I wasn’t super happy with the last word vomit. The reason for that is fairly simple– I wrote it in a fit of strong emotion, and I managed to get a sizeable chunk out. Since then, I had allowed too much time to pass between the mood and the elaboration, and so the elaboration feels forced. There isn’t a lot of flow. I’m not entirely sure how to prioritize things, what to focus on, and the whole thing just sort of meanders. There’s an interesting and important lesson to be re-learned here about mood management, mental state management, etc. And of course, a large part of being a writer is about learning to power through anyway– you can’t just NOT write if you’re not in the mood. You have to keep writing through the shitty moods too. It’s just that the good stuff happens during the good times, and you get more good times if you sit down to write more often, and if you expose yourself to the appropriate contexts (which is a whole art form in itself).
_
I’ve been taking a break from doing word vomits– almost half a month off. It’s been good for me, I feel. It’s allowed me to put some distance between the everyday writing (which might’ve been getting a little monotonous and directionless) and has let me think a bit more about what I’m doing here and what I want to do.
What do I want to have with me at the end of the project?
I want a strong understanding of my own personal beliefs, interests and motivations. This will probably be an evolving document, but I’d like something that is simple, succinct and compresses the most compelling bits into something that I can quickly glance at, revisit.
I want a strong set of ‘learnings’. In particular, I want a set of How-to’s. I’m stealing this idea from Matt MIght, who has a set of “HOWTO” posts on his blog.
Here I’m developing a better understanding of the nature of the problem that has begun to frustrate me with my word vomits. It’s a problem that’s a part of my life altogether, but it’s not obvious all the time unless I’m working on substantial things. (And I want to work on substantial things. So previously I used to avoid this problem by avoiding working on substantial things, but I found that that gave me an entire new problem– that I was unhappy and frustrated.)
A part of the problem can is related to a lack of proper bookkeeping. Part of why I never did any bookkeeping was that I simply didn’t have the habit. But also because I often found it to be a really difficult thing to do properly. I could never manage to do it properly. This in turn is parallel with the fact that I’ve always had difficulty scheduling and timetabling, and breaking down big tasks into littler subtasks. I could never develop the habit because I never found it particularly rewarding, and I never found it particularly rewarding because I wasn’t able to make it useful to me. I tried to do categorization and tagging in my old blog (now in my archives), and I could never put together a USEFUL set of categories. I’d have things like “meditations” and “reflections” and “thoughts” and they’d all really be pretty much the same thing. I couldn’t categorize my writing well partially because I didn’t know how to and partially because my writing didn’t lend itself well to categorization. (This isn’t self-praise. Both the worst and best writing defies categorization. But I wouldn’t call any of my writing particularly great. So it’s just bad, it’s dithering all over the place.)
So… we need to solve the problem of bad bookkeeping, and to solve that problem we need to figure out how to approach writing in a way that makes it more categorizable . At least in the interim, because one of the seductive BS thoughts is “if I make my writing categorizable I will pigeonhole myself into doing things that are more narrow than I want to do, and that will become a habit and I won’t be able to write great undefinable things”. That’s BS and I know it.
So, more categorizable writing. How do we do that? More specific premises. I tended to write and I still tend to write by just riffing and exploring ideas almost at random. This is still a good way to get the ink flowing, and will always be a useful tool in a writer’s toolkit. Writers write, no matter what. But what I do right now is I blend everything– motivations, observations, hypotheses, reflections, howtos– into melting pots. Which was fine as long as I just wanted to write, and to see what came out of it. To optimize prematurely would’ve probably meant sucking the life out of the project.
But now I’m starting to see more clearly what I want. I want my writing to function as a tool of inquiry. It might all converge at the end, or as I please, but it shouldn’t be converging simply because I don’t know any other way to write. And here I’m starting to think it makes sense to model my structure after the scientific method. Ask questions. Research topics. Make hypotheses. Write very specific directions for an experiment, experiment, observe closely, collect data, organize and evaluate the data, come up with tentative conclusions.
“Questions” are an interesting category. “Hypotheses” are another. What are the list of questions and hypotheses that I have? They’re all loosely hanging around in my head, and I need some sort of trigger to get them all out. I could go through all my existing word vomits and look for questions that I’ve asked, and indeed I’ve done that quite a bit.
“Observations” is another great category. Knowing that you’re going to read one of those things prepares the mind in advance to know how to approach it. Again, great art doesn’t tell you in advance what it’s about, and it challenges the mind– in a way that the mind grows from. But not every single thing needs to be a challenge. The task ahead of me is to return to my daily habit of writing, and to keep these new categorization ideas with me as I move forward so that things get more orderly, systematized. I’m excited again.
(I do however also realize that it would be quite challenging to try and write 1000 words of pure observation, or of pure hypothesizing, or of pure how-tos, or of pure motivation-analysis. Some of these things will be best served as much shorter chunks. Which might be something best done somewhere other than this 1000wordvomits project. Perhaps on my main blog, or perhaps somewhere else altogether. Something to think about.)