February is almost over — weirdly, this managed to feel like the longest February in the history of months, even though it was pretty great. I got two tattoos, I celebrated one year with my boyfriend, I got a new byline, I saw Pathaan twice. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been pushing finishing this dreaded second newsletter until the end of the month.
About three weeks ago, I attended a free creative writing workshop at the New York Public Library. I have been feeling largely creatively unfulfilled for quite some time now (haha, who feel me?), at least as far back as late winter of 2022. I’m not really sure what the inciting incident was, or if there even was one — whether I had been overworking myself and burned out (these are both true), or if I did genuinely lose some sort of nebulous creative spark that I had firmly grasped for three years, that decided to leave me for whatever reason and that I now needed to figure out how to reignite. Whatever the case, it was clear that I just wasn’t feeling as happy with my work, and nothing was inspiring me the way it had used to.
Last year, I was pitching a lot of pieces that I wasn’t really invested in, generating ideas I wasn’t particularly interested in. I was writing, and writing a lot, but I wasn’t satisfied with my output. I tried to dial things back towards the latter half of the year, and that helped in terms of exhaustion and stress load, but it didn’t really solve my problem. I thought I would suddenly have more room for ideas that moved me, but, well, I just didn’t. Last month, I asked to step back entirely from a regular contributor position in favor of occasional freelancing and in the hope that the additional freedom would free up more space in my mind for pieces I was really invested in. And while I’ve been writing and pitching at a more leisurely pace, it didn’t seem to be creative the cure-all that I had hoped for.
So, I signed up for a creative writing workshop. I sort of have a hope that if I can get back into short fiction writing, perhaps I can reinvigorate my overall creative spark. I am confident in my writing abilities, but I don’t think I’ve ever really been a good fiction writer, even when it was the only kind of creative writing I was doing — I did most of my fiction writing in high school and college, when I was reading a lot less than I am now, and so I’ve always had a pretty tenuous grasp on story structure. I know how to put words to page, but creating a satisfying story with a beginning, middle, and end has always been difficult for me. But I don’t have hundreds of dollars to freely throw at something more prestigious like the Gotham Writer’s Workshop, nor am I professionally invested enough in fiction writing where using that kind of money on a workshop would feel more like an investment and less like a frivolity. I’m sure I can get good enough guidance for free at the library, or even just by reading books on fiction writing and story structure.
There is one major issue with this whole endeavor, though. Part of why I was drawn to journalism from the get-go is that I both love writing essays—and genuinely prefer it over story-writing—and I love deadlines and someone telling me I that have to write, because it is extremely hard for me to write if I don’t have someone telling me to do it and when to finish it by. I pretty much immediately fell off fiction writing after I graduated college in no small part because I no longer had a dropbox on Canvas looming over me, and though I briefly pursued literary journals, the majority of them only take submissions on spec (if you don’t know, spec means an entire finished draft).
Despite the fact that, yes, I’m a writer, and have been writing for, like, forever, I’ve always had an issue writing for myself. At the same time, there is extremely little drive for me to write a whole piece and finish it if there is no tangible pressure on and incentive for me to do so (probably not great that this is how I’ve cultivated my writing work ethic, but c’est la vie), but maybe even more important than editors and deadlines is that I need to believe that people are looking at what I’m writing. So, I never kept a journal or diary as a kid because I didn’t have an audience.
Realizing I could pursue journalism, get my writing published and in front of eyes, and could be paid to write these little essays and research papers (which I always genuinely loved doing in school) was like was the biggest lightbulb moment of my post-grad life. For whatever reason, the pursuit of journalism as a career didn’t strike me in school (maybe, ah, for the best). But I suppose, then, that part of the appeal of a workshop is that once again I’m being led by an instructor to write. Maybe I also naively hope that, being the wizened and mature age of 28 now, I will be able to come away from a workshop with more of a commitment to writing for pleasure and less of a need to write with a reason than I used to, and I can imbue this energized creativity into the writing I plan to monetize as well as the writing I want to create for the sake of creating. And perhaps now that I have written these little hopes down in this newsletter, it will magically make them more likely to actualize. I also want to add that I would not say no to any tips or suggestions for these kinds of creative struggles, and I encourage anyone to either email (briannaszigler at gmail dot come) or leave a comment at the end of this post if they have any solutions for my silly little problems.
Anyway, the workshop I went to three weeks ago was the second of an ongoing series that I hopped into, that will continue once a month. We didn’t actually do much writing last time, just a free write and a discussion. But the free write did instill in me this idea that it’s good to put any words to page at all, at least once a day, every day, doesn’t matter the words, and whether they be fiction or non fiction. So I’m writing this newsletter mostly borne from this idea (hence, the title). I’m not paid to write for this newsletter and it is impossible to impose deadlines for myself (a huge part of why it is so habitually difficult for me to stick with this thing), but I do have 900 subscribers and I know at least a fraction of that number does read my posts maybe semi-regularly.
Actually, as I’m typing this I’m realizing it’s probably bad that I’m imposing free write rules on a piece of writing that isn’t for myself. Lol. Whatever! [Edit: Since starting this newsletter, I ended up skipping the subsequent workshop I planned to go to last weekend since I stayed out late the night before/slept in late the morning after and had another *paid* (paid) essay to finish that day. Gonna try to make sure this doesn’t happen but this workshop does unfortunately run on Saturdays. I signed up for another workshop, which is over Zoom, and which might ultimately be better.]
