Narrating your own work is hard, because who really likes the sound of their own voice? Maybe some people do, but most people don’t, I think. I tried to get out of my head by using different accents and dialects. It helped a bit, actually. I could almost feel like I was listening to someone else.
Starting to write now, and it reminded me of how hard it is to actually make things for yourself. It’s like walking through treacle; like I’m a severely underpowered large language model. Eking out a few words only to judge them immediately. I know the secret is to just write a lot of crap, so that’s what I’ll do. Still, writing is hard, but isn’t that the joy of it too?
When you’re writing something melancholic for spoken performance, you realize how getting quiet can counterintuitively make the moment feel even bigger. You notice the impact that pauses—the absence of speech—have on the story; on the spoken parts. I was listening to a members-only episode of This American Life recently where they talked about scoring, and how important words sound immediately after the music stops.
Anyway, it felt good to start, even if it was painful. It’s always slightly painful making things, I think. Making things for yourself especially. There’s this gap—the one that Ira Glass is famous for talking about—between your taste and your ability to execute it. I don’t think that gap ever closes fully, to be honest. It gets smaller though, if you persevere. Most creative work requires that you at least persevere, if nothing else.