My name is James Hazlett Foreman. That’s the name I was given by my parents, though I suspect my mother had more to do with it than my father. I say this not because of a lack of fatherly interest in child-rearing but because of a great deal of interest in names on the part of my mother. She cares a lot about names, something I inherited.
I resemble the man I’m named for. I will share with you a photo of him, my grandfather James, though you might not see much of a resemblance:
my grandfather
I don’t think I look very much like him, though people who knew him say I do. I think if I do resemble him, it’s deeper than simple physical appearance. We have similar mannerisms, interests, ways of speaking. It’s funny that of all my siblings (and I have a few), I most closely resemble the very man I’m named after. Why is that? How did that happen? Pure, random chance. There can be no other explanation, unless you want to get spooky. I rarely want to get spooky, so I stick to the material realities. He was like that, too.
It’s All About SEO
Why I chose to blog under this name, James Hazlett Foreman, is because I finally settled that, at the age of 43, on a name to put my creative writing under. I was content to be James Foreman, but Google has made it very difficult. My profession is in SEO, or the business of ranking pages higher on Google search results.
The name I was happily using, James Foreman, was terrible for my personal brand.
When you search for James Foreman, Google doesn’t think you’re looking for me. It thinks you’re looking for James Forman, a famous civil rights leader. If not him, then you’re probably looking for his son, James Forman Jr., a famous lawyer. Even if you put my name in quotation marks, Google doesn’t think you’re really looking for me, and gives you the results for the James Formans anyway.
There’s Only One Me
I am the only James Hazlett Foreman, and I am using this website as a way of firmly establishing my own brand of me-ness. It will grow as I continue to blog, using this as another distraction from the business of writing, which is what I should be doing.
I don’t know how else to describe how I feel, so I went with something nautical.
The nautical thing is an affectation, not an endorsement. I like nautical things in the same way I like wars that never happened—nobody was actually hurt, and it’s all just imagination (the star wars, for example). I like the culture of sailors from the 19th century, when ships were wooden. I enjoy the romance of those ships, despite knowing next to nothing about them and, not likely to enjoy the water. My relationship with bodies of water is entirely one-sided. I have no interest in them, and they leave me alone.
Getting hold fast tattooed on my knuckles despite not never having been on anything but a ferry once or twice and not even really liking boats at all and not knowing how to swim
It took me days to write those first few sentences (not the tweet, the sentences before it). I spend all day writing and yet, when it comes time to write for fun, which I used to do with some regularity, I am all stopped up. I wish I could yank out the cork and chug the champagne of creativity, or whatever, but the cork never pops. I have taken some steps to shake the bottle, which I will further relate to you below.
Ugh, extracting every word of this is like pulling my own teeth. You hear that phrase a lot, and I’m certain that it was first written by a person describing the act of creation when every part of you is reluctant. I resist every tap on the keyboard. I don’t want to do this.
It’s so much easier to give in. The easy path begs for my footsteps.
This Is Not New
I have never been able to simply sit down and write. This has not been true for writing assignments, like homework and actual work—though some days it’s harder than others to write about subjects I don’t personally care about, I’m never so stumped that I simply give up.
For the fun stuff (which I define as anything that I’m not being paid for), writing itself is an insufficient reward. Some people say they enjoy writing, but I don’t think I do. It is hard, and it is taxing, and I am prone to avoiding things that I know are going to be hard that offer no reward. All humans are. If we ran into every hard thing, just because it was hard, we would constantly break our noses.
Everybody who does something hard does it because there is some reward for doing it. The satisfaction of a job done well is not enough, or I would throw a deck of cards into the air and put them back in the deck in order, over and over again, each time satisfied by the excellence with which I had accomplished the task.
I suspect that anybody who claims that they do something unpleasant simply for the satisfaction of having done the task is surely being disingenuous. I don’t need to get money for my work, but I do need something. I would love it if that “something” were money, but I would gladly trade it for attention.
