Some of my earliest word vomits were written without any sort of planning or prompt whatsoever. I just got into a text editor and started writing. It’s 143am right now, and I’m feeling a little bit bummed out and upset with myself that I haven’t been writing word vomits in a while. And so I feel like it might be somewhat fun to… recreate the starting conditions? I remember I actually had an app called Write Or Die, that would start deleting words off your page if you spent too long without typing anything. And… I miss that urgency? It was exciting.
I think somewhere along the way, I started worrying about “bigger things” like structure and organization. After all, if I had too many vomits that were all over the place, then that would be quite bad, wouldn’t it? (As I examine this thought more closely, I find myself thinking… not really. Not as bad as not writing at all. There’s a balancing act of sorts. But all of the constraints are entirely in my own mind. I’m making this all up as I go along. And surprisingly, interestingly, there’s a sort of… physics to it. I mean, it’s not physics-less. I’m thinking of that bit from The Matrix where Morpheus is explaining to Neo, when he first gets plugged back into the simulation, how his physical appearance is a sort of “residual self-image” – he looks the way he thinks he’s supposed to look.
Similarly, there’s a sort of “residual world physics” in my writing when I’m writing – sometimes when I tell people about the million word project, they’re like, “haha, oh, isn’t that easy? can’t you just type the same word over and over?” TECHNICALLY, I could – but in practice, I have never felt the slightest inclination to do that. Because I know at some level that the point isn’t just to write a million words. The point is to spend a million words writing things that seem interesting to me to some degree. Articulating the precise degree has been a challenge. I know I have word vomits where I’ve repeated myself from previous vomits, and I find myself saying, “if I repeat myself, so be it. I repeat myself. As many times as necessary.” And there are times where I’ve ended up not writing for months, because I feel like everything is endlessly boring and repetitive in a way that doesn’t add at all. And I feel like there’s a meaningful distinction somehow. I don’t know exactly what it is, and I don’t know exactly how it works, but at my current moment of writing, I’m fairly convinced that it isn’t entirely “imaginary” – meaning I’m not entirely bullshitting myself. There may be some bullshit in there, but there’s also some truth. Sometimes I sit down and I just don’t feel like writing. And… maybe on retrospect I might think something like, “Hey, well, maybe sometimes you should sit down and force yourself to write the thousand words first, and then decide at the end of it whether or not it’s deserving of going into the 1000wordvomits repository”. As I think this out loud now, I find it strange that I had never quite considered that as a possibility. Why is that? Oh shit. Maybe it is all about enabling my bullshit. Hahaha. Let’s test it. Let’s test the hypothesis and find out. I’m going to write this and then I’m going to go to bed, and then I’ll try and do it again tomorrow morning when I wake up.
The important thing I want to know, I guess, is that I’m still capable of doing longform writing. I’ve been starting to feel a little cagey and anxious – and I think it’s because I’ve been spending so much time on twitter, writing really short things. Some of my threads add up to longer things, but even then… there’s something very orderly and precise about tweets. Getting better at writing tweets has definitely made me a better writer, and I’m proud of that. I’m grateful for that. And I look forward to seeing how it subsequently shapes my bigger bodies of words. This might be the first thing I’ve written in months where I am challenging myself to just put word after word after word, without switching tabs, without slowing down, without pausing to see if I can add links to things along the way. I didn’t have to turn off my wifi to do this. I just needed to go fast. In speed there is truth. I think it was Ray Bradbury who said something like that.
So… it’s 152am now. It’s been nine minutes. It takes me nine minutes to get to about 800 words. And I feel like the above writing – without even re-reading it, but just going by the feel of it – is definitely much more coherent than most of my early writing was. And… of course it is! How could it not be? Why do I doubt myself! Lmao. Some doubt is always healthy, but too much keeps you from creating. And I am a creator. That much I know for certain. So I gotta do what I gotta do to keep myself creating.
We’re approaching the wrap up. What has this vomit been about? I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter and I’ve been getting a little nervous and self-conscious about my ability to write larger bodies of text. But I think I have been subconsciously trying too hard to optimize things – I experienced some small successes here and there, and I got excited (which is a good thing!) and then I started unconsciously setting unrealistic and unnecessary expectations for myself. Not everything has to be “successful” – demanding and expecting things to be “successful” in fact makes them less likely to succeed. I know this. I just need to give myself the space to recognize what I know, listen to my own voice and intuition about what is going on inside me, and then allow myself to follow through. I am not here to win awards, or accolades, or anybody’s approval. I am here to write.
