Good Input + Good Output = Win
Medium · Writing · 2014 · 1.2k words
Visa advises aspiring writers to be prolific, write badly, and prioritize quantity over perfection for creative growth.
Good Input + Good Output = Win
I'll start by going through some of my most recent thoughts on writing.
1: "Letter To A Young Songwriter", which I can summarize as follows:
1. **Aim to be prolific**, rather than "to be great" or "to have fun". We can have much more interesting conversations once you have a body of work.
2. **Screw 'best'.** Avoid trying to write the best possible song. Your definition of 'best' will be a moving target.
3. **Write badly.** Deliberately try to write bad songs, rough songs, strange and awkward songs. They'll teach you more than you'll learn from writing what you think is "okay".
4. **Screw originality.** Forsake the quest for originality, it's a mirage. Learn other people's songs as much as you can. Learn songs from genres you don't really care for.
5. **Think less, write more.** Don't try to be smarter by thinking harder. Be smarter by processing more, recursively. Write new songs. Learn songs you didn't know. Learn new chord progressions. Take long walks through unfamiliar territories.
6. **Play scales.** It's like learning to play with the underlying code of music itself. It'll improve your appreciation of music that you listen to, and it'll improve your ability to navigate the music you play.
7. **Play slow.** Don't rush after music. Immerse yourself in it. Imagine really bad sex, and then imagine really good sex. What's the difference? Good music is like good sex.
8. **Always Be Creating (Or Listening).** If you're not doing one of the two, you're probably procrastinating. Ask yourself which of the two states you're closer to, and dive into that.
2: 10 things I've learnt from 10 years of writing for the web.
Here's a quick word cloud:
_you don't know what works / writing is free / it's an amazing thinking tool that helps you get new ideas + identify things others miss / you will get it wrong / be prolific / don't be proper, write with gusto / experiment wildly, then edit / read intensely / writing should inform the way you act / write to be read, get person X from point A to point B_
In both cases I've only dedicated a single point to input- to reading. This is not an accident. This is a symptom of the way I think. I've thought a lot about output. I've thought very little about input.
Why? Why didn't I think more about input? I think a part of it was because I felt invulnerable, invincible. I was used to eating poorly, sleeping late, all of those things. I was an _intellectual_, and brains aren't affected by such mundane, physical things! (Newsflash: They are.)
When I paused to properly appraise my inputs, I was horrified.
Something tells me Lebron James doesn't actually eat at McDonald's very often.
It was like discovering an athlete eating junk food, sleeping too late, drinking too much, smoking and hanging out with an underachieving group of toxic friends. And then wondering why she wasn't getting past her plateaus.
Framing writing as a sport makes it much clearer for me. If I want to produce world-class output, I also need world-class input. Calories in, calories out. There's a lot more that goes into it, of course, but I've already written a lot about that.
If I'm in the mood for writing, I already know what to do to write well. What's holding me back is that I haven't been in the mood for writing as often as I'd like to be. I haven't been stepping up to the plate as much as I know I could, and should.
Destroy distraction with drastic action
The first thing I did with this realization was unfollow and unfriend everybody on Facebook and Twitter (and Instagram and Quora and Tumblr). I used to have thousands of people on my feeds- old friends, peers, acquaintances, people I was curious about, etc.
This might seem weird to some people, but for me it was something that I have been curious about for a long time. Something that I've wanted to do for a long time, but didn't quite feel ready or able to for some reason.
Here's why: When it comes to social media, I'm an alcoholic. A large amount of my consciousness would (and probably a larger part of my subconscious) was being expended every day simply thinking about these people. Even when I was away from everyone, they were the lens through which I would view the world. I would think about what Facebook status to write next, to get those wonderful shots of pleasure with every Like.
"Why not just deactivate?" I tried that, and even then the knowledge that I could reactivate at anytime was always on my mind. I was like a smoker who stopped smoking only to look forward to his next cigarette. It wasn't good enough. I needed to do something even more drastic.
According to RescueTime, there are some weeks where I spend 31% of my time on social media:
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I shouldn't be spending more time on social networking than I should be spending on work, or writing.
What if I spent that time reading or writing (or even napping) instead?
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This is better, but what if…?
I felt like I needed to take some drastic action because a lot of the little actions I had been taking over the years weren't making much of a dent in my life. I still often go to sleep feeling like I hadn't really spent the day well, over and over again. And I don't want to feel that way for the remainder of my life.
I have been writing for years about trying on a different sort of self-image, and I have been prepping myself to have a different sort of identity. What's been stopping me from making the leap? Inertia. Fear. Habit. I don't know. But eventually I got tired of hearing myself say the same old shit day after day.
It's been 2–3 days since I started unfollowing and unfriending everybody.
I started with people that I didn't really care about, and with people who I found tedious or annoying. And that gave me the momentum and courage to unfollow everybody else as well. And finally when I was down to just a few close friends, I figured I'd go all the way. I can always reach out to them for a coffee in real life.
So that's me. That's my journey so far. I started out as a kid who'd read books under his desk to becoming this hyper-social (on social media) dude who'd keep tabs on everybody, pay attention to what everyone's doing with their lives- at the expense of my own.
What am I going to do now that I have almost 50% more time than before? (Assuming I was spending about 1/3 of my time on social media- I had two units of time spent on work, and now I have one extra unit of time).
I'm going to read. I have an entire bookshelf that has been waiting patiently for me.
I'm going to read.
My cats, with some of my books.
_Follow me on Twitter.
(But yeah, I won't be following back anytime soon.)_
Originally published at https://medium.com/@visakanv/1a20bc8fef94.