Benjamin law

Interview by Madeleine Dore
&
Photography Daniel Francisco Robles

Benjamin Law: Writer

Transcript

“I’d say all of the things about my routines were slight caveats because there are days and weeks where my routine is suddenly something completely different because of the work that I do.  But we can go into that later.” – Benjamin Law

Madeleine: Procrastination isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  There can be productive versions of procrastination that we require in order to think about something, to give something the time and the space that requires.  There’s procrastination that isn’t even procrastination, but actually just part of the creative process. 

Then there’s the kind of procrastination that really gnaws at you.  It’s the kind of procrastination that really stems from fear and, in many ways, is more of a stifler than it is a fertile ground for thinking or creativity.  For me, this podcast definitely fell into the latter category of procrastination.  I have put this off probably technically for years, but if we look at 2019, it was something that I announced many times that I would be sharing soon, and I even went as far as to start interviewing guests.  And then I just let them sit there and accumulate dust and it gnawed and gnawed and gnawed away at me, to the point where it was a project that I thought that I would give up on, many, many times.

But something shifted.  When I decided to stop trying to push this podcast, when I said, you know what?  I’m going to put that aside rather than continue to put it on my to-do list.  When I actually let go and stopped procrastinating, but rather paused completely, I actually was able to step into it with a fresh energy.

So, with this podcast episode, I debated whether to share it with you, but it’s with someone that I really admire and I think a lot of people who are familiar with his work, familiar with his Twitter account, familiar with his TV shows and his writing would really want to hear about the ebb and flows of his days.

And so I thought, you know what?  Just because I procrastinated for a really long time and maybe this incredible writer’s routine has changed dramatically, I think it’s still worth sharing.  And it’s also worth sharing because, not only does it sort of candidly reflect my own creative process and how much of a procrastinator I am, and hopefully provide comfort to my fellow procrastinator’s out there.

I think it also illustrates that our days drastically change.  So, I spoke to this guest in July 2019.  It’s now the new year, and I’m sure that this guest’s routine has changed a lot, and we can learn from that.  We can learn how quickly the shape of our day’s changes and how dynamic we need to be, and how something can serve us for a little while and we can let go of it for some time.

Things come back into our lives, just like this podcast came back into mine, and it’s okay to let go, it’s okay to procrastinate.  It’s all just part of the choppy, changey part of living and officially trying to pursue creativity.

So, this episode, I’m excited to share with you and it explores the writing life of the beloved Benjamin Law.  Benjamin Law has contributed to over 50 publications and has authored, co-authored, and edited more than a handful of books, including the Quarterly Essay on Safe Schools: Moral Panic 101. 

His memoir, The Family Law, was adapted into three seasons of an award-winning SBS TV series, which Benjamin created and co-wrote.  He’s also a columnist, a playwright, a radio host, and regular guest on TV shows, like Q&A, The Drum, and The Project, which is all to say, Benjamin is an expert in shifting gears.  While he credits his colour-coded iCal for his time management prowess, after our conversation, I’m convinced his curiosity and energy plays an important role in making Benjamin one of Australia’s most prolific and beloved writers.

So, join me in listening to Benjamin Law as he takes us through a typical day and shares how he manages several projects at once and, when it comes to a rut, he shares things like how to move through post-project blues.

Join me now in a little bit of time travel as we listen to Benjamin Law share his daily routine.

Benjamin Law: In terms of when I like to wake up, it’s usually around 6:30.  I want to get a start on my emails by seven, and that’s to kind of sweep away the dust in my inbox.  I’m kind of hurling all my balls over to my editor’s and everyone else so they can deal with them at 9am, so I can clear space for whatever I need to do at 9am.  That said, I think the teenage version of myself would be so appalled that I’m waking up that early because it’s taken me a really long time to become a morning person.

But what I do like about it is that head start that you feel like you have on everyone else, and I guess the only thing competing with my tendency to become a morning person is my tendency to feel like a superior person.  If I can wake up earlier, that’s better, and my partner, Scott, tends to wake up earlier, so that helps too.

MD: Is there anything in particular that helps you be a morning person?  Is it having a partner who’s also a morning bird?

BL: Well, yeah, my boyfriend actually used to produce breakfast radio for many, many, many years, like close to a decade, perhaps.  So, he was waking up at sometimes 3:30, 4am, you know, the really ungodly hours where no human being is supposed to be awake whatsoever on a regular basis, and that would kind of jolt my body up a little and I’d start waking up earlier.  So, that’s really helped, and just the fact that his body clock is more attune to be morning person, whereas, you know, growing up, I grew up in a family that, on school holidays, would make up past midday often, and we’d play Nintendo past midnight.  It’s why, when you visit a lot of Asian countries I think, there are far more robust night-time economies.  We’re just kind of a night-time people.

And Australia’s very much a morning economy, and as a result, waking up that early and getting onto it as fast as I can, it’s pretty good discipline for a writer, I have to say.

