in the early 2010s i spent a lot of my time writing on reddit and facebook and quora. and also chatting about politics and the news with friends in groupchats. i found a lot of it to be… underappreciated? i’m not sure that’s the right word. it felt like a waste of time in a certain sense. like i was… fighting the wrong fight, misallocating my resources. it was certainly good practice, and i’m grateful for that part. but i wish for example that i had made more youtube videos, which would be more enduring and public-facing.
at some point i started writing on twitter more. the specifics around that would take me a while to properly articulate- i’ve probably done that elsewhere already- and then my twitter audience started growing and growing. i’m up to 80,000+ followers now. which feels good. but i’m also feeling like there’s something limiting about it. i don’t mean i’m limited by the size of my audience. rather it’s something about the shape of the thoughts i’m expressing and conveying. i want to write more substantial things. i want to be a blogger, an essayist. i want to “go home” in that sense, because i started out as a blogger/essayist. twitter taught me some very cool and interesting things, and gave me some tremendous opportunities, i basically make a living from twitter now. but i want to be careful not to fall into the trap of pigeonholing myself as The Twitter Guy. I want to write some good fucking essays damnit!!
but then there’s always the question of, alright then, how DO you write good essays? at the heart of it it’s probably the same as writing good tweets, it just takes more effort, it takes longer. it’s riskier in the short-run sense. tweets pay off immediately, or don’t. you get immediate feedback and satisfaction. essays take time. a tweet that misses doesn’t feel like anything to me. an essay that misses… i want to say it makes me sad, but does it really? i’m at a stage in my creative process right now where i think… i think i’d be happy to write a hundred shitty essays in a hundred days, rather than a dozen kinda-good ones. I thiiink i’d rather write 1 Truly Excellent essay over 100 “shitty” essays, but the tricky thing is i don’t know how to write a Truly Excellent essay without risking shitty essays. The thing i’m trying to gesture at here, the thing I’m trying to teach myself, is that my anxiety over “this essay has to be really really good” is killing the work. I have about 150 wordvomits left to go in this space. I can just use these for the essays.
I want to prioritize writing essays. I want to build the muscle for it. I want to get into the habit of starting essays and finishing them. I have a lot of unfinished studies and sketches. That’s not perfect, but it’s okay. I could make even more of them. I think I wrote recently about how I’ve hesitated to write more crap if my existing crap is already taking up so much psychic space. I… will find my way out of that somehow. Maybe I’ll just accept that it’s a mess and then connect the dots for the good stuff that happens to emerge. I want to be really in tune with my feelings. these words are flowing out of me right now because i’m in tune with my feelings. the mistake i keep making is that i’m not trusting my feelings. it’s so funny that it really comes back to this every time. i want to embody john mayer’s stupid bravery. i want to be stupidly brave. i have wanted many different things at many different times, but i think at the heart of it all i want to be brave. i want to be willing to risk things. fuck it if people think i’m stupid. fuck it if people think “oh his tweets were good but his essays are ass”. so be it. i’m working. i’m practicing. i can postpone caring about the results for a few more years.
as i say that i know that’s not entirely true. i do have bills to pay. there’s opportunity cost to anything i’m doing. i could be working on selling more books. i could be doing more marketing consults. and if i need to do that to pay the bills, that’s something i can balance. yeah. i can do that. i can… learn to use a calendar. learn to schedule my time. i used to write while having a full time job. i no longer have a full time job. i do have a child, and i think the first year of caring for a child is particularly messy and disruptive if you don’t have outside help. i do love being a dad and it’s not even a sacrifice because i have no doubt as a writer that fatherhood is going to influence my writing for the better. my relationship with people and humanity etc is enriched, my heart is more tender and sensitive, there’s no way being a dad doesn’t make me a better writer… once i start getting some proper sleep and have some moments of time that i can sneak off and write. actually this wordvomit feels great in the sense that it feels just the same sort of sneaky that my writing on my commutes to-and-from work used to feel. i don’t have a lot of time. i just have some thoughts and feelings. i don’t even really have the energy to think too much consciously, so it’s my subconscious and my fingers that are writing this. but okay, lets call this what it is, the latest cycle of me trying to unblock myself, unjam myself, burst open the muddy pipe. what do i write about next? what’s on my mind? how am I feeling? scrolling back up, i don’t think i did a good enough job of exploring “how to write good essays” so let’s dig into that in the next one
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okay so how do i write good essays? what is the insight that i had? do i want to distinguish between essays and blogposts? i think every author gets to define for themselves what they want their writing to be, how it should look like, what the form and function is, blah blah. in my particular case, i think i’ve been feeling this separation emerge where, the blog is for more utilitarian “howto” type posts, things that I share with my friends to solve very specific problems. some of my blogposts start out as collections of notes and links and then they get updated as I find myself sharing them more often. I like that approach, i’m happy to stick with it. though looking at my blog right now, i’m not quite happy with it. that’s part of the mess i have going on, everything around me seems janky to varying degrees.
