a funny pattern
on trying to be unpredictable
A funny pattern that has played out several times now: whenever I tell my wife that Iām going to bed to do some writing, I typically end up being distracted, scrolling twitter, playing online chess. Maybe Iād attempt some writing, but it would typically be too fragmented and disoriented to be āpublishableā by my own standards. On the other hand, whenever I tell my wife that Iām going to bed to sleep, it seems like more 80% of the time I end up writing something that I end up publishing.
Whatās going on? I have a few overlapping hypotheses that come to mind. One is that I write better when Iām not trying to write. If I go to bed thinking āI have to do some writingā, it becomes somewhat heavy and wearisome. It feels like work, and not the fun kind. On the other hand, if.I go to bed thinking āI should go to sleepā, my mind lights up with āno, wait, not yet, letās squeeze in a little writing first,ā and then the writing is breezy and fun without the weight of obligation.
This whole system seems a little inelegant to me, but Iām at a place in my life where Iād much rather make use of an inelegant system that works, than strain myself to devise an elegant system that doesnāt work. āInelegantā feels like Iām underselling it. It feels stupid. But I think about it and I have to concur: I would rather use a stupid system that works, than a āsmartā system that doesnāt. Iāll happily do this until I get to a point whereā¦ the joy of having published, feels like itās less than the mild embarrassment of having had to ātrickā myself to do it.
ugh, heās so predictable
I used to be averse to the idea of having some kind of āformulaā to my writing. And now I have to laugh a little bit that I ever felt that way. Because, sure, while I donāt want to be overly predictable, being completely chaotic doesnāt get you anywhere either. I tell this to my marketing clients all the time, so itās funny to me that itās taken me so long to internalize my own advice. You want to be at least moderately recognizable, so that people know what to expect, and then you experiment within that frame. I guess when I had the idea of doing an essay āeraā titled FRAME STUDIES, I got excited about the hypothetical possibility of changing the frame with every post. And maybe thatās something that can be assembled at a later stage, but my experience has been teaching me that you need to keep some things constant in order to really experiment. If you change every single variable in an experiment, you donāt learn anything. In fact, you typically want to isolate one variable at a time! So I have been going about my experiments in a very silly way, one that has mostly taught me how not to act.
When I think about it more, I realize I have been afraid of being predictable. I have been afraid of being typecast. I donāt want people to look at me and think they already know what Iām going to say. But my mistake is that I have been trying too hard to fight against that, trying too hard to be surprising. And there are few things less surprising than a person trying too hard to be surprising. Hereās a similar anecdote from Sylvester Stallone that Iāve been sharing a lot lately:
So, with all of that in mind, what should my next steps be? I should maybe just say out loud what are the things Iām nervous about or afraid of. I have several essay drafts and ideas that Iāve pedestalized in my mind as Important, and Iāve made very slow progress on them because I need them to be Perfect. And here I know exactly the right advice to take, because Iāve given it to so many people over the years and witnessed them flourish with it: do it badly on purpose. Again, thereās a pattern here where, trying to force it to be good, condemns it to being stiff, stale, mediocre. But try to make it bad-on-purposeā whether by using absurd premises, or a silly frame, or some other comical approach, and youāre far likelier to accidentally chance upon something fun.
itās a peculiar sort of wacko who makes it his job to have fun
Here Iām reminded that Iāve written one post on here titled Are you having fun, son? which was largely a recollection of my childhood memories of fun-having, and then I attempted to write a sequel, which I was dissatisfied with and posted it to my archives instead. I remember thinking that itās so funny- both āha-haā funny and āthatās weirdā funnyā that having fun is so central to my lifeās work, because it immediately throws it into this weird loop, this paradox, whereā¦ if your work requires that you have fun, can it really be true fun? But again, donāt people sometimes have fun at work when itās not required? Itās the nature of ārequirementā that really muddies everything up. Which rhymes with the problem of neediness. Itās generally easier to have a good time with someone if youāre not needy about having a good time with them. On paper, the solution is simple: cease being needy! Remember that youāre going to die, remember that nothing matters, remember that the kingdom of god is already within you, have a laugh, see the joke of it all, ayyyyyy, lmao.
Sometimes this hits just right and you crack up laughing and the whole torment just falls apart. But sometimes it doesnāt work, and it can in fact make you feel worse. Iāve been on both sides of this. And latelyā¦ the more tired I get, the longer itās been without me having any major wins, the harder it gets. And Iām so conflicted about how to present this in a way that is both honest and yet notā¦ demoralizing? I think there are people who follow me on twitter who think that I never have any bad days.
