MINDING YOUR OWN BUSINESS WITH ELIOT DUNCAN

The National Book Award nominee and author of Ponyboy talks non-attachment and the non-physical practice of writing ☁️

THE 16 CREATIVE ARCHETYPES, DECODED

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Eliot Duncan is a writer from the American Midwest. He was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first book, Ponyboy (Norton, 23) was the first book with a trans protagonist to be nominated for the National Book Award. He teaches a virtual workshop called Madness as Divinity in Literature and he loves you in every tense.

ELIOT’S DIVERGENT CREATIVE STRATEGIES: ACTION/INACTION

• You only have to write draft zero. “That’s a liberating thought.”

• Investigate with non-attachment. Instead of assuming that sitting down to write or paint or bake a cake will be “hard,” what if you approached with openness and without predetermination? Eliot describes their writing process in more neutral and abstract terms — by taking the moralism out of it (good vs. bad, hard vs. easy) the drama evaporates.

• Everything you experience, do, think impacts your creative work. Live is just Research Mode, baby!

What’s your metaphorical Adderall — something that slingshots you into an inspired creative tornado of action?

I think my living is the colossal push into my work. Sometimes, the words are there and I get to let them take me. Sometimes, I have to be in bed and space out and sleep and not write. Sometimes, I just show up and write a little even when it feels like the worst and strangest thing in the world to do. Sometimes, I have to have a long phone call with a friend. Sometimes, it’s reading something that reminds me of why I write. Sometimes, it’s teaching. Sometimes, it’s a walk or falling in love. It could be a really dull, sleepy ache. It could be the sounds outside my window or the shirt my new friend is wearing. I never know, really.

I think it’s about paying attention to what’s already here. That’s the source. And I try to involve myself with people and activities that awaken me to the miraculous sensations and thought maps that are already here, in my daily life: a bike ride, an appointment, a day job, the trash on the street, the title of my boyfriend’s painting being ‘spirit, groan inwardly while we wait’ or my friend Francis telling me that he’s working on ‘how to write a door and walk through’. It’s my whole life that makes me go and that doesn’t always mean I'm flung into writing.

I’m still writing when I’m not at the page. Henry Miller has this quote about all the novels he wrote in his head that he never wrote down. I write that way, too, without writing at all. So much of what I wanna write is just felt. It can be hard, these days, to want to write the thing when I'm so occupied feeling the thing.

My friend Guy said that feeling the thing, not writing the thing could be like driving fast in the passenger seat and letting petals go out the window. The novel I could be writing are the petals, released in the wind. That’s why I love writing poems, they are the pulsing feeling of utter moment. Novels can do that too but lately, I’ve been overwhelmed with the durational demands of long form narrative.

What idea or concept are you chewing on? Has it shown up in your work yet?

I wanna write a novel about madness that is not about madness but is madness. It’s showing up like a shrug. I don’t know how to write the book I want to make yet. I haven’t read it yet so there isn’t a model. I know I need what Shelia Heti talks about as intuitive rules to create the thing I want to make, but I feel resistant to any structured way of writing madness, even if the rules are my own, even if madness is the method. A poet and beloved friend named The Friend told me that I only have to write draft zero. That’s a liberating thought.

I don’t know how to write the book I want to make yet. I haven’t read it yet so there isn’t a model.

How particular are you about your notebooks? Pens? What do you write in and with?

I like the navy blue pilot g2 bold tip pens. I like a black, soft bound moleskine. I also like my notes app and having a huge google doc where I leave poems and lines throughout the day. I guess it is particular but it doesn’t feel so specific.

What was going through your mind when you first decided to share your work?

I remember reading a poem I wrote to my Mom in like 5th grade. I was in my Dad’s office, on the couch with her. It was about mother nature or something. I think the opening line was like ‘nature’s call is silent, carried on the wind’, lol. I felt good. She took it very seriously and I did too.

What’s your media diet, at present?

Lana del Rey is really big to me. This summer, I love the album Born to be With You by Dion and The Ray of Light album by Madonna. I love Tyler Childers too. He has this song called Shake the Frost that I can’t get over. I also love listening to Ram Dass and tracks of recorded falling water (rain, rivers, waterfalls). I like the Granta Podcast, too. Oh my god, the song Nightswimming by R.E.M. makes me rise and fall into the everything of summer.

To be creative and to make things in 2024 is objectively difficult. You have to square off with distractions, global anarchy, and perpetual haunting of the existential question: “why bother?” What keeps you coming back to the ring?

I don’t think objectivity is real. I also don't like to project difficulty onto my work as a writer. Sometimes it’s immediate and shimmering in bliss, sometimes it feels empty and far away and like I have little interest in it. I try to be hospitable to all the ways it arrives in me.

I guess, I do it because it feels important to do it, or to think about doing it. It feels like writing is the most dramatic and enduring relationship of my life, so I just try to hang in there with it. It’s a long, long game that gives and takes and leaves and arrives. I don’t think it’s any of my business, in the end. I just love language.

I don’t think it’s any of my business, in the end. I just love language.

John Cage was inspired to develop his practice of composing via random chance and chaos after reading a book about the Chinese divining practice, The I-Ching. What influences or inspiration from outside of your field or profession have made the biggest impact on your work or process?

Oh nice! I have the I-Ching app on my phone. Everything is writing. Writing is living. I don’t like to call it a profession. Everything can fold into it, if I want. I work with a somatic practitioner, Elias Pack. Working with him has probably been the biggest influence on my life (my writing).

What do you do “wrong” that makes your work successful?

I probably do everything a little wrong, that’s where voice happens.

Everything is writing. Writing is living. I don’t like to call it a profession. Everything can fold into it, if I want.

You’ve been working on something and it just isn’t coming through the way you’d like — do you kill your darlings and scrap the whole thing? Do you compost the idea? Do you file it away in your cabinet of misfit concepts to review later?

I keep it all. I can’t remember ever throwing writing away. I just leave it on the page and go into something new. Even if I think, in the moment, it’s not working, in three years I might understand exactly what I was saying, I might love it.

What’s a weird superstition you subscribe to?

I don’t have any that come to mind. I think superstitions are categorically meant to be unjustified. My mystical orientation, the synchronicities I live amongst, are not linked to logic or causation. They are, to me, evidence of the Divine. I trust them.

Can you take the following in-universe quiz and lmk what you get - here? This season, we are sharing folk's creative archetypes along with their answers.

The star! My leo moon loves this :)

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