Haven’t written one of these in a while. It’s 129am, Saturday 2nd November.
Why haven’t I written one of these in a while? There are several reasons that come to mind.
One, I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter, where I feel like I can play much more quickly and get immediate feedback from lots of other people. It’s engaging, compelling, exciting.
Another is that I feel like I’ve learned something from my Twitter threads that I haven’t yet entirely been able to apply to my word vomits – and that is threading. When I look at my 700+ word vomits, I feel a sense of frustration – because my word vomits aren’t threaded! Which means that each vomit kind of stands by itself, it’s not simply/easily connected to each other. Which also kind of means that I’m repeating myself a lot.
One way of threading word vomits is to categorize them – and I think I’ve done that to some degree. And yet… I feel like it’s not enough? I feel dissatisfied with the state of my word vomits. Writing this out now, that seems like it was inevitable. Of course I would be dissatisfied! I started from a place of relative naivete, ignorance, incompetence. I’ve made substantial progress since. But I also hope that I will continue to make progress, and that when I look back on this years from now, I’ll think “boy, I was naive/ignorant/incompetent then!”
Okay, so here we are, almost 800 word vomits in. I have a desire to complete the project. But I don’t want to do 200 fluff pieces that don’t feel very meaningful. I want to thread things up so I end with something that I find useful, that I feel compelled to repurpose and reuse. But I can’t obsess too much about it to the point that it paralyzes me into inaction. I don’t need this project to be perfect; it was never going to be perfect. I just want to be making progress.
Okay, so what does progress look like from here on out? In my mind’s eye, I have a vision for what a perfectly threaded million word project would look like. And I don’t believe it’s realistic or possible to expect to make that happen. So I’m going to have to compromise on some front. And I haven’t yet properly articulated to myself how that compromise is going to work, how it’s going to play out. So let’s spend some words thinking about that.
Okay. Without looking outside of this word vomit – what is this word vomit project about? I’ve answered that question several times, and the answer keeps changing – which is fine + to be expected. What do I want out of this project?
The first goal was simply to practice writing as many words as I could. I think I have satisfied this goal, and I am now a good enough writer by my own standards to tackle pretty much any writing project I’d like to take on. Cool.
The second goal was to learn about myself. To make sense of the landscape of my thoughts and ideas, my feelings. My mindscape, feelscape, soulscape. This is something I think I could afford to spend a few more word vomits on, maybe even the remainder of all of my word vomits on.
A third goal is to put together content that is useful to other people. This goal I have been a little shaky about – because at the very beginning, when I first started out, I didn’t want to think about other people. I was tired of obsessing about what other people wanted to read, and wanted to write what I wanted to read. So I deliberately shut myself off from social media and whatnot and focused on exploring my inner world, mostly. And I think I did that quite well. So I have been hesitating on this front because, on the surface, it looks like I am contradicting myself. And maybe I am. But the more I think about this, the more I think I trust my older self over my younger self to figure out what’s next. I think if we sat down to have a conversation about this, my younger self would be like, “holy shit, that’s so awesome that all of those things happened and there’s all this new context I had no idea about. Of course we’ll repurpose the project, that makes perfect sense. We’ll still be completing it, right?” (“Yes!”)
So. The first goal has been achieved in spirit, and will be achieved in letter entirely through the passage of time. The second and third goals I think are things that will be new “filters” that I use to make sense of old word vomits with. If it’s not useful for learning about myself, or it’s not useful for helping other people, then I probably won’t bother with it. I now have a reason to go back and re-read old material – which I think is something I was subconsciously afraid of. I was afraid that I wouldn’t want to read any of my old stuff, that it would all just be “water under the bridge” or something like that. Which… would still be fine, really, if this project were just “Visa wrote a million words and never wanted to look at them again.” It’s conceivable that that might be the optimal thing to do, if new things crop up that change the game.
Really, it’s quite interesting to observe all of the tensions and conflicts here, and to observe myself trying to figure out how to do justice to all of my sub-selves, to the project, to the past and to the future. I trust myself to carry this through.
A final note: I wish I had revisited and reviewed each vomit after I had done it, to contextualize it against all (or most of?) the others. But again, that’s easy to say, and I know I’ve said it several times over the years. And looking back, I did put in time and energy to do what I could, in bits and pieces. The best I could do was the best I could do. This is the situation I inherited, and honestly I’m pretty happy with it overall. I feel honored to be given the opportunity to make it better.
Ted Nelson has perhaps the most documented life in history and is a wildly prolific writer.
He has storage units (plural) of notes, recordings, papers, books that’s he’s written. None of which he’ll ever go through, and this gnaws at him.
(We actually found a book he had forgotten writing at some point)
He assumed by this point Technology would have allowed him to consume all these writings and link them, contextualize and thread them.
That he’ll never be able to review and reexperience much of his writing is one of his major regrets.
Big support to you for contextualizing and going back through your writings 🙂
Thanks James! 🙂 I appreciate it.