This is true about painting a room, organizing a sock drawer, or making a sculpture. Nobody does those things just to do them. If they didn’t get a painted room, an organized drawer, or a sculpture after the work was done, they wouldn’t do it.
Specifically to my writing, I want people to read what I write because they enjoy reading what I write. I want to write things that people want to read. I am repeating myself.
I am in a constant state of repeating myself, into infinity.
I am not alone in this. Many people would gladly trade money for attention. The evidence is all around us, but definitely on the internet. Have you seen Instagram? It’s an endless scroll of attention-seeking behavior. The more strenuously they deny it, the guiltier of it they are.
The words you just read are a deck of cards I threw into the air. Now I’m going to put them back in order.
Reward for Writing: Early Childhood -> College
Casting back my memory like a fishing lure, specifically for the reward I received for writing I did when I first started writing, it was attention, and good grades, not dissimilar to what I receive for my writing today (a paycheck and thankful recipients). A teacher is a captive audience. They have to at least pretend to read what I’ve written because that’s what they’re getting paid to do, by somebody, if not me. I got good grades in writing classes, but more importantly, I got a pat on the head and told that I was good at it and that I should continue to do it. Eventually the praise piled up and I could no longer dismiss it. My low self esteem causes me to ignore praise far more often than I accept it.
Reward for Writing: After College
I used to say that I did not smoke cigarettes while writing but that I wrote while smoking cigarettes. This was a glib way of avoiding the question of why I didn’t want to quit smoking when, in fact, it was because it was too hard and the reward not as immediately apparent. When I entered the dating pool in my early 30s, I cut my hair and quit smoking, and I was afraid that at least one of those things would impede my creativity. I didn’t smoke while I wrote, I wrote while I smoked.
Reward for Writing: After Quitting Smoking
I was successful in quitting smoking. I have not slipped in 14 years, and I rarely want to. I find that if I do feel a craving, it is because I feel like I’m not in control in other areas of my life. Habits like smoking are compulsive gestures toward control. They make us feel like we have control over our lives. This part of my newsletter isn’t about smoking, it’s about what I do to reward myself for writing after I took cigarettes away.
Reward for Writing: Booze
At the beginning of the pandemic, when my beloved coffee shops and libraries had been cruelly ripped away from me, I would pour a rusty nail every Friday and write something that always, eventually, passed through the foggy banks of incomprehensibility. I would write, but it wasn’t any good, and it wasn’t rewarding. I was writing while I drank, not drinking while I wrote.
This, thankfully, only lasted a short time. After a series of poor decisions marked by texting people who didn’t particularly want to hear from me, I revised my lifestyle and went back to my much happier relationship with alcohol: passing, and only in social occasions. In our current climate, this means I very rarely drink. That’s okay by me.
But without the reward of a buzz, I was back to where I started.
The Third Place and Body Doubling
I can identify two rewards, two aspects of my writing in the past 14 years that did not require cigarettes, scotch, attention, adulation, or money. Until recently, I didn’t really have a lexicon to describe these things, but now I do.
The Third Place
Wikipedia has given me insight I did not have before, though I knew the outlines of it. I knew that the coffee shops and libraries I went to in order to write were “third places” but I didn’t really know what that meant. I now know that it’s part of a discipline called “community building” and people who study such things have identified places like the ones I described, often associated with leisure time, as “third places,” in order to differentiate them from first places (where we live) and second places (where we work). Some people find it difficult to, for example, do second place stuff when they’re in their first places. This is a problem that many of us have had to address recently.
Body Doubling
The great McKinley Valentine, Australian writer and author of one of my favorite newsletters, the Whippet, recently wrote about the concept of “body doubling,” a technique for productivity specifically for people experiencing ADHD.
These patients find that a person sitting nearby, accomplishing tasks of their own, make it easier for them to focus on their own work. There need be no communication between these parallel processes. It’s because of this preference in me that I reached the conclusion, as I started to work a full time job from my First Place, that I “do better in offices.” I don’t have ADHD, but it still applies to me.
