compelling projects
Frame Studies · Writing · 2026 · 2.4k words
A look at what makes projects compelling through Visa's own writing projects: Introspect, hyperthreading, wordvomits, YouTube, and Substack. Feedback, novelty, completion, and mission drive them, but each plateaus and forces a new frame.
compelling projects
to drive, to strike, to thrust
How do we create compelling projects for ourselves?
I define a project as anything that cannot be accomplished by a single individual in a single session. So a project is something that requires collaboration, even if only with our past and future selves. A project requires continuity. It typically requires reorientation, because tomorrow-you might not remember what today-you intended. And– this is less obvious, but I think it’s kind of tautological– for a project to be brought to completion, it must be compelling.
I think I’m writing this post in particular to try and reevaluate what has been compelling to me in my own projects. Simply thinking about this gives me that strange mix of horror and relief that one gets from realizing that they’re probably missing something important. Horror, because, how could you?? But also relief because, oh good, maybe this will be the thing that fixes everything. It probably won’t, of course, but maybe it’ll make a Real Difference at least. We’ll see.
I’ll narrow it down to just writing projects, because if I didn’t, then this post itself would become a sprawling project and I’d rather… ship something that works now, and leave myself the option of adding something separate later:
i. writing Introspect (2022)
Writing Introspect (2022), a 300 page book– this was hard, and it took me 2 years to finish. In hindsight 2 years doesn’t seem like a lot, but at the time it was excruciating. (Also I had started the project in 2018, and kinda noodled around with it on-and-off.) Once the Covid-19 pandemic started, part of me thought I was going to be done with Introspect in 3-6 months, since I had already written a lot of the material in prior years. I got stuck a lot. I feel like I remember being stuck far more than I remember actually working. I found it overwhelming and nauseating at times, because the emotional subject matter was so difficult, and I really tied up my self-worth to that project in an unhealthy way (which was recursively funny, because the book itself was significantly about not doing things like that, and I got stuck the loopiness of that for a while).
I think the strongest anecdote I have about working on Introspect is that I would often wake up in the morning, fairly clear-headed, shower, drink my coffee and sit down to work, and then almost immediately feel narcoleptic. I would take a nap and have very vivid dreams. Looking back, I now think those naps were the result of my mind (maybe even my brain, at a neurological level?) remodelling itself internally.
The thing that kept me going, I think, was remembering all the conversations I’d had with people over the years who told me that my input had been deeply helpful to them. Whenever I felt frustrated and overwhelmed by the impossibility of the project, and the certainty of failure, and the blow to my ego and so on, the thing that would pull me out of it was remembering that if I finished, I’d be able to help more kids like myself. That was very compelling to me, so I kept going.
ii. hyperthreading (2018-2023)
I still don’t know how precisely I want to frame this, but the way I talk about it is slowly consolidating over time: I had a grand tweeting project roughly from the time I left my job in 2018, until my son was born in 2023. This was very easy and effortless for me. It was almost harder not to tweet. I would tweet even when I was sick or tired or sleep-deprived. I wrote something like 200,000+ tweets in this time. This was easy for me! I wish I could do other things as easily as I could tweet. And… tweeting isn’t as easy for me now as it was in those years, I think because there have been diminishing returns– I feel like I’ve said pretty much all I have to say in that medium, and I feel compelled (or obliged?) to try and say different things in different mediums.
iii. Writing 1000wordvomits (2012—)
– I started this project in late 2012. It chugged along at a moderate pace at first, and then surged in 2015 when I found a great rhythm of writing on my phone on my commutes. This was before my Twitter started blowing up. Once I started having conversations with people all the time, I found it difficult to switch up to writing wordvomits. I’d like to be done with this project, but I can never seem to bring myself to rush its ending.
It’s currently 89.6% complete. I do still want to complete it someday, I think it will be very satisfying to finish it. I suspect I might feel a renewed interest in writing for it once I feel like I’ve accomplished something substantial on my Substack. I think it’s interesting how the years add layers to it. When I first started the project, I was unmarried, unemployed, and lived with my parents. Since then I got married, got a house, got a job, left that job, had a kid, moved house, and am having another kid. Still, the project remains, waiting for me to finish it. I also imagine that I might keep going with that project even after its completion, maybe adding at least a post every year or so.
iv. youtube.com/visakanv
I first created my youtube account all the way back in 2005, but I mostly uploaded videos of myself playing guitar. I made about a dozen “talking head” videos around 2016 or so when I had the thought that I ought to get better at speaking on camera, but that never really went anywhere. The impulse hit me again when covid-19 happened, and this time I made a commitment to make 100 videos, and I successfully achieved that goal. Many of those videos were 30-40 minutes long, some over an hour long, where I’d just be ad-libbing without a script, talking about some topic that interested me– usually something I’d already been writing about or talking with people about.