MD: So it sounds like you’re really clearing the deck between that 7 to 9am period.  Are you also having breakfast and doing a bit of waking up to the day when you’re doing the emails?

BL: See, this is my shame.  I’ve traditionally had a kind of unhealthy relationship with breakfast because I can go right up until midday without eating anything, which sounds like I’ve got some sort of horrible body dysmorphia that’s plaguing me.  It’s not so much that, it’s just that my body is made for being able to just go that far and keep pursuing with work until hunger takes over, and that doesn’t seem to be for a while.  And if I have breakfast too early, I tend to feel a bit gross, like I dry retch.  I’ve never been a big breakfast person, and if I have it too early, it just makes me want to throw up.

But some light things can keep me going, like I might make… I’ll definitely have the green tea or even just some hot water, which is a very Chinese thing to do, and maybe some fruit.  Miso, fruit miso is like my good, light breakfast or post-hangover breakfast.  I recommend it to everyone who’s feeling a little bit poorly ‘cause it’s got all of your vitamins and good bacteria and nourishment there. 

But now I actually schedule in my i-Cal.  This is what a disciplinarian I have to be with myself, but breakfast at 9am.  You are going to read the news and eat breakfast at the same time.  And I think it comes from this freelancer’s kind of pathology of needing to feel productive every hour of the day, so now I’m like, look, if you’re having breakfast and reading the news, you’re still being productive.  No one’s going anywhere, like you haven’t lost any work, you haven’t lost any time.  You need to read the news for work.  So, that’s usually my routine.

I’ve swept away all the detritus of emails by nine, and then I’m kind of reading the news and eating my breakfast at the same time.

MD: Mm, delicious.  How do you plan your day from there?

BL: I have cleared my inbox by then.  There was this New York Times piece recently about whether you’re a time optimist or not, and that means whether you’re underestimating how much work you can fit into the time you’ve allocated yourself, and when you’re a freelancer, you start understanding how long it takes to actually do something.  Like, for instance, I have to transcribe these 30 minutes interviews for Good Weekend for the back page interview that I do every week, and I would love for it to take one hour to transcribe half an hour worth of interviews, but I know now that it tends to take two hours.  And that infuriates me, but now I just relax into it.

So, I also know how long it takes for me to get all my emails out of the way.  I know myself as a worker well enough to structure the day ahead.  So, I’ll schedule that in my i-Cal, all of that stuff, and [plough/pile? 00:10:03] through it.

MD: I think that’s such an important point that you’ve touched on there in terms of that freelancer tendency to maximise every hour and potentially overload your to-do list.  Because you’re a time optimist, have you put any, I guess, quantity to how many tasks you’re capable of per day?  So, I know that you can kind of now have a more realistic sense of how long it takes to do something, but is there sort of a limit to say I can only really do two or three things per day?

BL: Well, it depends on the thing, actually.  So, you’re speaking to me within this 48-hour period where my days have been quite random, actually.  So, as well as doing my paid work, I’m also on the board of a not-for-profit and I’m also part of a committee member for this fellowship for our late friend Jesse Cox.  It’s a $20,000 fellowship and to raise that kind of money and to also administer that kind of prize, the people involved in that committee have to do a lot of work.

So, in amongst the paid work in the past 48 hours, there have just been commitments where I’ve had a breakfast associated with the not-for-profit, then I’ve had some homework to do with the fellowship, and then I have to block a piece for The Guardian that I’m writing, but I’m also needing someone later in the day for something else, and then today I’ll be on ABCs The Drum later this afternoon, but I’m also interviewing an architect for Good Weekend while transcribing my previous interview with international chef and cook, Samin Nosrat from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

So, it’s kind of been all over the place, and soon I’ll be doing prep work for The Drum after I talk to you.  Just going in and figuring out what the news and stories are of the day and what I think about them.  So, it’s kind of whiplash-y.  So, ideally if I’m doing creative stuff, like if I’m writing a feature article or working on a play for Melbourne Theatre Company, which I’ve been doing recently, I don’t want to change gears so fast. 

There was a period where I was only allowing myself to do one big creative thing per day because my brain couldn’t keep up with the gear changes, but in the last couple of days, a lot of my work has been bitty, and so the gears have been changing quite quickly.

But as long as it’s not like a deep dive, I have to write a play or a feature article, I can do a quick dive in, I can block a feature article, but don’t expect me to rewrite an act of a play.

MD: And I know that you’ve said before that your worst nightmare would be locked into one job for the rest of your life.

BL: Yeah.

MD: Whereas I think a lot of people would hear your workload and it would spell out overwhelm.  So, is there a tipping point where you know how much you can take on?  Or how do you make sure that it’s stimulating rather than overwhelming?

BL: Yeah, that’s such a good question, and it’s not an answer I’ve necessarily worked out yet.  What I do find is, for me at least, it’s not so much the number of tasks that I have to do that overwhelm me, it’s more about the hours that I have to put in.