Andā¦ it depends on what you mean by bad days, I guess. I had horrific days in my teens and early 20s, and I havenāt had one of those since I was maybe 27. But I do still get really depleted and down sometimes. Sometimes I feel like I havenāt really even gotten started on what Iām āsupposedā to be doing. Sometimes I feel like nothing Iām doing is working. I remember there were moments when I was quite miserable while struggling with working on Introspect, and when it got rough, I questioned whether a person experiencing misery even has the ārightā to write a book about introspection. But thenā¦ wouldnāt the opposite also be the case? If a person has never had rough days or experienced misery or depression or suicidal ideation, can they really be of service to someone who has? (I think the answer is yes, actually, but itās not the same as with someone who understands.)
What does it even mean to have the ārightā to do something, anyway? Itās all made up, fictitious social rules that change on a whim. If we want to be serious in our craft we have to learn to have a moderate indifference to the social bullshit. This can be tricky because it can feel likeā in my internal monologue I use the phrase āprecious diva behaviorā. And Iām conflicted about whether or not I am a precious diva, whether or not I want to be, whether or not I ādeserveā to be, whether or it not it is āgoodā to be. I never want to hurt anybody elseās feelings unnecessarily, but some people will get upset just seeing you live your own best life. I ultimately made it through that conundrum by focusing on the fact that I was writing the book for a younger version of myself, and to that particular kid, hearing from me would be a god-send, regardless of my āqualificationsā. We can move forward by attending to the past. And now that I have a child, in some ways itās even easier: I can just act in whatever way I feel is the right way for my sonās father to act. And I suppose I could use that same reasoning in all of my work. If you wanna read someone more qualified, or someone more polished, then please go do that! Iām here to write for me, and for my people. Nobody can be everything to everyone.
a great blog makes for a mediocre book
I think itās time I start wrapping up. Iāve talked about the pattern of my nighttime writing habits, the complications of mandatory fun, where do we go from here? I asked myself recently what would give me real relief, real satisfaction, and one thing that came up was, āpublishing something that feels true to me, that Iāve never published beforeā. Could I possibly do it on-demand? The trick here I think is that it doesnāt have to be something dramatic or important. It can be something minor. And I find myself thinking, for some reason, about old blogs.1 I find myself thinking about the Nora Ephron movie Julie & Julia (2009), which as far as I can tell is the only major motion picture thatās significantly about a blog. I could go off on a tangent about how Nora Ephron was a real media theorist, and how her movies like Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and Youāve Got Mail (1998) each captured something unique and remarkable about the pinnacle of a particular media landscape. Sleepless was about radio talk shows, Mail was about chatrooms and email, and Julie was about a blog. While all of those mediums still exist, they all feel like theyāre in decline, in contrast to the smartphone-era of Tinder and real-time texting and so on.
Anywayā super-quick recap of Julie & Julia ā it tells two stories simultaneously, the story of Julia Child, who was famous in the 60s as a cookbook author and tv show host who introduced Americans to French cooking, and Julie Powell, a blogger who got popular for her live-blogging quest to make all of Julia Childās dishes in 1 year. As a (former?) blogger myself, I was curious to look up more details about Julie Powell. Itās not surprising to me that the blog was popularā itās a recurring motif Iāve noticed that people tend to be interested in interesting āexpeditionsā where someone sets out to accomplish something challenging over a moderate length of time. But whatās fascinating to me is howā she then compiled the blog into a book, and itās the book that Ephronās movie was technically based on. And what really fascinated me were the reviews of that book.
via Wikipedia:
David Kamp writing in The New York Times disliked Powell's writing style, saying it "has too much blog in its DNA. It has a messy, whatever's-on-my-mind incontinence to it, taking us places we'd rather not go".
Keith Phipps of The A.V. Club did not think the transition from blog to memoir was handled well, asserting that its "digressive stream-of-consciousness style has become the lingua franca of the blogosphere, and while it can be an art form when dished out in daily installments, it's a slog at book length.ā
This parallels perfectly with my sense that good twitter threads donāt translate easily into essays, because theyāre written to fit the medium of twitter. They have ātwitter grammarā. And I donāt just mean between the words of the text, but the stylings, the cadence, the tempo, everything. If you copy the text of a twitter thread and paste it into a blank white page, it feels āoffā.