alright visa you know how to solve these problems, you help other people with them all the time, and you’ve solved some form of this for yourself in the past, too. what are your priorities? what’s important? what feels important? the most important thing… is to make progress on voltaic. sanity-check: why? because my tweets are already good enough. i don’t need to think about my tweets in order to write good tweets. the visakanv twitter game is quite well established. other people have learned from my play. ok, but why voltaic rather than say, working on my blog, or updating either of my books? well. it would be nice to update my books. there’s several things going on there. an epub for introspect should bring in some money which would be nice. but do i need that money right away? not necessarily, i don’t think so. that’s something for me to figure out with my wife while we discuss our finances. if i need money quick i can always do marketing consulting. and there are things i can do to improve my marketing blog, which would improve my pipeline of clients, but again that feels like overengineering somewhat. i can just ask twitter for clients if i want more clients. it would be cool to improve my marketing blog, but do i want to become a better marketing consultant right now? that’s not what excites me. what excites me is becoming the best essayist i can be, particularly for the times that we currently live in.
why not edit and update my blog? well, does editing and updating my blog help me become the best essayist i can be? doesn’t feel like it, does it? it’s just a nice thing to have. and sure i can spend a few hours on it here and there, my blog is certainly my oldest child. “what do i want my blog to be” feels like a fun question to jam on, but maybe later, because it’s certainly not as exciting as “how can i become the best essayist I can be?” let’s jam on THAT.
well, the basic formula is pretty straightforward. 1. immerse yourself in reading really good essays. i want to reread bourdain, neil humphreys (re: local singaporean context), montaigne, emerson. i need to be reading at least some longform every day.
- practice writing essays. i think i’ll do that in these wordvomits, since i’d like to wrap this project up too, or at least make a big advance from ~850s to ~900, ~930s, ~950s. maybe even all the way to 1000, who knows. one essay at a time.
there are two parts to practice, which is making/doing stuff, and studying/evaluating stuff. part of that goes in 1. what are the essays that have really made an impact? I’d like to be considered alongside say, slatestarcodex and ribbonfarm, though i’m not sure if i particularly want to focus on that particular audience, positioning-wise. i want to have one foot in that world, but another foot in a new world that doesn’t currently exist. i do mean it when i say that i want to write for friendly ambitious nerds from all over the world, particularly nerds who aren’t in america or europe. what do i have to say to them? do i want to be addressing them directly? or do i want to be writing at myself? there are some questions here about intent, positioning, focus, direction, etc that i have been hemming and hawing about indecisively. that’s not necessarily a bad thing, though i haven’t had much to show for it yet. in an essay i’m tentatively excited about, i talk about how important it is to argue with oneself as a creative. the question is, are those arguments productive? or are they a distraction from the work? sometimes what is a distraction from a particular piece of work turns out to be really valuable for some other piece of work.
i feel like the metaproject i’ve been working on has been really ambitious, really chaotic, really sprawling, and maybe it’s time to start reigning in some of that chaos. i have many different topics or themes that i want to discuss, that i know i can discuss at length. but i’m not certain of the frames. i’ve said to my wife several times now, it feels like i’m trying to write Game of Thrones, and i’ve done a bunch of important worldbuilding re: Westeros and all the Houses and the backstory and so on, but I’m not sure what S1E1 should be yet. And I’m not entirely sure I should be thinking episodically either. Maybe I’ll get to that once I’ve gotten a few reps in, something like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (which I think I might be due for a reread). Sketch out several patterns, several braids, several ways of seeing. Go in circles according to whatever is interesting. see what happens.