So, there have been some jobs that have required me waking up at 6am and finishing at 7:30pm, and that’s only one job for the entire day.  And that’s far more draining than working 9 to 5 and there being 12 commitments in the day, as long as it’s contained within 9 to 5.  You know what I mean?  Like, for me, I think it’s less about switching gears, which I’m happy to do, as long as it’s not about writing something big, and more about the hours I put in.

So, for instance, one of the most tired periods I’ve been in my life, and also creatively rewarding and professionally rewarding, was when I was simultaneously writing the third series of The Family Law, the SBS TV show that I co-wrote, alongside a Quarterly Essay, which was a serious journalistic piece about the safe school scandal that I wrote in 2017.  And doing those things alongside each other almost broke me to the point where I was still writing and doing edits for the Quarterly Essay on what was supposed to be a lovely vacation with my partner in Japan.

And those were the only two things I needed to concentrate on, but because the hours were so, so intense, I just feel like I aged years in those months where I was trying to do these two very, very challenging and impossible things.  But I’ve come out of it the other end, I’m okay, moisturiser has saved me, I don’t think I look too haggard as a result.  Everything will be fine.

MD: Was there anything that helped and actually got you through?  Did you allocate certain days to the two projects, or was it just a scramble with both within a day?

BL: There were probably a couple of things that helped.  One is my boyfriend, Scott.  He is just this island of sanity and robust mental health, which is not something that I have within myself, but he… all of my family members and the people who know Scott really well were just like, if you weren’t doing the jobs you’re doing… he’s a manager over at the ABC, but if he weren’t doing that job, you’d be a great therapist.  You’d make a great pediatric psychologist or something like that, because he can just really… he can talk people away from a cliff and he can just really help you break down what’s needed to be done.

And you mentioned a word before, Madeleine, being overwhelmed.  That’s something that is easy to become, especially as a freelancer when you’ve got a lot of competing stuff.  And I guess the other thing that I built within myself, and also my boyfriend has encouraged me to do, is not think about everything as a whole.  You don’t get in front of the computer every day to write a book.  You don’t get in front of the computer every day to write the Essay.  You don’t even get in front of the computer to write a TV show.  What you’re getting in front of the computer to do is to spend the next two hours editing this chapter.  That’s all you need to do.

All that’s required of you for the next hour is to revise a scene.  Or what’s required of you for the next day is to write 1000 words of a rough draft, knowing that you’ll clean it up the next day.  If you get too far ahead of yourself, that’s when your heart starts racing, that’s when you start sweating cold bullets, that’s when you freak out.  And, having trained my brain that way, it’s probably the explanation for why I’m calmer, but it’s probably also the reason why I forget what’s ahead of my schedule, because I don’t want to think about the big picture, otherwise I’ll start having a panic attack.

So, breaking it down is really important.  Breaking down big tasks, because all writing is bricklaying.  You can’t afford to think of it.  Of course you’re building a house, but you need to think about what’s ahead, which is I’m going to build this part of the wall today.  And that’s it.  And when you’ve built that part of the wall you need to be able to create some boundaries because there’s always more work to do, but you also need to be able to say that’s the day done and I achieved what I wanted to.  Otherwise you’re going to unravel. 

MD: I love how that bricklaying metaphor keeps giving with the boundaries that it creates with the walls too.  Have you read Bird by Birdby Anne Lamott?

BL: No, but my sister Michelle has, and she keeps recommending it.  So yeah, taking it bird by bird, right?  Yeah.

MD: Exactly.  Well, speaking of boundaries, you’ve also spouted the advice that a lot of writing is learning to be comfortable spending a lot of time alone.  How do you wrestle that as someone who seems quite social and gregarious as well?

BL: [Laughs].  It’s actually kind of easy for me because, on one hand, I grew up in a really big family.  I’m one of five children, and at one point there were five… before my parents divorced, there were five kids and two parents living in a three-bedroom house, so it’s my natural state to be around a lot of people, but as a result of that, I also craved solitude.  So I’m actually really happy being by myself, given that my body’s attuned to knowing that, well, you’re about to be thrust into a whole lot of other people at any second, so I quite like solitude.  I like being by myself, thinking by myself.  I’ve never felt… well, I’ve never really experienced the depths of loneliness necessarily, or anything like that, so I’m lucky in that way.

And then I guess when I do feel like I want to have a chat with people or someone, that probably explains my social media habit and why there have been some periods where I’m at my desk and I’ve probably sent 11 public tweets out and replied to every single person who’s replied to me on Twitter that day, because I don’t have that experience of looking over the cubicle and saying oh my god, have you read this article?

So, I have that conversation with my fellow Twitter tragics and media people who are on Twitter as well.  Yeah, I don’t find it too much of a problem because I’ve got those outlets.

MD: Yeah, solitude can be so, so delightful.  In terms of what else you do alone all day by yourself, do you still have a standing desk?  I’ve seen some photos of a desk set up.  Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about your environment and anything else you might be doing during the day?