Bodies in the Third Place
I realized that I do better in offices because of one of those things (the body doubles around me) and that I write more easily in coffee shops because of these two rewards: the third place, with its coffee, or tea, and its body doubles, or other people doing their own work, act as passive rewards. These two things delight me, for reasons I can’t determine (nor am I particularly interested in dismantling them, for fear of ruining their effectiveness). My process involved going to a Third Place and having Body Doubles around. The pandemic took those things away.
Shaking the Champagne
Until I can go back to those places and recover some sense of either Third Places or Body Doubles, I have to find new rewards. One of them is the occasional “good job” I get from you lovely readers. That helps. It keeps me going.
Another reward is that I refuse to listen to my favorite music except when I’m writing. I’m listening to Andrew Bird right now, and enjoying it immensely. I don’t listen to any music except when I’m writing something for fun and when I do, I use my best headphones. This helps, a little.
I drink seltzer all the time, but especially when I’m writing. That helps, too.
Masterclass, Goddamn It
I have returned to this newsletter because David Sedaris compelled me to. He’s one of the dozens of contributors to Masterclass, a walled garden of lectures by people in a wide variety of fields. I was skeptical that this product had anything for me that could not be supplied by a few YouTube videos, which are considerably cheaper, but the relentless advertising eventually won me over.
I have watched as their roster of teachers swelled and incorporated more people whose insights I could see myself benefiting from. I was pretty sure that I would encounter these things:
a lack of depth. I don’t need to see Neil Gaiman talk about things I already know about, I want to hear something I might hear in a class
content for beginners. I am not a beginner (at least as a writer), and while every teacher has beginner-level lessons, they also get pretty deep into the catacombs of their ideas and processes.
extremely niche content, or content that wasn’t niche enough. I want a writer to talk to me like another writer would talk to a writer. But I also want to watch Penn & Teller talk about magic and learn something about my own creativity from that, too.
I am annoyed by Masterclass because it is providing what I hoped it would. I don’t know why a company doing exactly what it says it does annoys me, but it feels like it makes it harder to identify the scams. I paid around $200 for a year of access and I already feel like I’ve been privy to education that I couldn’t have accessed without spending even more. I feel like that enormous sum is a good value.
Among some of the insights I’ve collected, after only a couple of hours worth of classes, include the following:
David Sedaris talks to his sister in a lesson about writing about your loved ones. Sedaris talks about what he does when he writes about his family members. They have a very frank conversation about how it makes her feel, though she is largely happy about it. One lesson I learned that I hadn’t really considered was that if you write with love as your first motive, then it can guide you on the path of what you should and shouldn’t tell.
Salman Rushdie is a pretty decent artist, and supplements his writing with sketches. He also seems to have a booger lodged in his left nostril and is constantly scrunching his nose in a fight with it (or it’s just a tic).
David Mamet shares the wisdom, not from him, that anybody can write a good first act and that a second act often ends with a reinvigorating confessional by the main character. I never thought about that before.
Penn & Teller do an extremely simple lesson about how to do a “French drop.” I can do a French drop now.
I can only watch the writing “lessons” for about a half an hour before I get excited about my own writing again and have to hit pause and go back to my notebooks. Neil Gaiman suggested writing everything you know about the story you’re going to write before you write it. That all changes as you develop it, of course, but I wasn’t doing that before. David Sedaris shared his habit of keeping a daily diary. I was doing something similar, but stopped because the bland description of my day was boring and repetitive. But now I’m going to write a little story about my day and see what that does for me. I wasn’t doing that before.
My progress is slow. I’m not back to writing the way I was before, but I’m getting closer. The reward I feel for writing this stuff is the delight of writing again. This will not last, but it’s nice for now.
There’s a lot of “happening” happening and frankly I’m sick of it.
Oh man. Oh jeez. Where do I even begin?
