On Connection

by Kae Tempest

Listen to everything. Read as much as you can. Try to stay present and connected with whatever you’re engaging with when you’re engaging with it. Even if you’re not into it. Ask yourself, why not? What choices are being made that turn you off? What don’t you like about the way they’ve recorded those drums? What don’t you like about the way the perspective shifts from chapter to chapter? If you want to be a writer, you need to read writers. Contemporary, fallible writers that arouse your jealousies and disdain, not just all your dead heroes. Same with music. Same with absolutely anything. Want examples of how to live, or how not to live? Look up. They’re everywhere. There is no success in writing. There are only better degrees of failure. To write is to fail. An idea is a perfect thing. It comes to the writer in a breathless dream. The writer holds this idea in their mind, in their body; everything feeds it. They have spent their entire lifetime up until that point honing the skills to get this idea out of the ether and down through their useless hands, on to the page. But it will never be right. There is no way that a writer cannot injure that idea as they wrestle with it. By the time it has revealed itself to be finished, when the deadline can’t be put off any longer, the exhausted writer has learned another lesson about their own restrictions that they promise themselves they will overcome next time. But next time comes, and they are faced with new restrictions, new limi...