BL: I do have a standing desk.  I’m really lucky enough to have my own office with a door, which is such a luxury for a freelancer and a writer because for most of my writing career, my writing desk has just been a desk in the living room that my boyfriend also works in, and we eat in, and all of that sort of stuff.  So, it’s probably been in the last maybe five years that I’ve had my own office, and it’s been amazing.  And in that office is a standing desk, because the desk prior to that was this kind of really shitty old vintage student desk that my landlord in Brisbane allowed me to steal from under the Queensland where I was renting.  And it was just this beaten up thing, and when I moved from Brisbane to Sydney, the removalist actually thought they could pack up the desk, but what they did was they wrecked it.

And so Sydney was the… it wasn’t too much of a tragedy, like it was the smallest, most ridiculously tiny desk, and so Sydney presented this opportunity to get a much larger scale thing.  I’ve struggled with a bad back for most of my life and so I wanted to improve my posture, and when we were looking for furniture, we were at this secondhand furniture store in Newtown and my boyfriend spotted this beaten up 1950s kitchen bench on wheels and it’s the perfect height of a standing desk and it’s huge. 

But the trick with standing desks, or any desks really, is everything has to be at 90-degree angles for your posture to be good, so your elbows have to be at 90-degree angles, you have to be staring straight ahead at the screen, like your middle of your screen has to meet your eye-line, all of that stuff.  And it was the perfect height.

So, that’s been my standing desk ever since.  Do I use it all the time?  Not necessarily.  So, my daily routine is, well, I’m talking to you in winter at the moment, Madeline, so it’s too cold to just necessarily leap out and work at my desk and I’m too lazy, so I start doing my emails in bed, then it’s 9 o’clock.  I take my laptop to breakfast at my dinner table and I keep working from there over breakfast and news, and then my laptop battery runs out at around lunchtime and I’ve got to recharge it at my standing desk, so I need to be upright from about lunchtime until the end of the working day.  Which is actually a pretty good system because an osteopath friend told me once that if you have to be sedentary, you shouldn’t be in one position the entire day, whether it’s sitting or standing, actually.

MD: It’s evolutionary from laying down in bed, to sitting, to standing.  It sounds quite good.

BL: Basically I go from primordial slide to an actual human being by the end of the day.

MD: You’re an example for us all.  So, with body movement, you’ve said before that that’s quite important to the writing process.  Can you speak to that a little bit?

BL: Yeah, so I’ve never been huge on exercise necessarily.  At school, I was really bad at sport.   I’m pretty uncoordinated, I’m exceptionally clumsy.  I was a really bad swimmer at school, which is a huge liability when you grow up in Queensland and everyone’s just expected not just to swim, but to be able to swim well.  And I just thought I hated exercise because I didn’t like sport, and that continued right through my 20s until I realised that I needed to start exercising for good physical health, for good mental health, and also to save my back because my back was in a really bad space in my early 20s.  And a doctor or maybe a chiropractor or something said if you want to do right by your body, you’re going to need to start exercising, and the best thing that you can do for your back is swimming, and I was like ahh, but it’s my worst sport.

But then there was a summer where I got these swimming lessons by the guy who ran the community pool in Brisbane because he was just wanting to help out, and I just started becoming more confident and soon I was swimming 500 metres at a time, and then eventually I was swimming a kilometre at a time with long breaks, and my back got a lot better.  And, as that was happening, I was also finding that, in that routine, it was really helping my writing, so I’m that kind of person who’s happy to wake up really early and go to sleep late if I’m really obsessed with cracking a piece open and getting it right, but that’s not really great for your physical health.

And once I started swimming, I realised that was helping my writing because I let my brain shut down, and when I got out of the pool, even sometimes mid-lap, ideas would come to me sideways that I wasn’t expecting because suddenly your body’s working overtime while your brain is just really calm and focusing on you not drowning.  And that’s needed to remedy the opposite state of your body not moving at all and your brain being overactive.  So, these things I find in balance, and so when I tell emerging writers who want advice that you need to move your body, they’re like who are you, Michelle Bridges?  That’s ridiculous. 

But it does really help, for me, and I wish someone had told me sooner because now I’m subtly evangelical about it.

MD: So, when do you fit in the swim?

BL: Well, it’s winter, so I’m a little bit of a wuss when it comes to cold water swimming, so I’m probably only swimming about once a week at the moment, whereas when it’s hot, I’m probably swimming about four or five times a week, actually.  But now, in winter, I’m combining a swim and it’s probably either in an indoor or a heated outdoor pool, usually a heated indoor pool.  That’s how much a wuss I am.

And then I’ll probably do gym, which I’m not a huge fan of the gym, but it does give me a chance to catch up with podcasts and stuff like that, and I do yoga as well.  So, as long as I’m doing exercise on more days of the week than I’m not, then I’m fine.  Ideally, I’d like to do it maybe five, but it’s winter and I’d rather eat soup and eat something with butter in it. 

MD: And speaking of cooking, what does the evening look like?  Is cooking at home something that you regularly do?

