writing on commutes
From 2013 to 2018, I used to write diligently on my phone on my commutes. I’d write both on the way to work, and on the way back home from work, sometimes squished and sandwiched between other tired office workers on the trains. This was a very stable pattern of behavior for me, which I was very proud of, and grateful to myself for. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s one of the primary ways in which I rebuilt trust in myself after my more tumultuous teenage years, when I felt like I was always struggling to stay afloat, thrashing about just to keep up with the vagaries of everyday life.
Over those ~5 years, I believe I wrote about 700,000 words, most of which I published on visakanv.com/1000/, aka 1000wordvomits – a project I had started a little earlier in Dec 2012 with the simple goal of writing a million words. The idea was simple, too: I want to be a good writer. You get good at writing by writing. Preferably a lot. Therefore, let’s start a writing project with the primary purpose of writing a lot. And write a lot, I did. As of right now, in Jul 2023, I’ve written over 832,000 words on that one blog. And that’s without taking into account all of the writing I do everywhere else all the time, from “regular” blogposts to twitter threads and forum posts and comments and text messages and so on. I now feel comfortable estimating that I’ve probably written over 2 million words in total. And I’d like my lifetime total to be something in the ballpark of say Isaac Asimov’s published 7.5 million. (I’m guessing he must’ve written at least twice that amount.
My last day of salaried work was in June 2018, after which I’ve basically not had a “proper” job since. I published my first ebook Friendly Ambitious Nerd in February 2020, when the covid pandemic hit and I then spent the next 2 years working on my second ebook, Introspect. I’m very glad that I did both of those things. Working on those projects made me a substantially better writer in every sense.
But what has been striking for me is that I haven’t quite been able to recreate the writing habit that I had from 2013-2018. And I’d like to understand this better. Why? Well- right now, I’m in a headspace where, I believe that one of the best things I could do with my time and energy, is write a bunch of essays. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve read at least some of my other Substack essays too, so you’d know that I have been doing this a bunch.
One other big thing that changed apart from my commutes was that I started tweeting a lot. I’ve had a Twitter account for a pretty long time – since October 2008, which was almost 15 year ago. For the first few years I tweeted fairly sporadically, mainly just to my local friends in Singapore. (If you look up some of my older tweets from before ~2016, you’ll notice that I often tweeted in Singlish.) In April 2016, I noticed one of my friends was making Twitter threads where he’d update older threads that he’d written. I asked him how he did it, and he taught me the magic of Twitter search. This completely changed the game for me, and I began to write the elaborate, intricate web of Twitter threads that I’m now probably best known for.
After I left my job, my top personal priority – after spending a bunch of time decompressing, lounging around playing video games and eating junk food – was to do as much personal creative writing as I could. I quickly found Twitter to be the most exciting place to be, in large part because of the quoting-and-threading dynamic, and also in large part because of the quality of conversation I had stumbled into. (It’s impossible to paint a perfect picture of what was happening, because many different things were happening all at once, but I would say that I found a lot of my favorite people from hanging out in the replies of Venkatesh Rao, who isn’t active on Twitter much anymore.
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My wife bought me my first smartphone for Valentine’s Day- it was a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and I remember at the time I used to write primarily in Evernote. At some point I got another phone, I think it was a Note 4, and then subsequently I got my first iPhone. At that point I think I switched to writing in my iOS Notes app. I didn’t really care what app I did my writing in. I just wanted to do as much writing for myself as I possibly could. And over those ~5…… /abandoned