It’s 2021jun02-1716, and I’m working on my second ebook, INTROSPECT. I’ve been working on this for a long time.
An interesting and important challenge when writing a book like this, in my opinion, is that you have to figure out what the core directive is. The great thing about a book – and the whole point of writing a book, really – is that you have a lot of space to talk about what you want to talk about. You get to take the reader on a very specific journey, and you get to set up a lot of things for them to consider, one after another. That said, if you want to sell people on a book in the first place, you need to give them something compelling to work with. And it can take a long time to figure out how what is compelling to you, and a longer time still to figure out how to make it compelling to others.
When I first started writing INTROSPECT I thought it was going to be a book about figuring out what you want. Along the way I started to find that to be a little too “instrumental”, or “mechanical”, and a higher level idea started to emerge, which I consolidated as “inner narrative troubleshooting”. This is still correct and true, but again, doesn’t entirely capture what I want to convey. And I know to some degree it’s never entirely possible to capture what you want to convey, but you can keep getting better at it. The next formulation I came up with, which is sort of parallel to that, is “tinkering mindset, and tinkering with your mindset” – I like how it works at two levels, incorporates some meta-awareness into it. But even then the question is like, why? And finally I’ve gotten around to “enjoy your life without bullshitting yourself”. I think that captures what might be the highest level – the mission, the goal, the point of doing the inner narrative troubleshooting and the tinkering and so on.
So… okay, yes. Why am I writing this? I wanted to just get some stuff onto paper, which is a recurring theme in the book. I also feel the classic problem of, there’s so much I want to say about each part of the book, and each part could end up becoming an entire book in of itself. I talk about the power of stories and storytelling near the introduction, and I find it challenging to not go on for too long, because there’s so much to say! I could write a separate book about storytelling, I think. But that’s not the mission right now. Maybe I should write a blogpost about storytelling. I have a bunch of notes about that. Sometimes it feels like having a bunch of notes about something actually gets in the way of writing about the thing. And this reminds me of a classic riff I return to, by a science writer… Carl Zimmer. He said that writing something substantial can be like trying to make a ship in a bottle. And specifically… that you will never be able to convey everything that you want to say. All the research you do will give you all this insight and all these details but it’s just too much to put in a book. No book can achieve everything you want it to achieve, and if you cling on to that it’ll just make you feel… well, like I’m feeling right now. Frustrated. Overwhelmed. Like the task ahead is an impossible one. And the solution… is to be less perfectionist. To accept that the book will be imperfect, that all books are imperfect, and the best you can do is the best you can do. I’m thinking now also about that Twitter thread of screenshots of Hayao Miyazaki. He’s someone who’s practically the best in the world at what he does, and he struggles. The struggle is inescapable and unavoidable. You just have to struggle with it.
I suppose I should remind myself that this is the struggle that I signed up for. That this is what I want to do with my life, even if I don’t do it anywhere as well as I want to do it. I can always improve on things later, revise things later. I need to get a sense of flow through the whole thing. I’m going to finish this word vomit and then I’m going to get back to working on the book. I’m going to flesh out all the loose ends. If anything is too much, fuck it, I accept it. Let it be too much. If there’s too little of something, fuck it, I accept that too. I just need to get this out of my system and ship it. I will print out the draft and edit it by pen a second time once I’ve done all the edits and updates. And when I’m done I know I will experience a satisfaction I haven’t felt in… years, possibly. And I will have levelled up, become a better version of myself, triumphed over adversity, and be free to pick new struggles that I choose and deem worthy.
It feels good to be back in here, writing word vomits again. I’ve missed this. And with time and practice I will get better at managing my internal rhythms. I have a long history of doing this for myself imperfectly, and I will continue to do this for myself imperfectly. I’ve got this. I’ve done the work. I’ve put in the hours.
It’s okay if the book isn’t great. It’s okay if people make fun of me for it. It’s okay if it gets bad reviews. It’s okay if it’s underwhelming. I can just keep going. I will just keep going. I will correct things as I go. Eventually I will even learn to be comfortable with calendars and use them effectively to my benefit. I’m proud of myself, even with all the imperfections. I’m trying.