BL: Yeah, it’s something that I really need to centre my day, so I really want to be cooking constantly.  My dad was, and has been, a restauranteur, my mum is the daughter of a restauranteur, so cooking is a really big family thing.  But there are some days where… and often the days unravel, like either I’m working in state, and I’m often interstate at least one day of the week at the moment, which is kind of insane, or I’m at home and I’m working, or I’ve been dotting around Sydney doing different jobs, I come back, and it’s too late to cook, and so my boyfriend will just get some takeout somewhere, or we’ll go to a local Vietnamese eatery or something like that to catch up.

So, I would like there to be more nights with me cooking than there aren’t.  This week is a good one because I’m largely at home, but the weekends especially, if Scott and I are at home in Sydney, there’s nothing better than just really spending time, a lot of time, at the markets thinking about the stuff I want to cook later in the week and going for it.

Scott kind of hates cooking, he gets stressed out about it, so I really like being the primary cook of our household.  It’s great.

MD: Yeah, it’s another moment where you’re focused on that act of doing, similar to when you’re swimming, and the brain can shut off and have that time for ideas.  I find that when I’m chopping vegetables, often ideas will come to me.  There’s something about that repetition.

BL: Yeah, totally.

MD: And so, during the day, is there any other rules that you might implement in terms of shutting off from social media or times that you might allocate for focused work?

BL: Mm.  Well, if I’m doing focused work, that’s a great phrase and I’m totally stealing it, if I’m trying to write a big article or I’m trying to write the next act of a play or something like that, I’ll actually often forcibly disable the internet because I’m such a millennial, I get really distracted by things, and when it comes to writing, writing is actually kind of shit.  It’s really hard to do, it’s really hard to focus, and it’s just this constant act of self-loathing because you’re like, oh, that’s not what I wanted to say, why is that idea so dumb?  All ideas are terrible and all sentences are awful until you edit, refine, and polish them and they’re right. 

And the internet’s such a huge distraction because internet gives you immediate reward, which is the opposite of writing, where reward and gratification is so delayed, and so I use an app called Freedom on my laptop, where you activate it, it asks you how many hours and minutes of freedom you’d like, it’s very Orwell-ian in that sense, you press enter, and a stopwatch starts, a countdown starts, and you have that time off the internet.

The problem with that is your phone is still available, so I also often simultaneously activate Freedom and an app called Forest, which is like a Tamagotchi and you have to allocate how long you want your seed to grow.  A seed will start growing and, if you look at any other app besides Forest in that time that you’ve allocated, your tree will die, and your forest will look hideous and shrivelled.  It’s a surprisingly emotional experience.  I’m this guy who’s in his mid-30s but I’m using these kids’ games to keep me focused, but I have to say it works.

MD: Yeah, often things from our childhood can actually be really helpful and work.  I know that… is it reading in bed is terrific?

BL: Oh, yes, RIBIT.  Did you have that as well?

MD: No, no, but I remember when I interviewed you a few years ago, you mentioned it.

BL: Yeah.

MD: And that’s always stuck with me.

BL: Yeah.

MD: Yeah, so whatever works.

BL: Exactly.  And reading in bed is terrific, which is something for a very particular cohort of Queensland students in the 80s and 90s.  That’s something I still actively talk about and, for me, I have to read before I go to bed.  One, so I make sure that I am reading as much as I want, and also it’s actually part of my sleep cycle now, and my boyfriend’s as well.  I’ve extended the culture of RIBIT to him now too, which I feel very pleased about.

MD: Yeah, he can help you with your morning routine and you can help with RIBIT.

BL: Totally.

MD: Is there anything else that you do for more of an evening wind-down routine?  Do you have a specific bedtime, or does that just change depending on what you’re working on?

BL: Yeah, I feel like I’m getting old now and slightly rotting, so I try and get to bed around 10:30 actually.  I’ve got a timer on my phone for 10 o’clock that says phone off, and sometimes I break that rule and I need to check something or I just need to get into a Twitter argument or something like that, but generally I try to have my phone off at ten.  Then something that I’ve been doing for about the past year is I set my alarm clock on my phone and then I start charging it on my bedside table, and that’s when I have my nightly shower.  So, that’s when I wash away all the detritus of the day, and debris, and then I’ve come out of the shower, I’ve got my sleep shorts on, and I’m ready to read.  And I’ve just needed that physical and mental break away from my phone, and knowing that my phone’s now in sleep mode, it’s got ‘do not disturb’ on, and now it’s bedtime and read time.

It’s really helped with my brain and really helped with my reading too, so that’s another night-time ritual I do.  Dinner and Netflix, getting angry about Q&A or whatever’s on television, doing the dishes, putting the laundry away, phone, shower, bed.

MD: How much sleep do you need?  Are you someone who needs a lot?  A little?

BL: I know I need at least seven hours, and that’s probably the one thing that I’m still a bit of a time optimist about.  I’m like, oh, I can still wake up at 6:30 and just start work.  And I know there have been periods of my life where I’ve been working on big projects like The Family Law and the Quarterly Essay where I just get up and my body is so highly strung because of this stressful deadline that I’m able to fight through the tiredness.  And I’ve got some big projects at the moment, but they’re not as stressful as those two, and my body’s just not complying, so I just have to yield to the fact that I need seven, seven and a half, ideally, hours of sleep and, really, allocate for them.

