right so one of the puzzles on my mind is
I. i know that i can write a copious amount of words at almost any given moment. there are some reasons why this might not ALWAYS apply, but it’ss omething that feels very true to my internal experience. there’s a chance that part of this is delusion, I’m reminded of something kenny werner said about how, however you play on your worst day, is how you play. so maybe i should change the statement. “there are times where I can write a copious amount of words in a moment”. alright, that seems much more truthful, and being closer to the truth – starting with where I actually am – is likelier to give me something that i can actually work with, that will actually lead me to where i want to go.
II. I don’t publish nearly as much as I would like. but even before we talk about publishing, I think the thing to note is that i don’t write as much as i would like. i feel like i should write at least 1000 words a day, and that i’m capable of writing 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 words a day. those larger numbers feel a little scary to post but i remember once writing over 15,000 words in a single day. but that must have been something weird, special, exceptional… thinking about kenny werner again. what’s my daily wordcount? I haven’t even thought of it like that in a while. but if I want to be a professional writer, I should write, right? do I believe this or do I not? is it complicated? I don’t think it’s that complicated. I think I have complicated it in practice and I can de-complicate it with a little clear thinking. that’s part of the whole point of writing, to define and solve problems, or puzzles.
so here’s what it looks like has been happening. part of the problem or challenge is that i have a very large body of work to begin with, and there’s something about that that i don’t feel very good about, it doesn’t feel very complete or right to me, and so I hesitate to write a lot more. it’s likely part of why I haven’t finished this wordvomit project yet. part of me feels like i ought to read all of my material and then streamline a bunch of it, eliminate a bunch of fluff, cut away the non-essential, before I start producing more stuff to dump on top of what’s already there. there are certain limitations- i dont know if you’d call it bandwidth limitations, architecture limitations, cognitive limitations… the issue is, a part of me feels like i already have too much stuff, and so if i’m going to create more stuff, it better be good. part of me is afraid of creating new bad stuff.
but another part of me knows that creating new bad stuff is practically inevitable if you want to create new good stuff. that’s the parable of the pots for ya. if you gotta make some duds to make some hits. the thing is to have a meta-process where you can spot the duds early enough to get rid of them without publishing them or sharing them too much, and to notice when you have a hit so you can really go hard on that one. i think i’m pretty good at noticing when i have a hit, though even that i could continue to get better at – some of my best hits are phrases within longer tweets, that ought to standalone tweets, for example.
but currently in my process i have some murkiness around the duds, and some aversion to writing duds, i think because i feel like… i should have a higher batting average, maybe? but that’s a kind of hubris. iirc writers like hemingway used to say things like 90% of everything he wrote was shit. “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” Yeah so… I’ve been trying to write the masterpieces in my head. But the head is a very lousy place to write. Sometimes it can be the best thing you have in some particular moment, and there are ways in which it works… sometimes it works while you’re sleeping, which feels like cheating. But it’s not cheating, that’s just a scrub’s attitude.
Write, I think I’ve triangulated onto what the problem roughly is. I do know and believe that you need to write a lot in order to produce good material, but i’ve been afraid of producing junk that clogs up my system, and so i’m not producing much. But “clogs up my system” is a problem that has multiple solutions. one way is to produce less. but another is to just burn more. or as hemingway put it, put the shit in the wastebasket. i have an old tweet about this too, about how the jankiness in my process isn’t a bad thing, the unfinished sketches aren’t a bad thing, the bad thing is that i’m too slow and too hesitate to wipe everything aside and start over. it’s okay to have lots of iceboxes and backburners and junkyards and so on. I’m more of a professional than a casual at this point, and so it makes sense for me to have an entire home office just full of work material. This is my life now. This is my career and vocation now. I want to take it more seriously. That means studying the entire pipeline and process and looking for what the actual problem is.
Let’s restate it again. It appears that i’m not writing as much as i would like, as much as i know would be ideal. this seems to be because i’m afraid of clogging up my system with junk, and so i write less, to minimize clog. this is the wrong approach. the writer should be unencumbered to produce as much as he desires. it’s the manager, the janitor, all the other guys that have to figure out how to deal with it. so suppose those two parts are having a conversation, what does it look like? the writer will need some reassurance that he’s not going to suffer or be punished for being too prolific. he might need some positive reinforcement, some celebration, some good cheer. the manager/janitor gotta demonstrate… progress being made in terms of junking stuff. throwing stuff out.
i asked my wife here what she thinks is going on, what’s her observation/interest on the matter. she cycled through a few reasons (you wanna be annoying? you actually don’t like writing?) before eventually getting to something I thought was pretty warm/accurate – “you’ve gotten fussy/precious about it?” – which I think is a correct-enough interpretation. Though then she wondered if it’s about set and setting, when I think it’s really about the logjam about the totality of my work.