I was really glad that I did this, because I think it greatly improved my confidence as a speaker, particularly speaking with international friends and audiences rather than just locally. A part of me was hoping that the project would yield outsized success, but I’m okay with how it turned out. I think the odds are good that I’ll make more youtube videos in the future, but I no longer care to do long rambly videos like I did then. I achieved my goal of becoming comfortable speaking on-screen. With future videos, I’d want to be more sensitive to viewers, which means planning what I’m going to say, and trying to say it as succinctly as possible.
v. Working on my Substack (2022–)
This is still oddly I think harder than all of the above. Would I say that it’s harder than writing Introspect? I think yes, actually. I think I had a clearer sense of what I wanted with Introspect than with my Substack. At first I called my Substack “Visa’s Voltaic Verses”, which was a sort of generic placeholder name, and then eventually I did several brainstorming exercises that made me feel that “there’s something about frames that I ought to talk about”. But I have doubts and uncertainties about this in a way that I didn’t have so much with Introspect. Well, no, that’s not quite right. There were many times while working on Introspect where I worried that I wouldn’t finish the project. Well no that’s not quite right either– I’m stubborn. I knew I wasn’t going to quit. I just worried that it was going to be not-as-good as I wanted.
Just as it was funny how working on Introspect drove me into emotionally unhealthy places, working on Frame Studies has gotten me to question whether “Frame Studies” is the right frame at all. Recently a new overarching frame or motif came to me, which is the idea of a funhouse mirror, that I’ve gotten from Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown (1992):
We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. We are feeling our way into it, blundering about. That is not surprising. Our lives in the physical world, the “real” world, are also far from perfect, despite a lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are imperfect by their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace. The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real world. We take both our advantages and our troubles with us.
“The Funhouse Mirror” feels more fun, cheeky, experimental, chaotic and jester/fool coded than “Frame Studies”, which feels academic and sterile in a way that I don’t really enjoy. But I’m questioning everything, really. Do I even want to be doing essays about media and thinking and the internet and so on? Big sigh. I think yes, but I want to circle my way around to it. I might start by writing about video games and movies and other cultural things and then introduce the Frame Studies elements obliquely. I’m unsure.
What do I know?
Alright, it’s time to start wrapping up. Let’s circle back to the original question: how can I create compelling projects for myself? What do I know about what makes a project compelling versus not?
Part of what made Twitter compelling for me was the prospect of immediate feedback. tight feedback loops are compelling. another part of what made twitter compelling for me was the constant stream of novel information that I could respond to. So novelty. And another thing that made twitter compelling was how each tweet could be written and “finished” in such a short amount of time. So a sense of completion. All of those things are still broadly applicable, but the immediacy factor seems reduced with algorithm changes, and the novelty aspect seems dimmed now that I’ve more-or-less seen everything. And while each individual tweet or thread gives a minor sense of completion, I also feel like new tweets are overkill.
What made Youtube compelling for me was feeling like I was developing my confidence, and developing a sense of skill. And building up a body of work. Similarly as with twitter, once I had made 100 videos, getting to 200 didn’t feel as compelling without a change in the specifics of the game that I was playing.
Actually I can say the same for 1000wordvomits. I started that project with the intent of becoming a better writer, and I feel like I achieved elements of that goal sufficiently enough– in the sense that each additional wordvomit, just like each additional youtube video, no longer feels like it’s actually making me better at what I do. Quantity of output creates a context where you can discern (and make) qualitative changes, but eventually you do pick all the easy-and-visible wins, and then you hit the plateau. This is how it is with fitness and musicianship as well, as far as I know (which is not very far tbh).
What made Introspect compelling for me was a sense of mission. I wanted to make a difference to people, and to myself. I also greatly enjoyed this sense of consolidating all the things that I cared about in a domain into one space, which was a tremendous relief. I’ve felt similarly about some of my favorite blogposts and essays.
When I think about Frame Studies, I find that there are compelling elements in the sense that… okay, it would be nice to do another ‘Big Master Work’ in the same category/class as “VV’s Hyperthread Twitter Corpus” (I need a better name for this), Friendly Ambitious Nerd (2020) and Introspect. I even have this cute little sigil motif for the latter three works together: ▲꩜▣. It feels like it wants to exist. And frankly it feels like I’m the one standing in the way. But I also did feel that way with Introspect for a lot of the time I was working on it. I’m now remembering that there came a point where something changed– like I fell through the trapdoor (h/t matryoshkas), and suddenly the project was “more right than wrong”. And I think this coincided either roughly with when I figured out that the book ought to follow the Hero’s Journey structure, or when I figured out the brainfog / heart beacon visuals. Something about those particular realizations gave the project Animating Spirit. The project went from “house” to “home”, even though there was still construction dust and mess lying around everywhere, and some of the lights and plumbing etc were not functional. So… there’s probably some similar realization(s) that are waiting for me re: Frame Studies. Maybe it might be that I have to sketch out the whole “book” even though it’s not actually book. Initially I thought that this would be a bad idea, but it’s been long enough that I’m open to it now. I’m kind of desperate at this point, because I have a new baby on the way in a couple of months, and the sheer number of open loops associated with Frame Studies is kind of driving me insane.
I gotta go pick up my kid from school, so this will have to end abruptly a little. But I felt good thinking through this stuff, and maybe it might be useful or interesting to some of you who might be working on your own projects.
Originally published at https://visakanv.substack.com/p/compelling-projects.