MD: And is there anything that you would change about your days, having just relayed them to me?  Is there any habit that you’d like to work on next?

BL: I’d like to be able to read during the day, but it just feels so indulgent and associated with bedtime to me that I just don’t think that that’s going to happen that much.  My daytime is news brain and what’s going on around the world and night-time still feels like book time.  But sometimes work warrants me reading during the day and I have to train my brain better for it.

MD: Do you ever take time off, or how do you fit in time off?

BL: I allocate it in my i-Cal, with colour-coded i-Cal, so I just... Scott and Ben’s weekend and no one will disturb this day, and I plan holidays months in advance.  I’m actually already thinking about a July 2020 holiday, which is, when I’m talking to you, a year away.  It’s sociopathic behaviour, but unless I plan for it in advance, it’s just not going to happen.

MD: And those plans never change?  Like once it’s in the i-Cal, you’ll honour that time off?

BL: Exactly, yeah, because I associate i-Cal with work.  It’s a professional commitment that I have to go away.  It’s necessary.

MD:  You’ve also mentioned that there’s been times when you’ve felt quite deflated or depressed or weirdly empty after achieving a big goal, and so that’s kind of a different ebb to what a holiday would be.  Did you want to talk to us a little bit about what that experience is like, the post-goal blues?

BL: So, there was this really great New York Times piece in their Smarter Living section about why it is that some of us feel deflated and/or melancholy after achieving a big goal, when you’ve smashed something out of the park, when you’ve been working something for months, and it’s gone well, but now suddenly you just feel like shit or you want to cry, and I’ve had this experience after every time I’ve done something huge.  So, after I’ve finished the last, last, last draft of the TV show, when I finished the Quarterly Essay, after I finished my thesis.  Whatever it is that you’ve been building towards and you can’t wait to see the end of it, you just have a day where you just want to cry.

And reading that New York Times piece was very reassuring because, first of all, knowing that I wasn’t the only person who felt like that, and second of all, having some practical advice because it’s often when we’ve invested so much of our sense of wellbeing, so much of our sense of worth, into these singular goals, that we forget that there are other smaller things that are just as important, you know, maintaining time with your family, being able to exercise the way that you want, trying out the new recipe that you’ve wanted to try for a really long time.

It turns out that these goals are also important to maintain so that you don’t come crashing down.  So you’ve got that random ceramics class that has nothing to do with work in your back pocket because you want to learn how to make a fricking plate.  That’s really important too, and I know that piece was a really good breakthrough for me because, weirdly, I did enrol in a ceramics class at the same time and I’m like, oh my god, this is really hard, this is really challenging, and it’s got nothing to do with work and it’s a much smaller scale achievement, to create something on a pottery wheel that doesn’t explode in the kiln and that’s been glazed properly, and the fact that it has nothing to do with work has been a real liberating thing.

So, the post-achievement blues.  Real thing.  You’re not just imagining it.

MD: Yeah, that really is comforting to hear that other people experience it and also that really pragmatic solution of, well, make more broader goals across your whole life, not just one area, such as work.

BL: That’s right.

MD: With those blues… obviously you’ve got that great tool now, but when you did experience them, what would it do to your days?  Would it mean that you wouldn’t work afterwards, or you were completely stuck or blocked, or what kind of self-talk were you giving yourself during that real rut?

BL: Yeah, I would have a 24-hour to one-week period where you’d have that Zoolander experience of looking in a puddle and going, who am I?  I’m glad that I’ve done that thing that’s defined my very core of my existence, like what does that even mean for my identity?  But now I think that’s a little bit silly because I know what I am, I know who I am, I know what I want to do professionally, and I guess the other thing with freelancing is I’ve got to a stage where I’ve always got something to do, so I don’t have that much time to luxuriate in philosophical questions about who I am.

But one of the niggling things is, well, what do I want to do next? Because there’s that kind of danger you get, as a freelancer, where sometimes you can be just responsive to things and just saying yes, and yes, and yes, and hopefully saying some very sensible no’s as well, which is a whole other conversation, but you also want to drive the agenda and not let other people necessarily drive the agenda for you.  Like an editor might be offering you a job that does come with a decent paycheck, but it doesn’t quite align with what you want to do, or the kind of writing that you want to do over the next year, so you have to actively think about that.  That’s an ongoing challenge.

But in terms of getting through it, I just know that I probably need to swim, to be honest.  I just need a breakthrough, go for a swim, cook something.  Do those things, like, I swam a kilometre, I cooked a lasagne.  That sense of achievement needs to come from somewhere else.  I cleaned the fridge, I audited the pantry, I cleaned the bathroom.  That stuff helps.