Anyway, thanks to everyone who wastes their time reading my inconsequential personal and creative woes. Here’s some of what I’ve been up to over the past month:
What I’ve been watching…
I had probably the strangest experience of my theater-going life when I saw Skinamarink at the bastion of repose known as the Times Square AMC. I do not care for Skinamarink at all, I should say — I have seen it twice now, once in a packed theater, and once in a silent, pitch-black bedroom late at night. Neither one offered me a pleasant experience, and while I am happy for the filmmakers that their film has found great success as a very small, very low budget, very experimental horror film, I think it’s gimmick is tedious and hollow, not at all scary, and it is the longest 100-minute film I’ve ever endured (twice!!!). Anyway…
I went to see Skinamarink in a theater because it was playing at an AMC; thus, I could see it for free with A-List, and I was curious how I’d receive it in a theatrical setting (not well, if you didn’t guess already). But while my friend was in the restroom before the movie started, I proceeded to get shrieked at by the person sitting at the end of our row who would be forced to stand up to let us get to our reserved seats. This person starts off with a very shrill “oh my god, are you kidding me” when I politely say “excuse me,” and then proceeds to howl “stay away from me, stay away from me.” This latter insistence seemed to be a COVID thing, despite openly eating food with their mask off in a theater full of maskless people. Since we noticed that this person already had their giant bag placed comfortably on one of our reserved seats, my friend and I surmised that they came prepared to make a fuss about having to sit next to someone. This person ultimately did stand up, but I made the rational decision to stay the fuck away from them. We ended up swapping seats with another theater-goer, who was accommodating to our situation. And on top of that, I had to wait 100 minutes for Skinamarink to end.
I also saw Down with Love on 35mm, a funny, sexy little ’60s rom-com riff that made me weep for the career of Peyton Reed. It’s not like he had a filmography full of heaters (Yes Man, something called The Break-Up), but between the success of Bring it On and the creative charms of Down with Love, it’s sad to think that his career has been, perhaps permanently, stagnated by the fucking Ant-Man films. Do the small directors who get hired to direct these things just not get paid enough, and then don’t really know where to go after the job is done and can only afford to take on the next big Marvel blockbuster? My new working theory is that they keep these guys living paycheck to paycheck, so that the only work they can afford to do is another Marvel film. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they want to just take a big cash-out and use it to make real film??? Maybe Peyon Reed is just really invested in the storyline of Ant-Man and the Quantum Realm, or maybe he just loves Michael Douglas and knows he’ll likely never get another chance to work with the star of The Game again and is hanging on for dear life. I know I would…
But my best theatrical experience in the month of February was getting to see the Titanic rerelease in a big beautiful IMAX theater with two pairs of glasses on my face. Other than the fact that I hate wearing 3D glasses because I literally wear glasses for my regular life (can’t we implement some 3D clip-ons for glasses-wearers already???), my boyfriend and I thought that the 3D was pretty unintrusive, nor did we notice any usage of HFR that was added to this upscaled rerelease (perhaps it wasn’t implemented in the AMC Times Square IMAX, though that just feels so unlikely, so maybe HFR washes over me now due to Avatar and I have simply unlocked a new level in human evolution).
Aside from it already being a pure gift to see one of the greatest blockbusters ever made and one of the greatest love stories ever told on the biggest screen possible, it was the packed, cheering, hollering audience that made the experience special. Titanic really is the white peoples’ Bollywood film…
What I’ve been reading…
Not like I’ve been constantly talking to people about Bram Stoker’s Dracula throughout my life, but the book has always been passively sold to me as overwhelmingly boring. I never thought I’d ever be one for classic prose and literature (I’m kind of a dullard and an idiot and it’s always been hard for me to read that kind of writing) but I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed/understood Frankenstein. I thought, why not take a stab at Dracula too?
Maybe I’m just not as much of an idiot as I think of myself as (that’s likely not the case), but nevertheless, I think Dracula is a very entertaining book and I can feel my brain growing smarter and bigger with every page turn. I’m just under 100 pages in at this point and am really engaged with the story, even the very slow beginning section with Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula dancing around the simple truth that Harker has been imprisoned to be fed to Dracula’s brides in a blood feast orgy. Though, it really didn’t feel slow at all to me, and actually kind of flew by. I rewatched Coppola’s recently, and though I love that movie I almost felt a little dissatisfied with how much I now realize had been cut out from at least that first section of the book. It came off as rushed to me in a way that I had never noticed before, though I suppose them’s the breaks for most any film adaptation of a novel.
I have, however, come away from the novel and the movie with a better appreciation for Keanu Reeves’ much-maligned take on Harker, because he does a great job of exuding Harker’s comic obliviousness to the grave situation. Embarrassing British accent be damned that boy can act.
What I’ve been listening to…
Readers of BriZigs LLC may recall I wrote about my recent exploration of Bollywood cinema. Well, I now spend an enormous amount of time listening to Bollywood movie soundtracks because Bollywood movie soundtracks go fucking hard. I don’t know how to describe or write or talk about music since I really don’t know anything about music and I’m not interested in learning about it but uhhhhhh….the vibes are crazy. Case in point: the Pathaan soundtrack, which features a song called “Jhoome Jo Pathaan,” and that I’ve been listening to a profoundly unhealthy amount. In the film, it’s a dance number before the end credits that features lead actors Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone doing deeply erotic things with their bodies.
Odds and Ends
Got a question? Comment? Something you’d like my opinion on? Anything???Leave a comment below or email me at briannaszigler at gmail dot com. It will make my will to write for this newsletter so much easier.
I don't have anything that can help you out Bri, but I always connect with your writing, even (or maybe especially) when you're writing about your difficulty writing your newsletter! Always look forward to reading these and anything else you put out there. Hope that maybe helps a tiny bit
I absolutely hate free writes, but they always work for me and get the creative wheels turning, which is awfully annoying as well as awfully helpful. I've found that free writing about my seed idea of the moment (ooh, I'd love to one day write about a blah blah blah) usually spins me off in a productive direction into the actual themes and messages I want to currently write about. Which, again, annoyingly helpful.