It’s 427am and I should get to bed, but I suddenly feel this compulsion to do an “old school word vomit” – the way I used to do them when I first started out, with a 15 minute timer. This time, I just set off a stopwatch on Google.
Anyway. I’ve spent a bunch of time lately tidying and sorting my blogposts. I’ve been doing this mostly on my “main blog”, which is visakanv.com/blog/, and now I’ve done a bit of it here on /1000/ as well. And… it’s been an interesting experience.
First of all, this isn’t the first time that I’m doing it on either site. I’ve done it in bits and pieces before, probably a dozen times, maybe more. But I’ve never been able to comprehensively do it in a way that feels like I’ve really done justice to the entire site. And maybe that’s just an ideal that can never be attained. But I believe that there are meaningful thresholds and checkpoints in between, and those can be attained.
For example, with my Twitter threads. I do Twitter threads all the time, and each of these threads functions as a sort of blogpost – and many of them are interconnected and reference each other in quote-tweets and so on. And I have a Notion page, which is on my pinned tweet, where I collect a list of many of my favorite twitter threads, and sort them according to category.
Is it a perfect list of all of the threads that I’ve ever done? Of course not. But is it a pretty good list that I’m happy and satisfied with? Yes, actually! I could go to that post right now and scan through it and find things that I want to do, things that I want to improve. That will probably always be the case. It would be weird if there’s nothing that I want to improve at all. But… I’m happy to share that post with other people. I know that it will be interesting to them, I know that it’s not going to make them go “uhh… wtf is this?”
Hm. I guess this might be a “maximizing positive variance vs minimizing negative variance” situation. My blog is a little dated, many of the posts are pretty old. My thinking and writing has gotten a lot clearer in the last 2 years – and I imagine I will say this every 2 years. Generally speaking, my Twitter threads are much better than my blogposts are. I’m not sure if I have any blogpost that’s really much better than a collection of my tweets. Maybe my Mean Girls essay from 2014. Which was 5 years ago!
I think that’s the source of some of my stress and frustration lately. I want to be a writer. I know I write good tweets, good twitter threads. But I haven’t written a good essay or blogpost in years, it feels like. And that feels like something that I want to change. I want to write novels eventually. So what’s a writer to do? I think maybe the next thing I should do is really just hit pause on my Twitter and start writing longform posts like these again. Just to get into the rhythm of it, to see how it feels.
Circling back to the sorting of blogposts – I think I’ve made some minor breakthroughs in how to think about categories. I used to try and categorize them in some sort of top-down way, which was a silly and stupid way to do it, because I’m not intelligent enough or well-informed enough to come up with thoughtful categories to begin with. Rather, I realized that I should work backwards from what I talk to people about. The cool thing about talking to people is, because of the incentives of the social game (you want to impress people, you don’t want to waste their time, you want to be useful), I end up surfacing whatever is the most interesting or important thing that I could be talking about. I found, for example, that “how to deal with assholes” was a common thing I talked to people about – and I didn’t have a category for that in my blog! So now there’s a category for that. I need to repeat that.
And I guess the same is also true for my word vomits. I can’t just keep scrolling around and clicking around and hope that I’m going to find some sort of magical set of category ideas. The best ideas come from talking about these things with other people. Because ultimately I do want my writing to be useful to other people. So it’s time for me to start getting out of my solipsistic, introspective lair and talk to people about all of this stuff!
I’ve been nervous, I guess. A part of me feels like all of this stuff is old, dated, irrelevant. Why would anybody be interested in this? And I suppose more worryingly, what if they think worse of me for it?
But as always, articulating these worries out loud reveals them to be silly. So what if they’re not interested? And so what if they think worse of me? Why should either of those things bother me? I don’t have to be interesting to everybody all the time. And if somebody is so flakey as to think poorly of me because I shared something I worked on… do I really care what they think about me? Not really! I’d much prefer to solicit the opinions of my trusted friends and peers – now a rather diverse group of people now, which I am grateful for – and I can already kind of figure out what they would say.
So here we are then. We are approaching the final fifth of the @1000wordvomits project. A part of me is eager to get it over and done with. A part of me wants to make sure that the final quarter or fifth is superior to the the rest of it. And I think that will be the case, whether I actively try to do something about it, or simply let it flow.
One of the things I’ve been learning from the editing process is that I should make an effort to title things well. What should this title be? (Just crossed 13 minutes and 30 seconds.) I think it will be… share your work. Because that’s what I need to do more of right now.
(image from Jordan Napper’s blog.)