There’s no central narrative to Jim’s 2020, though COVID will dominate. That’s just the A Plot. The B and C Plots for your 2020 were different depending on who you are—maybe you lost your livelihood, or lost your favorite hang out spot, or lost someone you loved, or lost your coping mechanisms. Nobody’s getting out of this year unscathed. Some of us are more scathed than others, but I’m glad to have shared the struggle with you. I’m glad you’re still here. Have some coffee with me.
I don’t want to fail you so I tell you the awful truth Everyone faces darkness on their own As I have done, so will you
Forgive me if I run to the maudlin side of the room so early (that usually happens later). I think everybody deserves to be maudlin sometimes. Hey, it’s 2020. We all need a little extra this year.
2020 was the year of A Lot of Stuff. The writers of the simulation really packed a lot in, like they had to use up their extra budget on the last episode of the season.
2020 Was the Year of Letting People Do Things
It’s 2020, so you should give yourself permission to [whatever]. Be lazy. Eat something you shouldn’t. Play video games in your pajamas. Indulge in something you normally go without.
2020 Was the Year of Kindness
It’s 2020, so we need to worry about each other more than ever.
2020 Was the Year of Forgiving Yourself
You probably did something you’re not proud of, or acted selfishly, or hurt somebody’s feelings, whatever. It’s 2020. Give yourself permission to be a flawed person.
2020 Was the Year We Discovered Everything We Should Have Always Been Doing
Empathy, kindness, sacrifice, mercy, patience, especially for ourselves, is the lesson of 2020. You don’t have permission to be good to yourself because it’s 2020, but because you always had the right to those things. We lost some things we can never get back, people we can never see again. 2020 took a lot out of us. We must give ourselves permission to be ourselves.
The Story of the Year
On a purely personal level, it’s hard to get a firm grasp on the narrative for Jim’s 2020. 2018 was easy: tumor time! 2019 was a year of collapse, both personally and professionally. So much happened in 2020 yet nothing really happened, too, yet everything actually happened and it’s still happening. It was hard in ways I didn’t expect and nothing was easy, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Fate’s cruel finger never found me.
Using Garbage as an Analogy for Writing
There’s a huge pile of cardboard boxes sitting in my living room. This often happens after the holidays. I have to break this stack down and take it someplace to be recycled. I know every single step. I know what I need to do and how to do it and in what order.
These three things are simultaneously true:
I have decided what I need to do.
I will do it when I’m ready.
I will never be ready.
The fact that there is not a pile of cardboard from last year is evidence that I will do it eventually, before I’m ready. That’s because there is no such thing as “being ready.”
Every fortress falls It is not the end
If Not Now, When?
I was in therapy, many years ago. I had been working hard on my social anxiety with my therapist, who was helping me toward the goal of being able to talk to strangers without having a panic attack. I had made great progress in his office, I had done my homework every week, and I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to get over my social anxiety.
“So, how did it go?” he asked.
I was speechless. I probably made a face like my favorite emoji: 🧐
I explained that I hadn’t actually done any of the things we had practiced. Why not, he asked. Because I’m not ready. He didn’t quote Hillel the Elder to me, but what he said was a gentle, therapisty way of saying the same thing. I’m paraphrasing, but this is what he said:
“There needs to come a point when this stops being theoretical. You won’t feel ready. You have to take those steps anyway or you’ll never get where you’re going.”
It was such a simple lesson to learn but it has informed every part of my life since I learned it. Like any lesson, I have to remind myself of it periodically. Sometimes, I have to rediscover it, like a book I forgot I owned and bought again.
What does that have to do with writing?
When I think about My Writing Career, it’s like looking at the sun. It’s like thinking about what happens after we die. It’s like moving a giant rock out of my yard so I can plant a garden there. I don’t know where to begin, and I don’t know what I need to do, and I’m not ready. I don’t want to confront it. I don’t want to answer the question lingering at the edge: should I just give it up?
More than once this year, I’ve considered throwing it away. I write every single day for my lensgrinding job, so it’s not as if I’ll stop writing words. But as far as my career as a fiction writer goes, I feel like I’ll always be a person who tried for a while but gave it up.
