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On Burning Resentment

2019-01-15 · letter vlog · John · 3:42 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion

Replying to Hank's burnout video, John recalls writing Looking for Alaska at 24 fueled by resentment: it made him productive but made the work about himself, and the book only became good once he found a warmer fuel and wrote it as a gift for others.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Writing Looking for Alaska at 24, fueled by resentment despite privilege; self-pity

  • ★ John liked Hank's Friday video about burnout, motivation and the fuels we use to keep our engines running. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ From just after his 24th birthday John spent most nights and weekends on the novel that became Looking for Alaska: Booklist by day, review reading after work, then writing until 11 or midnight. — 00:00:00 · Looking for Alaska (novel)
  • ★★★ John says this was possible because he was burning an extremely efficient but dirty fuel: resentment. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Despite many privileges, John imagined himself a plucky underdog wronged by grave injustices: being dumped by a girl he loved, not being handsome enough, and no breaks in publishing. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ In fact John had many breaks: his Booklist editor Ilene Cooper mentored him through the writing, and Booklist paid him, modestly, to read and write about books. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ John says you can have 70 million YouTube subscribers and still imagine yourself a plucky underdog: the human capacity for self-pity is endless. (playful) — 00:00:58 · YouTube
  • ★★ John says self-pity has good reason: however fortunate, even the most powerful humans are fragile, mortal creatures in a vast universe indifferent to their needs. — 00:00:58

00:01:27 — Resentment makes work about you; finding a warmer fuel and writing the book as a gift

  • ★★ At 24 resentment let John work almost constantly and get a lot done, some of it good or at least impressive, which is what he wanted: to show how clever he could be. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ John says the problem with resentment as fuel is that it makes your work entirely about you. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ John says his early story had no guts, its griefs grieving on no universal bones (Faulkner's phrase); its narrator looked hard at everyone but himself, and it felt recounted rather than revealed. — 00:01:56

  • ★★★ Stealing a line from Shakespeare, John says resentment is a fire that burns with more light than heat. — 00:01:56

    “resentment is a fire that burns with more light than heat”

  • ★★ John hasn't read Looking for Alaska in almost 15 years, but gathers that almost none of what people like about it was in the resentment-fueled drafts. (hedged) — 00:02:26 · Looking for Alaska (novel)

  • ★★★ John thinks he needed those drafts to see what was wrong with Miles's and his own way of looking at others; to finish, Miles and John had to grow up and find a warmer, less bright fuel, which took years. — 00:02:26 · Looking for Alaska (novel)

00:02:55 — Still returning to resentment; hiring in Indianapolis, Life's Library Q&A, Nerdfighter Valentines

  • ★★★ Eventually John worked on Looking for Alaska as a gift for other people rather than a document of his attempted cleverness. — 00:02:55 · Looking for Alaska (novel)
  • ★★★ John still returns to resentment as fuel and must relearn that, while it makes him productive, it doesn't produce much he's proud of. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ John and Rosianna are hiring someone in Indianapolis to help make their things; uncommonly organized people good at calling strangers should check the link. — 00:02:55 · Rosianna Halse Rojas, Indianapolis, Complexly
  • ★★ The Life's Library book club's Q&A with author Jacqueline Woodson will be January 31st at noon Eastern. — 00:03:24
  • ★ John recommends Valentines by Nerdfighter Sharon, available at DFTBA.com. — 00:03:24 · DFTBA Records

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Looking for Alaska (novel) · resentment

Also: People: Ilene Cooper · Jacqueline Woodson · Rosianna Halse Rojas · William Faulkner · William Shakespeare

Projects: DFTBA Records · Life's Library

Organizations: Booklist · YouTube

Concepts: absurdism · social privilege

Places: Indianapolis

Characters: Miles Halter

Only in the description or credits: Complexly · Sharon (Nerdfighter)

Also centred on resentment: Motivation in Hard Times

Replies to

  • continues · What is Burnout? — “I really liked your video on Friday about burnout and motivation and the various fuels we use to keep our engines running.”

Later videos replying to this one

  • 2019-01-18 · Should You Burn Dirty Fuel? (Hank) — continues (tension on Why make things?) — Against John's point that he couldn't write the good parts of Looking for Alaska until he found a healthier fuel, Hank thinks it is possible to do good things with unhealthy fuels. (00:02:26)

Part of an exchange of 3 videos, 2019-01-11 – 2019-01-18.