I wrote that last post– 0313– right after lunch, while in a food coma of sorts. I would’ve typically much rather have preferred to take a nap instead, but I decided that I wanted to challenge myself a little bit. To keep myself from straying– ending up on Reddit, Facebook, Imgur, etc as I often do, I turned off my Wifi.
As to be expected, the post wasn’t the most coherent of posts. Interestingly, come to think of it, I must’ve known that that was going to be the case, and I chose to write something that didn’t necessarily have to be coherent. I chose to put together a bunch of thoughts and quotes instead of writing something that might’ve required welding or other more energy-intensive processes.
It feels like there are several different kinds of processes in writing, and they require different levels of alertness. It gets really complex because there are multiple variables and multiple types of work and processes. And none of this is very precise. Most of the time I just sit in front of my keyboard and start writing without thinking too much about what sort of writing I’m doing. Right now i’m just writing straight from my head, whatever’s on my mind– a running commentary about what is going on, about what happened earlier. That’s a sort of “transcriptive” writing, the process of making a transcript.
This is slightly easier than what I was doing earlier, which was accumulation and gathering– thinking about all the things that are related or relevant, and then putting them down on paper. That’s the sort of thing you don’t necessarily need to write in paragraphs– a simple bulleted list would do, if you’re merely accumulating data.
What other forms of writing are there? (I’m now transitioning to thinking about accumulating, which requires more thought and recall of some kind.) There’s argumentative or expository thinking, where you have to analyze something in your head and look for cracks and chinks. This is harder than simply accumulating data points, because now you’re adding value judgements. If you’re writing about something you’re very familiar with, then you’ve already done the accumulation-work in advance, and you can go straight to processing the values. If you’re trying to argue about or discuss something you don’t know very much about, then it’s going to be harder– because you have to collect the data AND figure out what you think about it all. (Of course, you’re never able to simply collect information without forming some sort of opinion about it, unless it’s purely abstract gibberish that you aren’t able to make sense of.
What am I getting at with this post? I’m trying to say that writing (and thinking– for me the two are somewhat yin/yang) is a big bag of many things, and all of those subsets of things each have their own challenges, their own complexities. Okay, I already knew that. What are the subsets? So far I’ve mentioned– transcribing thoughts in real time, accumulating data points, and making sense of data points. What else is there? “Making sense of data points” is itself a box with smaller boxes in it. What are those boxes? There’s… contextualizing, which is seeing where some data points fit with other data points.
I’m halfway through this vomit and I’m feeling a bit stuck, because it feels like the scope of what I’m writing about doesn’t fit nicely within the scope of this piece of writing. I suppose I should attempt to write about writing in an entirely separate form. So what should I use to remainder of this vomit to do?
I guess transcribe more thoughts. I know that I’m a pretty decent writer. I was reading a book yesterday about Business and about individuals who have made a difference to the world of Business, and I found myself thinking… this book might be useful to some people who’ve never heard of these individuals, but there are all sorts of more interesting things to talk about than merely listing out who these people are. I feel like I could have written a “better” book– better according to my own standards and interests, of course. It was an interesting, slightly unsettling and rather exciting feeling– the realization that I must have become a better writer. Again, I know I’m pretty good, but I’ve always felt like I’m not ready to write books. A book is a bigger investment than a blogpost or an internet comment– it’s an experience, something that people make time for. It’s like the difference between telling a joke and doing a standup routine for a paying audience.
I can’t wait to be done with these vomits, but of course I shouldn’t rush them. I’m sorta rushing them, but I’m just going with the flow that’s inside me. As long as I sleep well at night, all is alright. I stress out about some things but I want to contextualize that stress within a broader system. I want to be able to breathe deeply and feel calm even as some part of me stresses out on the inside.
What do I need to do now in order to become a better writer, to move forward, to develop my craft? There are a whole bunch of things I could do, of course, but what’s the most important thing? I need to read, but I don’t feel like reading right now. I feel like I’m beginning a process at the present moment that I should exhaust before I get around to changing gears, changing tasks. I suppose I should go through old things that I said I want to write about, and write about those things. I had put together a mini set of heuristics for thinking about what’s worth writing about, and what’s not.
I wonder if my next one will be less messy, and what that will say about what I’m doing, where I’m at. It’s okay for some of these vomits to be completely incoherent and senseless– they still perform a function within the broader ecosystem. They’re the little trash piles.