Member Spotlight: Ryan T. Pozzi

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? Writing is important to me because it gives me a way to sit with things that don’t resolve right away. A lot of The Mess That Made Them came from my frustration with the way we tell famous lives backward, turning uncertainty, failure, interruption, and luck into an oversimplified story once we know how everything ends. Writing lets me resist that. I can stay in the part where nobody knows what happens next and try to understand what it actually felt like to live there. Somewhere along the way, writing also became the next version of work I had spent years doing in other forms: trying to make a place where people can see themselves a little more and feel less alone in whatever they happen to be making. I think writing matters to the world for much the same reason. I don’t think its job is to make life simpler than it is. At its best, writing can make something more legible without making it less complicated. It can preserve contradiction, recover people and experiences that get distorted by the stories we tell later, and remind somebody who feels uncertain, ignored, or unfinished that those things are not proof that their story is over. A piece of writing doesn’t have to reach everyone to matter. Sometimes it only has to reach the person who needed to encounter that particular thought, life, or voice at that particular moment. That possibility still seems extraordinary to me.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? I’m a little suspicious of anything advertised as a cure for writer’s block. My most reliable remedy is just to lower the stakes and make something move. Maybe a paragraph I fully expect to throw away. I’ve learned not to wait for confidence, inspiration, or even a particularly clear idea of where I’m going. Sometimes – actually, pretty often in my case – the work has to come first, and confidence catches up later. If I stay stuck, though, I try to stop treating it as a moral failure and look closer at what’s actually happening. While writing The Mess That Made Them, I eventually realized I was struggling because the first version of the book I’d written didn’t work. I started cutting, sorting, moving things around, and solving whatever problem was immediately in front of me. I’ve gotten much better at treating doubt as information. Sometimes I need to push through, sure. Sometimes, though I need better working conditions, more time, or permission to make something badly at first. The trick, for me, is figuring out which kind of stuck I am.

What is your favorite time to write? I don’t have a particularly sacred writing hour. Once I’m deep into a project, I’m much more likely to think of it as clocking in for work. I’ve become much less romantic about the conditions required to write. If the work is going well, I want to get back to it. If it isn’t, changing the hour usually isn’t the thing that fixes it.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? The best advice I’ve received, in multiple forms, is to stop defending the book you thought you were writing and pay attention to the book that’s actually in front of you. That became painfully useful while I was writing The Mess That Made Them. I’d accumulated a lot of material I loved, but loving the material didn’t mean I had the right structure for it. Other writers and my agent helped me see that distinction. As I get better at asking what a book I’m writing needs, I become better at lateral thinking, experimentation, and revision. So I think the useful part of that advice is learning to recognize when you’re stuck because the work is difficult and when you’re stuck because you’re trying to force it into the wrong shape. I spent a long time on The Mess That Made Them assuming the answer was to work harder on the existing book when it turned out the more important thing was being willing to dismantle it and and reassemble it in a better shape. I still think persistence matters, but I’m much less impressed by persistence for its own sake. We need to make room for experimentation and reivention just as urgently.

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? What excites me most is how much more porous the boundaries of writing have become. I can spend a morning reading a century-old newspaper archive, move from there to a museum collection or somebody’s letters, and then end the day talking directly with readers who are interested in the same strange corner of history. A book like The Mess That Made Them, which moves between music, literature, visual art, psychology, and cultural history, would have been much harder to research and much harder to find an audience for not all that long ago. Books matter enormously to me, but so do essays, newsletters, podcasts, events, and the odd conversation on the sidewalk (or the digital sidewalk.) There are plenty of things about the attention economy that I find exhausting, but the ability to build a body of work across different forms and find the people who are genuinely interested in it is pretty remarkable.

Ryan T. Pozzi’s The Mess That Made Them: How History’s Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway is out now with Bloomsbury Academic.