On Losing Work

Commonplace Newsletter #80

It’s gone. Nearly 1000 words, almost a full essay about the beauty of everyday things inexplicably vanished. As I type this I’m still at the blind fury stage of the process and am waiting for the subsequent self-recrimination and eventual acceptance phases to kick in. I know the timeline- because this has happened to me once or twice over the years- with both school work and personal writing. Perhaps now you understand why many of these essays here contain a throughline, a literary leitmotif of technoscepticism and semi-Luddite sneering. It’s because I’ve been burnt before. A cynic is simply a disappointed optimist as they say.

So what I should do is walk away; from the screen, from the flat, from the whole sorry scene of this minor injustice. I should write those three hours off, those three hours of head down, flow state creative work and go out into the world. Clear my head. Calm down. Go for a shoulder tension relieving lunchtime whiskey, see a matinee, lie spreadeagled on the grass in some manicured city park watching the clouds slow roll across this blue May sky. There are options. These are the kind of things I would do if I had any sense. But evidently I don’t. Because this is not an accidental, quirk of fate, unforeseen, just-one-of-those-things computer glitches.

No, this is personal. You see, the computer- my enemy, my daily work colleague, my gateway to a myriad of useless information and multifarious useful communications- is laughing at me. It’s not sentient, not animate but it is mocking me all the same. It thinks it has beaten me. It thinks it has demoralised me. Well, friends, I will not be beaten. I am getting straight back up and knocking out a new essay, straight off the cuff, right now. Because this computer needs to learn who is in charge around here.

Of course the moment it happened my first instinct was to put my fist through it. Behind the steady stream of profanity my mind was conjuring up fantasies of stamping this infernal contraption to death, or throwing it off my third floor balcony like a champagne addled rockstar in a palatial Beverly Hills hotel- never before had the scene from Office Space where the three dorky office workers drag the faulty department photocopier to the meadowlands to perform a gangster rap soundtracked gangland execution on it- felt more relatable. But I didn’t want to give this high-minded typewriter the satisfaction of a righteous end. And I didn’t want to have to fork out my hard-earned cash to buy a new one. A new one that would also surely betray me eventually, as they all do. One of the laws of the universe, that.

So with that cathartic, knee-jerk, foolish option off the table I am starting to calm down. White hot anger cooling to melancholic self-recrimination. After all it was my fault if you think about it. Why did I insist on using ultraminimalist, distraction free third party software in the first place. Rather than using standard word processors with auto save features I had to try and get clever and go off the beaten path. Serves me right. You could say I’d been running this risk and rolling the dice for ages now and in a way I was fortunate not to land on snake eyes before now. You could say that. It was my fault. When have computers not been a letdown in those clutch moments, when the essay is due and when the deadline day has arrived. And that goes double for printers, which are a topic unto themselves.

What did I expect? My anger then was the silent scream of arriving inevitability and not the instinctual rearing up to unpleasant surprise. I should have seen it coming. After all what kind of professional writer doesn’t have back ups of back ups, failsafes, contingencies. Am I still treating all of this like a hobbyist with a Stripe account and a retinue of kind hearted readers? I was never a Boy Scout but surely some aspects of basic preparedness should be instinctual, no? I claim I want to a professional, a craftsman, that I am playing a long term game on the narrow path to eventual mastery and yet here I am, subject to the most basic schoolboy error that can befall any writer in the computer age.

And right on cue here comes stage three of the lost work grief triangle- acceptance. Careering down the valley of neuroticism turning into the sloping ascent of philosophical perspective-taking. Maybe it was meant to be. Maybe that original essay- already starting to vanish from my mind as it vanished from my screen- wasn’t that good. Maybe it was ill-considered, rote, derivative, or worse of all- boring. Maybe this happened for a reason, maybe it’s a blessing. It’s possible. Likewise, maybe the lost incomplete Hemingway novel from 1921- what would’ve been his debut full-length work about his First World War experiences- housed in a suitcase that was stolen from his wife on a train from Paris to Switzerland, maybe that too was no good. Maybe it not being pilfered and thus published would have altered Hemingway’s whole literary trajectory and subsequent legend for the worse. And maybe Hemingway told himself this as the stomach lurch of realisation gave way to more level-headed reflection. Certainly, the loss didn’t stop him creating, which is the lesson I am trying to extract from my far less-dramatic, less-romantic reliving of the same old writers’ story of lost work.

It was only an essay after all. Only 1000 words or whatever it was (I eyeball my work, word count is largely an irrelevancy if not a distraction). It was only three hours of work. It was a reminder and a learning experience. It had me get back on the proverbial horse when the absolute last thing I wanted to do was to write something again, from scratch. Besides the whiskey and the picturehouse and the manicured grass are all still there for the sampling. The sun is still shining. And I now have another 1000 words or so, so long as they paste into my Substack dashboard without issue. Because if there were an issue I would be straight back to stage one, getting ready to troubleshot my computer straight off the balcony.

Until next time,

Live well,

Tom.