It ain’t if you fall But how you rise that says Who you really are
I Decided to Continue
I decided that I was simply being dramatic, as I often am. Stop being dramatic, I told myself. You’re just having a hard time of it. Save some of that sympathy for yourself.
I rediscovered that lesson I learned in my therapist’s office twenty years ago: I just have to do it. The only way to get through something is to go through it. All those doubts and fears and questions have one answer, a clanging, loud, ringing of a very large bell that says, in the language of bells, “just fucking do it.”
So I will. I’d rather be the dumb schlub who didn’t know he wasn’t any good and kept trying anyway than the person who stopped before he really got started.
Do you hear the bell?
I’ve Been Here Before
My memory is a tattered, unreliable thing. Stories I hear about people and who those people are don’t always converge, so somebody will tell me about something that happened to them and then bring it up later and I’ll have no memory of it, at first, but then they reframe it with a rough outline of what they already told me once instead of whatever signposts they thought were the important signifiers and I’ll remember it (usually).
Somebody might say “it’s like when Guy stole my air conditioner” and I don’t remember the story but then they’ll say “I told you about this, Guy stole my air conditioner on the hottest day of the year and drank all my seltzer, too” and then I’ll remember the story because the signpost that remained with me wasn’t the air conditioner at all but the seltzer. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.
The point I was trying to make is this: I already wrote about giving up writing. It was over a year ago! Here we are again. I think all creative people can relate to that feeling, so it’s natural that I should experience it again.
Sometimes I Get Lost
I don’t mean literally lost, though that does happen, even in the age of GPS and omnipresent tracking, I mean in my own head. It’s not enough to simply forget things, I also enjoy worrying about forgetting things. Worrying is one of the dumbest things I do. Sometimes it pretends to be “planning” but it’s not.
Dementia lies heavy on my family tree. It doesn’t hit all of us, but when it does it hits hard. Some of us, like my great aunt, lived a very long time and only slightly lost her edge right at the end. Some of us, like the paternal grandfather I barely knew, died from Alzheimer’s. The paternal grandmother I knew very well died of vascular dementia, which is the medical term for a gradual, inexorable atrophy of the brain. People who die of dementia do so usually because their bodies simply forget how to sustain them. It’s an awful, terrible experience for everyone.
If you’re wondering if I’m going to pivot into how I worry that my memory problems stem from early onset dementia (and it would be extremely early, though not impossibly so), then you must be a subscriber.
I don’t have early onset dementia. One of the (few) benefits of having had a brain tumor is that I have a neurosurgeon, a radiologist and an oncologist examine a very detailed MRI scan of my brain once a year. They are specifically looking for bad things. They would have noticed if my brain had atrophied.
This Was Supposed to be About 2020
I wrote a year-end post for 2019 and in reading it again, a year later, I am chagrined. Some of the things I wrote about ended up being far worse than they appeared at the time. Many of those things I was thankful for went away. Such is life. Good fortune, bad fortune, they move in and out like the tide.
2020 is over, and some great things happened for me. I got a job I love during the worst pandemic in a century. I’ll stop there, because even if the last twelve months had good parts for me, I can’t ignore the suffering going on around me.
We are currently living through a massive humanitarian crisis. Even those who haven’t been killed or debilitated by COVID are under enormous threat. I won’t innumerate all of those, either, because if you’re reading this then you’re living through it, too, and I don’t want to be a bummer. For so many people, 2020 is a giant bummer, the worst year of their lives, and my problems shrink in comparison.
The truth is, I’m fine, I’m actually great, and if you’re not, I will help you as much as I can.
2020 can die in a ditch. Even if 2021 isn’t markedly better for you, at least it will be different, and that’s something.
If your fortress is under siege You can always run to me If ever your fortress caves You’re always safe in mine
All the quotes in this newsletter were from a song by Queens of the Stone Age called Fortress, which you can watch and listen to here:
