Writing is a concentrated form of thinking… A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.”
Don DeLillo

This morning, with the final version of my manuscript back from my editor, I am tentatively emerging from the depths of the 'this is shit' stage. The idea has been following me around like some kind of albatross for more than a decade, but it was seeing myself in the words of M. John Harrison’s ‘anti-memoir’ Wish I was Here that finally convinced me to just let it all out:

“Late style arrives when you realise that you are: competent enough to write those things you wanted to write when you were twenty-five; impatient enough to have one more go at going all the way; angry enough not to allow anyone else to persuade you to do something else. At the same time, late style is cold, amused, contemptuous and savage about everyone you have been or ever tried to be. Late style is when the monster down there has finally had enough of you.”

I have returned to those words repeatedly. With experience (turbocharged by claiming my professional independence) I realised, comes the gift of a certain kind of savage clarity. Not just about one's work, but about the professional personas one had previously inhabited and the stories one told about who one might be. All those earlier versions of the self - insecure, performative, over-serious, approval-seeking - are no longer protected by the comfort blanket of nostalgia. When Harrison writes "Late style is when the monster down there has finally had enough of you" he's not writing about self-loathing - he's writing about liberation. Competence removes excuses, time removes patience, self-knowledge removes the need to perform or please, and unquenched ambition removes the temptation to settle.

Hey, it’s a modest volume, without the imprimatur of a legacy publishing house, and (lest I have) I really wouldn’t want to give the impression I’m presenting it as some kind of seminal, revelatory, last-word magnum opus. But it is mine. And as Martin Luther, whom my father was always fond of quoting, said at the Diet of Worms in 1521, when he was asked to recant his writings and teachings: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

Not long now.

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Martin Weigel is a brand strategist, former Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, and founder of EMDUB. He helps companies find their superpower - and turn it into action.

Releasing The Monster Down There