So the big question becomes, how will I deal with the logjam in the totality of my work? am I going to find a way to be at peace with it? am I going to try and reduce it? Surely there’s some 80/20 thing I can do to make it a lot less jammed? What are some simple low-effort ways i can add a bunch of clarity and structure?
or maybe that’s the wrong approach. maybe the focus should be on making sure that the new output is contained in a way that allows it to “exist in peace”? I think the way to do that would be to spin up something new entirely. And a part of me always flinches at that because it sounds escapist? There are all those memes about people who flit from one project to the next without ever finishing anything, accumulating loads of junk… but as I wrote in a substack post recently, that’s maybe not actually a bad thing? As creatives we should think of these as unfinished sketches rather than false starts, and sketches are meant to be unfinished. You can’t seriously expect to finish every single sketch you start and turn it into a final working masterpiece.
So maybe what’s really necessary is something like, sketch management. How are you going to keep all of your sketches in some semblance of order? And it’s not realistic to expect to catalog them super precisely as if they are museum artworks, that’s something you do with something much more final. Early stage draft management is much more chaotic – and it SHOULD be chaotic and rough around the edges, it should be unfinished, incomplete, it should be kinda all-over-the-place, because it’s full of possibility. but I’m trying to discern something here about something good vs sometihng excessive. I should be much more comfortable crumpling up certain things and throwing them away. I want a bunch of my notes gone from my note-taking apps. I don’t think it’s crazy to consider starting up a new notetaking app entirely from time to time just to have some fresh space to think.
I could ask myself what I think about this. I like to do fresh writing in wordcounter.net or in a reddit comment. I can then publish it in all manner of places. I could put it in my iOS notes, I could put it on any of my wordpress blogs, a substack, I could post screenshots on twitter, I could post it on reddit, I could post it on tumblr, I can have multiple tumblrs, multiple subreddits, multiple substacks… there are a lot of possibilities. But what do I actually want? That’s what I have to continually return to. What do I actually want? I want to create great reading experiences, and to do that I have to write a lot. I can sit down and do a bunch of writing, but I’m concerned about what happens to the writing after I’ve written it. One thing I could say is, to hell with it, just delete it. I do think it’s worth sitting with that thought for a minute because… if I did do that every morning or something, I would actually make progress as a writer towards the essays I want to be writing. I could come back to this wordvomit project and finish it first. That’s one way. Though even that might be a little over-filtered, I don’t necessarily want every single thing I write to be published on /1000/. And that’s because I have some semblance of an idea of what I want /1000/ to be – lots of stream of consciousness stuff, but not necessarily junk. It already has a bunch of junk in it and I’d like to keep that to a relative minimum. Not an absolute minimum, since that would take forever, but I’d like to publish something at least every week, every month, that sort of cadence.
Have I solved the problem? I feel some relief at framing it as a logjam problem – not writer’s block exactly, not in way people usually conceptualize it. I’m hesitant to produce more when there’s a constraint ahead. Now I’m thinking of tiago’s writing about bottlenecks. My bottleneck is not at the start, it’s close to the end. I don’t know where I want to publish things. I suppose a lot of that has to do with me having this overwrought mindset about what my essays are Supposed to be. Maybe I feel like I’m making up for lost time having written wordvomits for so long and not having written about politics. I should really… kinda do a “do 100 thing” thing on 0xSB that is… it’s also wordvomits, in a way, but it’s public facing, and slightly more tied up. This is also how I feel about youtube videos, isn’t it? I have so many already, 200+, maybe approaching 300, but part of me is afraid that if I make a lot more, then I’m going to lose connection with the past.
If I’m so afraid of losing connection with the past, I should spend at least some time every day facing it, shouldn’t I? what’s stopping me from doing that? there’s a flinch, a fear. as long as you’re avoiding the problem, it doesn’t have to hurt you. you can tune it out and pretend it’s not there. but it’s already there. we are already bearing what it is. and i know from cleaning my home that stuff that i tune out mentally stuff affects me emotionally. so it would be good to face things. good to make myself comfortable. good to feel my feelings. good to ask myself, what is this for? what is this about? what shall we do with this?
thx