Things That Can’t Be Said

Hey party people,

Well, I finished the #ship30for30 writing challenge. Out of the 30 essays I wrote, I got about nine that I really loved, which is pretty great. I wrote a mix of new ideas, old ideas, and back catalog remixes. I even threw in a few pieces of short fiction, which was fun.

Takeaways from writing and publishing 30, 300-word essays over 30 days:

You really don’t need 1,000 words, most of the time. It was a challenge to narrow certain ideas down to 300 words, but the extra time condensing and simplifying almost always made the writing better. It was a great exercise in being clear and concise, but also in figuring out ways to infect feeling and rhythm into the work.

The challenge made me a better writer, but the greatest gift of #ship30for30 was the community (shout-out to any Shippers reading this 👋🏻 ). I made a ton of friends and connections and was really inspired by the creativity out there.

There were days I wasn’t all that impressed with my writing and just published for the sake of keeping the streak alive. I don’t love that, but I am glad I went through it. There were also days I really didn’t want to write but did so I could keep my place in the community. This was a great reminder of how powerful accountability can be in creating new habits.

As I wrote in one of my essays, “If you’re the kind of person who will generally ‘rise to the occasion,’ then your challenge is to find occasions to rise for.” I can say with total honesty that if the occasion didn’t call for me to write and publish 30 essays in 30 days, it never would have happened.

I didn’t get to tackle all the topics I wanted to write about, mainly because I found that some ideas do require more than 300 words. More storytelling. More pacing. More time to let the reader come around to their own feelings and ideas, rather than just hitting them with your own like a featherweight boxer.

And that was probably my biggest takeaway from the last 30 days:

I’m pretty burnt out on writing anything that looks or feels like Personal Development. Maybe because I already wrote my book, which is more “memoir / alternative personal development,” but I’m just not interested in writing anything else that might fall into the “prescriptions for life” category.

For now, I’m less interested in having something to say than I am in trying to communicate the things that can’t be said directly. And if I do write anything along the self-help lines, it will be a short, atomic essay packed with feeling, rather than “tangible takeaways.”

If you’re someone who wants to develop a writing habit and join a bad-ass community, I can’t recommend Ship30for30 enough. I might be sending this a day too late for you to join the next cohort but try this link to see if you can sneak in. And there’s always another one around the corner.

Ok, here’s one of my more popular Atomic Essays (that I also really liked.) It’s about the struggle of staying in service of your work after you finish making it.

🍿 We went to the movies! Remember those? With the overpriced popcorn and the previews? We masked up and did it.

We saw News of The World and I really enjoyed the film. It’s a great example of how you can create tension, action, and change in a story with a very basic, point A to point B plotline. The film really just hits all the beats of Hero’s Journey in perfect order. Reminds me of this video, “Every Story is The Same.”

🎶 Been on Dylan kick this last week. My order of importance for his albums goes:
Bringing It All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, and then, Highway. But I gotta say, it’s actually crazy just how good his most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways is. I mean, the guy’s 80 and still doing it! Pretty cool…

📚 Outside of reading hundreds of Atomic Essays, I’ve still only been reading fiction. Short stories mostly. And this last week I’ve been getting through Richard Ford’s collection, “Rock Springs.”

My sister told me about this book over a year ago and I wish I’d read it sooner. If you want to know what I mean when I say, “communicating the things that can’t be said directly,” read these stories.

Ok… I think that’s enough for now. Love you all.

The Temperature is Good! 🔥🔥🔥

• Corey

Read more at https://coreymccomb.substack.com