tired and sleepy, but i don’t feel like sleeping just yet… ok one chess game and then a word vomit? or a wordvomit first? chess… maybe both at the same time… ah i’m getting my ass whooped, ouch. alright let’s take a break from chess and write a wordvomit. part of what is so compelling about chess is that you just need to play one move at a time. which is what i tried to write about in ‘one more turn’ in my latest substack essay. a piece of writing on the other hand feels much more ‘open-ended’ somehow. and yet, here i am having written 100/1000 words of a wordvomit. that feels pretty good. i feel good about getting to 200 and then 300 and before i know it i’ll be done with this session. and that would be 884/1000 total wordvomits. I’d like to get to 900, and then finish the whole damn thing. but i want each ‘piece’ to feel like i had given it some effort, like i didn’t just totally slouch my way through it.
i’m rediscovering what it feels like to write longer-form text. there’s something about it that’s different than writing tweets. i’ve tried explaining it several times, but let me try it again, and this time i think i’ll approach it in a more ‘structural’ way, ie comment on the structure of the thing. a tweet is just a short string of text, and it has its own challenges. there are many genres of tweets and this might not apply to all of them, but generally you want tweets to have a punch to them. lemme scroll through my timeline for my recent tweets… yea i think a tweet is a ‘unit of consideration’… here I noticed a substack-note shaped set of words emerging, and so I switched up to writing them. I wrote them over here:
So in a way this was already a ‘success’ for a wordvomit– it started somewhere arbitrary with me just describing my situation, and it got me to thinking about one of the usual things I think about a lot, and from there it got me writing a substack note. and I still have 600+ words here to spend and try and get more out of this. the question on my mind is, can I do what I just did here, with substackPosts, or Essays? What does it take to write a Post? I think to build on what I was saying with unit-of-consideration, an essay is like a landscape of consideration, or a domain of consideration. I’m not just asking you to consider one thing, I’m asking you to consider… maybe several things simultaneously, maybe the context around a particular thing as it changes or develops, maybe the relationships around a thing or a bunch of things, maybe a domain. I’m reminded of an old tweet I have somwhere about how a great new idea is exciting to have because it attracts all the existing relevant ideas to come out to see it, interact with it. (I used photos of rihanna and her fans, that was fun.)
I want my writing to be evocative, to be compelling, to be worth my readers’ time. What is it that makes it worth a reader’s w hile? I know some of my fans will be happy just to read anything from me, but that feels like a low bar, and I should aspire to something better. But at the same time, excessive aspirations can have a paralyzing effect on me– nothing is good enough. So clearly there’s a… exercise in contrasts here, I’m thinking of cyberpunk’s ‘high tech, low life” idea. There must be something similar with writing. Oneo f the things I like about my writing is that I can oscillate between the profound and the mundane or silly or crass. Done properly I find the contrast to be desirable. Not always, though. So it takes some sensitivity to the wider context. But when I say context I’m usually talking about twitter, and substack is a different context, and one that I don’t feel like I have a great grasp on yet. And I’m not sure I want to spend loads of time just exploring substack right now. But… that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. “one more turn” strikes again– yesterday I said I’d do one chess puzzle and ended up doing 19 in a row without meaning to. Similarly I would like to get to a point where I keep publshing substack posts and notes without feeling like i’m particularly meaning to. There has to be a ‘trick’ to doing that, I really believe it. I don’t mean that it woudl be cheap or easy necessarily. Just a clever solution to the puzzle that I haven’t properly considered yet. If I go by what happened in this post, I think the formula might be– pick something out of my notes maybe, start rambling a wordvomit about it until I get to a “this is something I could say more about” digression, and then use that digression (an expression of truer, deeper writerly intent) as the new foundation for what I want to write. I think that sounds like a formula that works, that isn’t too stiff. I could probably do dozens of those and vary them somewhat so it doesn’t feel too stale. Fill up my notes however I can. Ramble about them in wordvomits. Mid-vomit, feel around for something to write that wants to be a ‘domain of consideration’. Write it up and hit publish. Today it was a note. Maybe I’ll try to doone note a day for a while, and maybe some of those notes might expand into becoming posts. That’s happened a couple of times now.
How do I end this nicely? I have a hypothesis on how to come up with something interesting, and that’s to start with something i already noted as interesting, but then go off in some random-ish direction, and then look for the NEXT interesting thing. It’s kind of like a secretary problem!