Ugliness. Part 1: The aesthetics of working

1.

I’ve been snapping progress pics. I typically forget to do this, as the progress in writing is mostly just me doing the above somewhere near my desk.

There is not much to look at! Unless you would enjoy watching a timelapse of me tearing my hair out over the exact value of a centurion’s wage, or lightly laughing as I torture my characters with some weird and overly specific situation.

My eyes tire more easily than they used to, so I print drafts. And I find the ol brain (pats roof) is trained to speedread on screen and read deeply on paper.

I recently found myself crouched exactly as depicted above, under my standing deck. I sat there for hours picking commas out of 450 pages of a manuscript via highlighter. It was so ugly and feral. Very aesthetic, haha! I thought. Let me take a picture.

I jumped to my feet and arranged everything in neat stacks. It was by instinct. My training snapped into place and I captured the moment as the 2014 flatlay handbook would have commanded. Little sock toes, even, popped in demurely from the corner to even out the composition.

My immediate revulsion for the photo really surprised me. I thought, “Hate it. Why?”

Well, first, because my experience of writing is chaotic and lively and so ugly and feral. I adore it. But also, I think I’ve personally hit my limit on working as an aesthetic.

Maybe it was the fifteen years of selling my process as beautiful grids and presentation slides to people clinically afraid of uncertainty. Or maybe it’s the proliferation of shallow facsimiles of truth and meaning, whether via genAI or simple grifting, where passing the Turing test is more the point than communicating something real.

I don’t think I’m alone. I think many others tire of messy creative work presented purely as aesthetic. We now crave unvarnished reality when we fantasize about creators making things. As they say: Gives it to us raw. And wriggling.

Aesthetics are more than just appearance. They do communicate. And especially now, people want to make sure if it’s marketed as a human creation, it is, indeed human. Tricking someone just because you can remains…not cool. And pro-genAI writers are parasitic—they want that human cachet without getting their hands too dirty.

(I pray for the eventuality when insecure AI cheaters can finally flock to their own separate networks and send their AI agents to like each others’ posts without reading them, finally leaving the rest of us in peace with our messy human creative struggles. Perhaps this is too spicy, but what’s the hold up, sluggers??? Awfully slow building your own parallel illustrious awards and communities despite having a fleet of supposedly all powerful expert machines you don’t have to pay or small talk with!!!)

ANYWAYYY I used to just recycle these printed manuscripts after transferring my notes. Since a few months ago, I’ve started keeping them as literal paper receipts. Ya girl is genetically predisposed to become a … ‘collector’, so I have fear saving 2–3 reams of paper for every project. Every modern human author who insists on only the sicko algorithm inside their own sicko skull is now wise to keep some kind of receipts.

Until the machine gets wise and begins to copy this sentiment as mere aesthetic, I’m sensing that pro-creative people—for now—crave seeing the weirdly erratic process only a human mind can manifest: dirty sketchbook pages, ugly chin selfies in a badly lit workshop, graphite smudging into illegibility.

2.

In response to this growing disdain for polished process shots, I’ve ironically been in a deep YouTube hole looky-loo-ing at people’s journals, process, and ‘personal curriculums’. It started with this charming knitcheek video where this fiber arts vlogger makes her house an ‘analog house’, an extension on the analog bag trend.

I get the impression some people my age (and up) are sometimes annoyed by the analog bag. I am fairly neutral. It’s great people are getting off the hamster wheel of doomscroll to make or read, and if it must be some kind of aesthetic treat, so be it.

I get why one might be annoyed, though. ‘Analog’ used to just be my life. Do not cite the old magic to me, witch, etc etc. When I was in my teens-slash-twenties, I always had 3 various sketchbooks/journals on me, a novel, a printout of directions, and some tiny watercolor kit or something. Most of my thinking and planning was done longhand in little snatches of time vs. tapped out on a screen.

So I support the movement. But already there’s so much backlash that analog bags encourage rampant consumerism. Carry a bunch of pristine aesthetic things in a pristine bag, instead of actually doing the things in the bag. It seems we can’t help but fall into our predetermined Internet pattern:

1. People create a movement around getting off our phones.
2. The movement catches on.
3. People begin to create related content and waters get muddy. There’s genuine sharing and community—and, also, brand sponsorships on specific landfill-destined polyester pouchies you must have in this season’s Pantone.
4. Rightful backlash then gets muddied with questionable backlash, which will undoubtedly turn anti-woman, anti-queer, anti-BIPoC somehow, and the movement is buried with the trusty old cancel shovel and we all crawl back into our caves.

3.

I’m admittedly leery that today’s desire for process authenticity will become another shallow aesthetic. Cultural transformation requires more than showing people something different. It requires education. We all love to watch an expert, but with no comprehension of how things are made, how can a viewer even understand what expertise looks like, versus the artifice of appearing to be an expert?

There’s more reason than ever to remain ignorant and creatively uneducated. I wish modern AI had been widely designed as a tool, not a consumptive blank button for busy, careless consumers. A chisel brush—not a servant who never says no.

How do we find creativity authenticity in a world that’s trained us towards aestheticism for attention, and subsequently, monetization? In a world where companies trip over themselves to tell you life and creation might finally be effortless, painless, and free of all discomfort?

Is the snake now eating its tail? Is cynicism inevitable, the only way to stay safe in this age? Will we forever have a knee jerk mistrust for beautiful portrayals of creativity, asking what its originator is trying to con from us? Is this a rotation of a wheel? An edge of a cliff? A door finally sprung open?

I don’t know. But ugliness is the key. I have more to say about that in a follow-up Part 2. For now, I think we do what we can to create without the pretense of performance.

I think we can only show each other that many of us are still here, and still making things the slow and human way, simply because we want them to exist.

Ephemera

As the cherry on top of this pep talk, let us talk social. Let us talk about embodying these ideas of process-not-as-aesthetic, which I will surely fail at in the coming days as I navigate these questions with the same baggage we all have.

But, I am giving it a try.

I’ve been filling out my Instagram grid, and to be real—especially after this screed, lol—I have been trying to figure out ways to do it without feeling totally ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Because, I do like talking to folks on IG. No one is mean to me, though. Everyone is very nice right now, so it is easy to feel ok about it.

Anywho, if you’d like to see my almost perfect writing day, or get some short story collection reco’s, have at it! Though eventually I will turn these into longer form essays on here, I think, if you are trying to remain off Instagram.

How are y’all treating social these days? Are you finding it relatively chill or fraught? Have you quit? Have you relapsed? I think I am having a better time this time around as I am trying to just be honest with my feelings and process.

We all know the game afoot!

Til next time,

Ash xoxo