My close friends will tell you that pretty much anytime they ask me “how’s things?” I talk about how I’m working on my essays, how I kinda feel like I’m making some sort of progress on the back-end, but don’t really have much yet to show for it on the front-end, and how that process is quite a lonely and emotionally challenging thing to inhabit– because how do I know I’m not just bullshitting myself, until I see results? But I know from my own history that these things take time. It’s an ongoing tension that I’ll probably never be rid of– and never want to be rid of, because overconfidence in this domain likely spells underwhelming work– but I do believe it should be possible to surf the tension with more zest and gusto.
There are many different layers at which to approach the infinite game puzzle that I’m working on. I feel like the “what’s the subject matter?” question is largely ‘solved’, but even then I must acknowledge that from time to time encountering a fresh subject can be deeply invigorating and set off wonderful cascades of clarity and resonance. That aside, I feel like my primary challenge seems to be one of “what’s my process?”, which is something that has been in flux, roughly since around the time my wife and I found out we were having a baby. It’s been hard to really focus on doing exploratory writing in a jovial idiosyncratic way while worrying about the bills, and while caring for a child who still needs nearly-constant attention. And, if I’m being honest, I deeply cherish the time that I spend with my child, so it’s a tradeoff I’m choosing to make. That said, my time and attention is more fragmented than it’s ever been, and so my challenge has been to figure out how to work in fragments. And all of that is happening while I am transitioning away from primarily writing tweets, which I am good at, to writing essays, which I am not so good at. To be clear: I do believe that I am capable of writing good essays, or that I will be in time, but I am comparatively inexperienced at the process of writing good essays. Which is to say, I can sometimes write good essays, but I am definitely bad at consistently writing good essays, particularly when my time and attention are fragmented. Nonetheless, this is the challenge I have set out for myself, and I intend to face it.
A thing I’ve (repeatedly) noticed is that I write more fluidly and freely when I feel like I am enthralled by an idea. I can never seem to do this “on command” in a straightforward way, by which I mean I can’t really arbitrarily pick something from my list of ideas and notes and drafts and then just turn that into a good essay in a matter of hours. If I could, I would have published a hundred essays by now. I’d like to believe that I could, but the evidence suggests otherwise. So it would probably be wise to use some different approach, at least as an experiment. So here’s the idea I have. Rather than to ‘write good on demand’, I simply ramble a random path of words… until I encounter a digression that’s interesting to me. The good news here is that my digressions are rarely ever truly random– they’re almost always something that I’ve already written or spoken about in some context, something I’ve already thought about.
So to recap– my idea is, instead of writing carefully about some particular X, which I find I don’t seem to have the capacity for, I’ll simply ramble chaotically about any random X that comes to mind, until I find myself tempted to interrupt with ‘digression Y’. Then I’ll take that digression as the real prompt, and use that for the body of the essay. As with any other approach to creativity, it won’t always work, but I have a really good feeling about it. I think it’ll work more than my previous method, which mostly left me feeling frustrated with myself.
I’ve circled around something about this idea a few times. In a matryoshka of possibilities I wrote about ‘looking for the secret trapdoor’, and I wrote about it again in straight outta tartarus by using the dream-within-a-dream concept from the movie Inception. I’ll have to write about it a few more times so that I really properly internalize it. Both of those posts are clunkier than I’d like, and I fantasize about writing really polished ‘late-stage’ forms that are really elegant, beautiful reader experiences. But I’m not going to be able to do that anytime soon, so I’m stuck making lots of janky sketches and hoping to at least have some animating spirit that can get me by.
I was thinking in the shower earlier that there are some motifs that are reoccurring in my work. One of them is the idea of forgotten ruins. Ellen Ullman said, “We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” This visual image is very striking to me. I think it applies to pretty much anything with a lineage. The history of literature is like this, and cinema, and it’s true even of my own personal writing and body of work. From time to time I excavate something from my archives in 2011 and find that I had written exactly what I’m working on in 2025. Everything leaves clues. I also found myself thinking about the Titanomachy…
gotta call it a night. but i think if there’s one lesson or takeaway for me here is that i don’t appreciate my digressions enough, and i’m not reading enough of my old stuff… i just copied this post out from substack drafts and it’s 975 words, so i might as well just pad out an ending and publish it as a wordvomit. let’s review? so… ramble, wait for a digression, and then use that as the core bit. excellent. now if I can only find the time to do all this, lol
note: this post seems like it follows the previous one as a series. i guess i did a wordvomit then thought i’d do a substack… but i’m really tired of publishing substack posts ‘about my process’, so. 2 wordvomits it is.