i’m going to bed now but i have some followup steps in mind for the next essay or two. one would be, what are all the features that i want to see in my essays? and, what am i trying to do with these essays? who are they for? what is the breadth of scope? what are all the different kinds of essays i want to write? write the meta stuff here. done
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I periodically get the sense that a lot of the different things I talk about are really all facets of the same thing, and that if and when I eventually figure out how to convey the wholeness of the thing, I will feel a great relief. But I realize as I write this– if I invert that, it implies that I am feeling anxious about being in disarray. Which feels true. And maybe I can do something about that. There is some relief to be had right now in the acceptance of the mess. I can sit in this for a bit. But after a couple of big sighs, i feel that I don’t particularly want to accept the mess. I don’t have to be neurotic about it, but I would like to progress towards less mess, even as I understand that mess, like misunderstanding, is the default condition.
so alright, let’s start from scratch. what do i know for sure? i want to be the best essayist i can be, and in tandem with that I want to reduce the amount of mess in my domain. the obvious first rule of mess is to throw out whatever you can. but beyond that the deeper question is, what do you really want? clarity of intent is what helps determine what is relevant and what is not. arguably all messes are not just clutters of things, but clutters of intentions. that’s what really makes them difficult to tidy.
i’m currently in love with the idea that i want to be the best essayist that i can be, but i haven’t yet gotten into the details. what does that MEAN? what do i want to be doing? do i want to write pretty sentences? yes. but is that my top priority? I don’t think so. I’m quite happy with my sentences. I’m not happy with my paragraphs. and that’s obviously because i’m out of practice when it comes to writing collections of paragraphs. how many paragraphs is an essay? actually, let’s go count words and paragraphs in a few of my favorite essays. andddd alright, i did that. what did I learn? I think I decided that I’d like to try writing essays with paragraph constraints. what would I do if I only had 12 paragraphs to say what I wanted to say? would I start writing really long paragraphs? maybe. but really I want to diagram my sentences better, which I think I did for Serious and for Voyagers, somewhat haphazardly.
alright, those are some thoughts about the technical volume of things. but what about subject matter? what are the topics i want to discuss? do I even want to be thinking in topics necessarily? I think that’s been the source of a lot of rumination and (hopefully productive) confusion. today i’m thinking about information architecture, and obliqueness, and storytelling heft, and how they all come together. I was rewatching Frozen 1 and 2 and I have some thoughts on that, I could’ve maybe chosen to write an essay about that and then spiral off from that into tangents as desired. In F1 I really enjoyed the little details like the random mother and son on coronation day, really demonstrates how the major event affects little characters too. In F2, I really enjoyed Olaf’s little presentations, first explaining F1 to new characters, and then F2 in the postcredits.
I think the nature of my writing style is that… I seem to work best in bursts. I don’t really like leaving something and then coming back to it later. This is hard to fully/properly contextualize. i think anais nin had a good riff about how stuff is more vivid and vibrant… yup . this is similar to ray bradbury’s idea of stepping on the landmine. this was partially how i used to write when i was in my early 20s, and i suppose having attained some level of success, having a readership, i got all self-conscious about wanting to do Good and Proper work. I might be repeating myself but i’m ok with repeating myself.
alright lets race to the end of this so we can go to bed. i work well in bursts. i have… many big picture ideas, themes, concepts etc all sketched out, but none of them particularly at any moment seem to want to be manifested in the ways that i have conceptualized them. i would like to get good at writing 12 paragraphs about something in a fairly short amount of time. i would like to practice diagramming my sentences, but i dont want to get overly tedious about it. rather i just want to practice sketching something, put it out or discard it, and then move on to the next thing, repeatedly, every day. or in this case maybe every night. i got tired and bored of doing my wordvomits at some point because i feel like i was repeating myself in an unproductive way, like i was circling the drain with my introspection and it was time to go out and do stuff and/or talk to other people. and that’s when my twitter blew up and i spent a lot of time talking to other people but now i’m starting to feel like i’m circling the drain of THAT somewhat, in terms of how i’m spending my hours. i want to be writing essays. and there are only so many times I can say “i want to be writing essays” before I get into “particularly, i want to write about X”, and I have hundreds of sketches and notes about various possible X’s, such that it gets a little overwhelming. so I think the next step would be to start writing an essay tomorrow without a plan, except the plan is to start and finish, let’s say 1400 words. for substack. about 12 paragraphs. if i can do that, then i will feel realllly good about repeating that. and that would be really exciting. i can just do that once a day to tremendous satisfaction. but let’s see how tomorrow goes.