MD: I guess just speaking to that ‘what is next’ kind of quandary that a lot of us might face, you’ve said before that your entire career was putting your hand up for things that you don’t know how to do, and I think a lot of people, myself included, find that very scary and fear actually gets in the way of doing that.  So, I wondered if you had any advice for sidestepping fear in that kind of instance when you’re taking on the next new thing that you might not be ready for?

BL: I think it comes back to what we were talking about before, like say you’re about to dive into a huge new project, it’s deeply intimidating, it might be even a genre or discipline that you’re not that familiar with, and you’re asking yourself, why have I agreed to do this?  Why have they thought of me?  One of the things that you need to do is that kind of bricklaying thing that I was talking about before, you need to adjust your attitude so you’re not… you kind of need to fool yourself.  You’re not writing a memoir, or you’re not writing a 4000-word piece for a very important literary journal, or whatever.  You have to write what’s ahead of you, which is, today, your daily goal is to write roughly 1000 words, and they’re going to be rough, and you understand that.  And maybe the goal from breakfast to midday is to smash out 500 words, or at least provide the infrastructure or the scaffolding that you need to write those 500 words.

You’ve got to do it bit by bit, so that’s the first thing I’d say.  There’s always a point, and sometimes it’s the start, sometimes it’s the middle, sometimes it’s the end, often it’s all three, of that process where you completely lose faith in yourself and you have a crisis of confidence, and that’s where I say you’re not in it alone.  If you’re doing a big scale project, you’re usually… and it’s been commissioned, you’re usually doing it with an editor or director or a producer, and those are the people that you need to bounce off.  And, if you know that you can still do the work and you don’t need to bounce off them, you also need to give yourself a pep talk.  When you cannot trust yourself, you have to trust their judgment.  Do you respect the people that you’re working with and for?  If you do, hopefully you do, you can trust them that they made the right decision to commission or hire you in the first place.

That’s a pep talk that I often give myself.  It’s just like, I don’t believe in myself, but I do still believe in my publisher, and they show good judgement.  And, if I need extra help, I’m going to reach out to them and say, I’m stuck, and I don’t know what I’m doing.  Can you look at something?  Can we talk about it?  And go from there.

MD: When creatives are often starting out, it’s often self-initiated projects, before the point where they are being commissioned for work.  Did you ever experience that where you had to do something of your own to develop yourself as a writer?

BL: Yeah, and I think I still do.  For instance, I’m writing a play at the moment that took me… developing the play for quite some time in my own time and then coming up with a pitch when I was ready and confident to pitch it.  But especially in the early phases of my career, so much of your work is pitching stuff, developing work, writing stuff in your own time in order to build the confidence to be able to pitch it and get to that next stage of developing your work.  And I think it’s a similar thing, like you’ve got to treat it like work.  It might not feel like work because you’re not getting a paycheck, so therefore the urgency doesn’t feel as high, but you’ve got to, again, fool yourself into feeling those stakes so you’ll get it done, and that’s about having really tight deadlines.  Like by this stage of the month, I want a first draft of that pitch, and by the end of the week after, I want that pitch to have been edited again after I’ve taken a weekend to step away from it.

So, the reason why I’m so anally retentive about schedules is I’ve spent most of my working life working to deadlines, and within those deadlines I’m giving myself personal deadlines as well.  So, back in the days when I was writing more long-form stories for The Good Weekend, they might give me a month to complete the story, but within that month I’m telling myself, by this week, you’ve got to have all your interviews lined up, and by the next week all of them finished by the middle of next week.  You know, all that sort of stuff goes into it, and that’s what you need to be doing for your personal work too.

MD: I think it would be interesting for people to hear that being a writer wasn’t necessarily a childhood aspiration, and how you actually wanted to be an actor as a teenager and even auditioned for the QUT.

BL: Yeah.

MD: It’s interesting.  So, you started with more of a love of reading and then you, over time, fell in love with writing.  Would you say that’s true of passion, that we build it rather than find it?

BL: Maybe.  I think it’s different for different people though.  I was… it is a true story, I was so hilariously deluded in my teen years where I’m like, yeah, I’m going to be on Home and Away, and that dream did not work out right because, you know, I’m not an actor and I still don’t have that capacity.  But reading was the thing that was always a constant.  And, for me, I wanted to read stories that didn’t exist in a way.  I know that sounds kind of strange, but where were the stories about this really interesting person that I’ve met or this really interesting topic about science or sexuality and gender or the arts that no one is writing at the moment, and I think the good thing, for me, and the advantage I had, was I kind of automatically provided a different perspective because of being gay and because of being Chinese Australian, that a lot of other writers couldn’t necessarily bring to the table.

So, I fell in love with writing because it felt like a quest.  I love a good mission, and, I don’t know, writing is kind of, at its fundamental core, basically an education.  You get to learn about things through writing, whether it’s a travel story or learn about how humans work if you’re writing a play, and all that sort of stuff. And it’s just an extension of being a nerd, and that’s how I fell into it.  I think it’s the perfect profession if you’re just a massive dork, really.

MD: I was wondering if you ever experienced envy or professional comparison?

