I started writing these word vomits in December of 2012. In the 60+ months since then, I’ve almost never gone more than a month without publishing – 2 months in 2014. Not sure what that was about, but I published lots of posts in July that month – so I think I was writing a lot and not publishing.
These past few months have been different – I haven’t been writing word vomits at all. I wrote the draft of a novel in November last year. And then mainly I think I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter.
I’ve been asking myself – why haven’t I been writing? And how do I feel about that?
Interestingly, I don’t feel bad at all. It feels like I’ve had to step away from here for a while, to practice writing in a different medium. I’ve been tweeting a lot. I’ve been reading a lot on my iPad, and sharing my book notes on Twitter. I’ve experimented with a TinyLetter and a Telegram channel. I even have an alt-Twitter. I’ve made a 30-minute-long YouTube video, just talking in a casual, meandering way about whatever was one my mind. I feel like I’m due for updates on all of those fronts, which is a little unnerving. None of this should feel like an obligation.
What is all this telling me? I’ve been hungry for some sort of alternate means of expression. I was getting tired of writing here, in this style, at this length. I never doubted that I would eventually return – It’s very important to me that I finish this project. But I also had begun to feel like I was going through the motions here.
I think going through the motions was a victory in itself for the first 300 vomits or so. But beyond that, I want to make sure that this stuff is actually useful to my future self. As I’m writing this, I find myself doing a little bit more editing as I go. I’m not just trying to race to meet the 1,000 word count. I’m comfortably confident that I can always sit down and hammer out a thousand words, no biggie. I’m holding myself to higher standards now.
What higher standards are we talking about? Well, sometimes I look back at my older vomits and think, “I spent 1,000 words getting to the point, but the point is actually just a few sentences long”. I’d like to get to the point faster, and spend more time articulating the point itself. That would be useful.
I want my writing to keep getting better. I was recently reading Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. He mentions that tech companies create most of their value at least 10-15 years down the line. In the early 2000s, it seemed that PayPal would create most of its value after 2010. Now, growing 15% annually, it seems much likelier that most of PayPal’s value will be created after 2020 (of course, unless it gets somehow completely eaten or destroyed). Loosely, I’d like the same to be true for my writing. I’d like to keep getting better as a writer. It would be cool if, say, vomits 701—800 are more valuable than 1—700 put together – and if the same were true for 801—900, and 901—1000.
What does better really mean? This is essentially the question that I’ve been trying to wrap my head around in my absence. I needed to leap across quite a chasm for this one, and incremental iteration wasn’t cutting it. I needed something radically different to help me make sense of this. And I’m still not sure I’ve made sense of it yet. But basically… it seems to me like I need to have better “products”. My vomits started out very fragmented. They’ve since gotten more coherent – and I enjoyed that, but then it started getting predictable.
I used to think that the answer to “I’m being too predictable” was to “become unpredictable”, but that’s not quite the right answer. That’s a classic example of heterodoxy being just as boring as the orthodoxy. Random inputs can be useful to shake things up a little, but if you don’t change something more fundamental, you’ll just have end up roleplaying some version of those “I’m so random” kids.
I want depth over breadth. (Breadth is still a good thing – but I can trust myself to accomplish that subconsciously. I’m wired that way.) I think my vomits began to bore me because I had begun circling around the same things over and over again. I was giving myself the same directives. There’s a bundling that needs to happen – the repeated directives need to be merged and forged together.
What do I want to dive deeply into? I had a minor epiphany last month – that I can divide all of my writing into “self-psychoanalysis”, “work” and “public portfolio”. There was a period of time where self-psychoanalysis was the most important thing to me. Is it still? In a sense, yes – but I’m increasingly troubled by my lack of a powerful public portfolio to present to the world. Part of this is a consequence of having a project like this – just having too many fucking things to do.
As I get older, it becomes clearer that I don’t have a lot of time. I mean, in a weekly sense. Weekends are really short. Weekdays are really short. I’m already 28 years old. I started this project when I was 22. What do I have to show for it? (Funny thought: if nothing else, the realization that you should always have something to show for whatever work you put in.) I’m a better writer, but my writing has been very… “oral”. My best work is buried in tweets and messages, when it should be in essays, blogposts, articles. It should be on publications. So I want to focus on that next.
But in the meantime, I still have 298 word vomits to write. So I need to figure out a way to do both. I need to figure out a way to use my next 298 vomits to create output that I can reuse in those essays. I know I have big bunch of vomit/essay ideas in my todo list. But I’m not clear if each of them could be 1,000 words. I was thinking I could do several ideas per vomit, but that would make the vomits worth less. I should just write those out in my notes, and then expand some of those into vomits. Yes. I’ll do that.
So, in closing, let’s address the title – what have I learned from being away from here? It’s good to be back. I’ve learned that I crave multiple mediums, multiple approaches, that I need to experiment and mess around so that it can inform my work. And I am ready and eager to get to work. More tomorrow.