to know: Does such a person exist?

MS: They should!

SB: I would hire one, assuming it was affordable or covered by insurance. But these are very real conditions in our minds. I feel like you’re playing with that when you tweet about how hard it is to write.

MS: I started doing it on a whim. Just me trying to be funny but also tackling something. I’ve been doing it for years now, and I continue to because it helps me, but it also clearly helped at least one other person: you. When other writers see those tweets, maybe they don’t feel so alone anymore.

SB: I’ve seen some other writers post similar tweets—Cheryl Strayed, Celeste Ng. In the past eighteen or so months, as we’ve been living through a pandemic and political unrest, more and more writers seem to be voicing certain anxieties. I know for me, in addition to the sense of terror that’s paralyzed me, there’s also a sense of, What’s the point? Who cares about my memoir? Why bother writing it? It’s a big crisis of faith. In the end, I’m glad I finished my manuscript and I’m glad I’m going to publish my book in the summer of 2022. But it was touch and go for a while there. Has it been harder for you recently because of everything we’ve been contending with?

MS: I always battle with the realization that the stuff I write doesn’t need to exist, and I wonder how many people actually want to read the horror and speculative fiction that I write. There’s all this cross chatter in my brain that has only gotten worse due to the pandemic and political unease and turmoil. There have been defeatist moments where I’ve thought, maybe I shouldn’t have been a writer. I’m thirty-five years old and maybe I should pivot to something else. But I’ve done a lot of self-reflection as to why I went toward writing, and I’ve realized that I do enjoy it. I like creating something out of essentially thin air. It’s always a sort of escapism and a sanctuary for me. I realized I needed to stop thinking about it specifically just for publication. Like, I’m doing this as a form of my own therapy, for my own escapism and self-challenge. If it ends up being published, cool. That’s the icing.

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