BL: I think that that was something that I had probably more in my late teens, early 20s, when I was starting out, but even then it was less about envy and more about my own insecurity.  And, look, maybe that’s what all envy is about actually, not knowing whether I’d have a career at the end of my degree, not knowing whether I’d ever have a job.  I mean, arguably, I still don’t.  And not really knowing if I would ever get professional opportunities that would lead to a sustainable career, so I think all that stuff is about your own work.

But I have to say, and my boyfriend can attest to this, I’m not an especially jealous person, and when I do see friends and people I really respect and admire do great work, I am really genuinely just excited, to be honest.  I just feel pride that, I’m like, I know that person.  Maybe that rather than envy is the more gross aspect to what I do.  I have far more bigger propensity to namedrop than I am to envy people.

MD: It sounds like you have a wonderful smattering of friends.  Do you have any quick friendship-making tips, especially in adult life?  How do you form new friendships?

BL: Ooh, that’s interesting.  I don’t know.  There was a period in my 30s where I’m like, I’m not even getting to see enough of my existing friends and my very large family.  I just don’t think I’m going to make any new friends now.

MD: You’re full.

BL: Yeah, it’s done.

MD: Friendship quota.

BL: Which is such a terrible thing, but at the same time, I just find people really interesting.  I’m still, to this day, meeting people that I’ve formed connections with on Twitter or Instagram, just because I’m like, wow, you’re interesting.  We don’t live that far from each other, we should go have a drink sometime.  I’m a little bit incorrigible in that sense, but I think the main thing is, I think if you’re a curious, genuinely curious, person about other people, you’re probably going to make friends that way.

There’s nothing worse than talking to someone and they don’t ask questions about yourself, right?  Which, even though I understand that’s what this whole interview has been.

[Laughs].

MD: I’ve been waiting, Ben.

BL: Tell me about your entire routine from the moment you wake up, Madeleine.  But I think it’s just about staying curious and putting yourself in situations that are new.  You’re going to make new friends that way.

MD: Yeah, I love that.  How do you gracefully get out of something that you no longer wish to do?  Or have you ever had to do that?

BL: Oh, nowadays, I’m getting better at saying, I’m so sorry I can’t make it, but thanks for thinking of me, all the best.  And that’s all.  I had no idea that you don’t have to give an excuse.  Like I don’t have to come up with this elaborate thing where I’m like ooh, and I’ve come out through a period of illness, and I’m really trying to make sure that my relationship is healthy and thriving.

Like if I want to extend it further and I think it actually is a legitimately great opportunity, I’m like let me know if I can connect to you with anyone else you had in mind, but nowadays I’m like, I genuinely do wish them the best, I am really flattered that they thought of me, but sadly I’m not available, and I think that’s totally fine not to be.  Not all of us can get the time we want from the people we would like it from.

The new mantra I’ve had and told other people is, you can say no, you don’t need an excuse. 

Madeleine: Benjamin Law seems to get a lot out of his allotment of days and somehow seems to get more out of an hour that I can even seem to imagine.  While he brings what appears to be this natural buoyancy to his working life, what I appreciated hearing from Ben is how important it is to break a task down into small chunks and take it step-by-step.  He also reminds us that it’s possible to counter those common myths or the notion that, because you’re a freelancer, you have to be productive and busy all the time, that your time is money and that if you’re not working you’re not being productive and therefore not being worthwhile.

It was really nice to hear him break that down a little bit and also share that there can be pressure and something that we really need to redefine for ourselves if we are working as a freelancer.

It’s also important to recognise this natural ebb and flow to our energy and our mood, so rather than trying to manage our time, it might be worth looking at ways to manage our energy and mood, especially when we’re working on several projects at once.  Our mood or our energy for anything can change during different times, and in a way it’s kind of nice to have a variety, so you can turn your attention to different things depending on where your energy is at.

For me, that was really helpful, again, when making this podcast, to have other projects like my event series Side Project Sessions or toying with a book or my freelance writing.  Not everything happens all at once, and we need to shift gears and recognise that that’s okay, and sometimes that can look like procrastination, but at other times it’s just a work process.

Even though we might seem really buoyant in our work and our attitude and our being, I think what I took from Ben is that it’s really important to have a for those moments that we might not feel so buoyant or stable, because maybe it’s at the end of a project or even in the beginning or the middle or during a life crisis or an unexpected circumstance. 

We need to have ways to find joy outside of our work, outside of our creative self, be it through finding pockets of solitude or, in Ben’s case, swimming or trying a pottery class, meeting someone new.  Whatever it is what can help you keep overwhelm at bay and keep your head above water, so to speak.

To finish, here’s Benjamin Law with what he wishes he knew a little sooner.

BL: Saying no and doing it in a way that can be kind is possible.  I wish that I knew that earlier.  Exercising as a way to break up all the static in your brain, I wish I knew that earlier.  And I wish… I think that’s about it actually.  Everything else I’ve been happy to learn as I’ve been learning it.