An exact excerpt from the first draft of chapter 22. CJ whips Gerry on the calf with a saber at fencing practice:
You know when you’re little and your mom tells you that when a boy is mean to you, it means he likes you? Well, that’s garbage. Don’t take that shit from anyone. [<-think on this]
In the first draft of chapter 22, I wrote [<-think on this] because the sentence felt stale and unoriginal as I wrote it. When I went back to it, I realized that [<-think on this] was a note from my subconscious-editor-self to my future self, editing. A coded way of flagging what my gut already knew was “self-righteousness,” produced by the Automated Writer in my head. I needed an example of what Maggie Nelson calls the “flimsy comebacks” that litter her first drafts before she edits them and this is one of them. “Don't take that shit from anyone,” is self-righteous garbage. I’m writing a novel, not a self-help book.
The Automated Writer in my head takes over my brain when I am tired, uninspired, or trying to write in vain. It digs the shallowest holes, picks the lowest hanging fruit, and is literally the voice of my "writer’s block.” Luckily though, even when my Automated Writer is dominant, my true, passionate, insatiable self is not completely dormant. She is whispering. She is arguing. She is telling me not to even bother writing at all. In that regard, I ignore her. Better to write and hate the garbage you wrote than to not write and lament the progress you could have made.
What I’m getting out now is: you need time. Time alone. Time to suck. Time to write in vain so that the next time you write is time to recognize. To re-think. Some people know exactly what they want to say and how without needing to work through any alternate iterations. In some parts of the novel, this is the case with me. But sometimes I need to write down the things I’m not trying to say in order to start saying the things I am.
It’s all the more reason why Maggie Nelson’s personal philosophy on social media rings true. She burns through flimsy comebacks, self-righteous platitudes so that her book can “keep thinking further.” She knows where she wants to go as a writer and that social media doesn’t enable the writing pattern for what she is trying to create.