Introducing: Admit One

Writing about movies for the sake of writing about movies

Here we go. Another millennial writer with a newsletter. 

I’ve been struggling with a theme for this newsletter. What to write about. How to write about it. So many options, topics, templates. I’m a chronic over-thinker, over-planner. I’ll get bogged down in ideas, plans, structures, timelines. All that project management goodness that I love—until it gets down to the nitty gritty of actually writing something down. And then: crickets. 

Of course I want to write about cinema, but also not, really. It’s what I do for work. I just want to write without thinking about deadlines, about the freelance hustle, about relationships with distributors and publicists, about pleasing editors, about horror or non-horror, about my career or what a particular piece will do for me. I’d really like to forget about all of that once a month and have space where I can write about things that I’m not commissioned to write, that nobody’s waiting for, but I just want to have written. 

In a recent Terror Teletype (that’s FANGORIA’s weekly newsletter), the magazine’s editor-in-chief Phil Nobile Jr. wrote about writing for the sake of writing. I revisit this paragraph often:

“Hubris and arrogance will not cover up the fact that your writing isn’t good, and what makes your writing good is writing. Not ambition, nor desire, nor a sense of entitlement. You have to want to write, and to approach the writing as the ends, not the means. You have to want to write even when no one is reading it. And you have to write with the knowledge that nothing is promised or owed to you. The writing has to be enough for you before it will ever matter to anyone else.” 

I revisit this paragraph almost every time I get a rejection for pitch (which is plenty), or when that uninvited green-eyed guest shows up, sucking up my attention. The Comparison Demon, I’ve started calling it. With every rejection comes a stab of jealousy about what pieces got commissioned instead of mine, what editors are friends with which writers, who is profiling the biggest talent, who is getting asked to write instead of going through the soul-crushing slog of pitching. The Comparison Demon is a master of distraction. While I’m busy looking at what everyone else is doing, I could be writing. 

While I could be bitching and moaning about the state of cultural journalism or the film industry, I want to focus more on putting the blinkers on and just writing. There are certain films, certain events, films or series or video essays or TikToks that spark something. I don’t want to depend on commissions to be able to write about them. 

The same way I fell in love with the movies—by myself, with no one telling me what to watch, what not to watch, what was considered High Art and what was Trash—I want to write without anyone telling me what to write about. 

In the same way that there’s a million things that interest me, and a million newsletters that this newsletter could be, what it really needs to be is a space for me to write the things I need to. It might also be a way of ridding my friends of the obnoxious amount of text messages that come from knowing me - recommendations, links, images, podcasts, articles, musings and half-formed opinions. 

To quote Phil Nobile Jr. again: “I would much rather be known for having written than to actually write. Writing sucks. Having written? The best.”