So what does it even mean to be āa good writerā? Every kind of writing is structurally different, and while there is something like a āgeneral competence with wordsā, that alone does not guarantee that you will write good essays, or tweets, or books. People who are ecxeedingly specialized at one thing are rarely ever equally good at another thing. (Authors of popular books might get a lot of twitter engagement because they have a large fanbase, but thatās not the same as actually being good at tweeting. Not many people care about the subtleties of this, but I canāt seem to help obsessing over it.)
Anyway. It occurs to me that Iāve been approaching these essays/posts wrong. Because Iāve been prematurely thinking about how they will work together as a collection. Even though I try to conceive of them as essays, Iāve really been thinking of them asā¦ chapters in a book. And books and essays are very different beasts. As evidenced by Julie Powellās corpus, the things that makes a blog great, make for mediocre books. Iāve been struggling with a kind of premature optimization. Rather than try to design a grand overarching reader experience, I should focus on writing one standalone thing at a time, that works by itself, and to hell with everything else. It also occurs to me now that Iāve basically been overcorrecting because of my frustrations from when I was working on my book.
So, there we go. Thatās something that feels true to me, that I donāt think Iāve published before. Iāve tried to write some version of this on multiple occasions, but I was never satisfied with it. Iām not satisfied with it now either, and I expect to write a better form of it in the future. But in the meantime, this is where I am.
i realize the connection between āthinking about old blogsā and āpatternsā and āfunā isnāt obvious. it goes like thisā¦ i used to blog quite effortlessly. i tweet quite effortlessly. a part of me believes that it should be possible for me to write substack posts with comparatively low effort. another part of me feels that thatās a self-serving bullshit feel-good belief, but i do think thereās a truth to it. itās possible if i let go of the false assumptions that i have about what substack posts are supposed to be like. and i realize here i make a similar error to what iāve seen people make re: youtube videos and podcasts and so on, which is assuming that things are supposed to have a high level of polish. butā¦ polish is something that comes later. at least, thatās my view on it. some people have different views. it depends on your personal philosophy, your personal aesthetic sensibility. i believe- and it will take me a few months to prove this- that i CAN write effortless substack posts that meet my minimum threshold criteria for āgood enoughā, if i am willing to compromise on polish. thatās kind of what i was trying to get at with āresonance over coherenceā. but like miles davis said, man sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself.
Hereās another funny pattern: Whenever I explain why I donāt feel like doing something, or how Iāve decided that Iām going to stop doing something, I often get a surge of renewed interest in doing it. Most recently this happened for me with chess. I literally wrote a twitter thread about how I couldnāt enjoy traditional chess very much because the outcomes in one game cannot directly affect another. Tweeting is preferable to me, because building a body of work is something that compounds over time, and you can reference other material that youāve written before. Shortly after I wrote about that, I found myself curious to play chess again, and Iāve played over a thousand games on chess.com since.
I can think of other examples of thisā¦ when I say Iām going to organize my notes, I tend to waffle around. But if I say Iām going to delete notesā¦ well. Iām going to try right now. Iām going to delete 5 bullets from my [[substack drafts]] roam page, just becauseā¦ andā¦ done. I didnāt just delete 5 bullets, I ended up reorganizing a whole bunch of stuff, probably for the better. Much to think about.
Fun read :) Felt quite disorganized while reading, but then it all came together in the last section in a nice way. I encounter a similar pattern to the one in this post in my writing all the time that I'm only slightly paranoid about, it goes like this:
When the writing is good, it feels effortless. The writing that feels hard, and cumbersome, and attached to details, and step-by-step always afterwards seems forced and rigid and lacking something. So is there any point in writing when it's hard? Or must one only wait for inspiration to strike?
I agonize about it. I must write -- but if I'm not already writing, is it not the right time? But somehow I must choose to start writing at some point...you get the idea.
I feel like the middle-ground I've come to -- and which you seem to also end up advocating -- is like, yes, you must force yourself to write somehow, whether its as part of an era, or This One Weird Bedtime Trick, but when you sit down to write, you have to be totally unbound to any particular thing. You have to just write what feels right. There's a symmetrical forcing of chaos on order: yes I will write at this time, but by god I am going to write whatever I feel like writing.
A good strategy for writing more, but one that fails often when confronted with longform content I find. So it goes.