WORD VOMIT is when I write 1,000 words in 15 minutes. You have better things to do than to read this.
It seems that the best way to do it is to start immediately before doing anything else. I should always start my most important or pertinent work as soon as possible. The longer I delay, the likelier it gets that I’m going to delay further, or even indefinitely.
I’m thinking about how amazing it feels to be able to write so much- and how scary it is, too, and how disappointing it is when you realize what you haven’t been doing. I’m reminded of this story of a grandmother who lifted up a car to save her grandson (who was pinned underneath it), and she avoided all the interviews and media attention afterwards. When somebody finally did manage to get her to talk, she said quietly- “All my life, there’s been a voice in my head telling me, ‘You can’t do that, it’s impossible’. This was the first time that I disregarded that voice. I did what it said was impossible. How different could my life have turned out to be if I had ignored it from the beginning?”
I love that story, and I think we all relate to it in some way- we almost feel discomfort at the contemplation of our potential greatness, and so we listen to the voices that tell us we can’t do it- voices both from within and without- because it’s more comforting to live predictably. (Now I’m reminded of a Nabokov quote, I believe, where he says that we expect a degree of predictability and permanence from our friends and from the world, and if we label somebody a failure, we’re often almost a little disappointed if they turn things around and become successful instead. We typically then attribute these successes to external factors, or some sort of unique situation or circumstance… the idea that we might have it in ourselves all along is a little hard to swallow, because it means we’re all sitting on greatness right now, at every point, and doing nothing about it.)
See, 5 minutes ago I was browsing Facebook and Reddit- two of my usual internet distractions- and my mind was absorbed in the flow of just passively passing through information- reading this, clicking that, look at this bright red notification, ooh. A part of me was telling me “Look boy, you’re not in the mood today. You wrote 1,000 words in 15 minutes, two days in a row. That’s not quite right. It makes perfect sense if you can’t do it today, because it’s something you’ve never done before. If you could’ve done it, surely, by now you would have written over 10,000,000 words in your life! Buried in those words would be a wonderful novel, several inspiring blog posts, you’d be a writer worth talking about. But you are not, you have not received such adulation, you are not a great person, therefore you are not capable of greatness, just give up, give in to the pretty images and flows of the internet.”
I love the internet but sometimes I hate it too, because it’s so easy to get blissfully lost in it without creating anything of substantial value. But technically it isn’t the internet that deserves hate- (well, does anything, really?)- what’s upsetting is my own human tendency and taste for petty distraction and superficial engagement. I could spend the rest of my life simply clicking and scrolling around the internet.
I AM pretty pleased to have gotten some recognition for my general internet time-spending. I’ve been awarded a “Top Writer of Quora 2012” award, something reserved for only 492 out of tens of thousands of writers. My contemporaries include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I like the idea that, given sufficient time and space, I naturally tend to try to create something meaningful instead of merely scrolling around. But I shouldn’t leave this things to chance- nobody ever really creates amazing things by accident.
That’s something I’d like to talk about further. I was watching a video last night called The Overview Effect, which describes the profound experience of cognitive restructuring experienced by astronauts seeing Earth from space for the first time. It’s a deeply spiritual experience, and you can see it in the eyes of the astronauts being interviewed as they recall their experiences from so many years ago.
What I want to focus on is this- almost every astronaut describes how he or she wanted to involved in space ever since he or she was a child. Nobody becomes an astronaut by accident. I mean, there may have been serendipitious moments involved, of course- they might have been studying in a related field, met someone who could bring them over, so on and so forth. But nobody ever creates anything of magnificent value through pure accident. Nobody wrote a novel by meeting the right person for coffee- did they? Even if it were possible, that’s an awfully risky strategy that I wouldn’t count on.
What I’m trying to say is- it’s clear that value comes from deliberation and recursion- from focusing over and over again on the same thing, from multiple angles and perspectives. You can’t just meet someone for coffee and be inspired to write a novel- you might have to meet that person over and over, you might have to meet multiple people, you have to think about it, write drafts… novels are re-written more than they are written, said some famous writer, and I’m inclined to agree.
That’s still not exactly clear- what I’m saying is that we need to be deliberate, because unless we are deliberate about how we want our lives to be, we will be swept away by the wind- by forces beyond our control, both from within and without. We will become victims of our biology and of our sociology, of our inward impulses and of social pressure. We will act without thinking, in accordance with what is destined for us. We have to fight that if we want to do anything meaningful. We have to develop a vision for ourselves- and I think most of us will, if we pay attention to ourselves and just listen, find that we already have a fairly well-developed vision of who we want to be, of what sort of work we want to do. We develop this over time, in quiet moments of reflection, meditation and insight. But these quiet moments are drowned out by the bustling highways of advertising and social pressure and insecurity and fear and desire, everything inside of us and outside of us that’s beyond our control.
There will always be things that are beyond our control, but I think we do have the ability to set certain parameters- we have a little space that is all our own, and what we do with that space is up to us, and what we do with that space will define our legacy, will create meaning for ourselves in the present…
I think all my life I have feared discipline because it involved ceding control and autonomy to a framework that I was personally suspicious of. Why should I study so hard? Why should I put in so much effort? How do I know it will pay off? I was suspicious of all of that. I couldn’t trust the world just because people told me to. I had not personally encountered any proof which I found persuasive or convincing. It seemed to me that I could get through life just coasting along doing as little as possible, and that seemed pleasurable to me- why should I bother working hard, just because you tell me to? (I’m not going to be a part of your system, man!!!”)
But now as I get older, I’m starting to develop a more personal, intuitive understanding of how discipline works. If you choose your pursuit well and you design your experience properly, discipline and routine gives you more freedom- it allows you to do the work that you feel you need to do, without having to waste valuable cognitive energy thinking about when or how you have to do it. You just do it and you build this vast… body of work, whether it’s practice hours in the pool, or studying, or writing, or whatever it is that you know you have to do.
The realization is dawning on me that routine and discipline, if well chosen, is a joy rather than a burden. But a well chosen discipline expands freedom rather than diminishes it- because while you do lose an immediacy of autonomy for a few minutes or hours, maybe, you stand to gain freedom in terms of options. You expand your reach. You have more “money in the bank”. You just need to find out what “money” is to you, and habitually deposit it in your bank.
Nobody ever taught me this, they just told me to shut up, stop doubting and obey. I think- if I were a teacher, or a parent, and I had to teach “discipline”, I wouldn’t teach it at all. What we should be doing instead is asking, what would you like to be doing? What would you like to explore, who would you like to be? What do you have to do to get to where you want to go?
I want to be a writer. It is clear to me that if you want to be a writer, you have to write. So I would gladly invest, until death, a good half or more of my life into the practice of writing. It doesn’t matter if I never get any credit for it, it doesn’t matter if I never publish a single book- writing is its own pursuit for me, it’s own joy. Enlightened discipline and routine yield freedom- there is freedom to be found once the work is done, and there is freedom to be found in the doing of the work which you find meaningful.
(A big part of the process of writing is re-writing- and there is none of that here. Patience. One thing at at time.)