i’ve had a puzzle that’s been bothering me for about as long as i’ve been writing, though maybe i didn’t begin to properly discern it until about midway through. there are a few ways to describe it. one is the framing problem. how do you choose what to put into the frame, and what to leave out of it? what goes in the background, what goes in the foreground? how big or wide should the frame be? this can also be described as an information architecture problem – george orwell said every book is a failure, fran lebowitz said words are easy, books are not. annie dillard said “every book has an intrinsic impossibility… the problem is structural; it is insoluble…” – so if these authors struggled with it, i’m not realistically expecting myself to somehow solve it. i suspect it’s more of a tension to be managed. some of the past ways i’ve tweeted about this are, “currently my creative challenge is to figure out how many things to say in how many containers”, “i care disproportionately about how a bunch of words fit in some container– whether it’s a tweet, a blogpost, or a book– changing the container changes the dynamic of the experience”, and “I think the thing that keeps causing me pain at every scale… is figuring out the correct number of containers to divide things into. too few containers and you have one massive blob. too many and its chaos.” A sidenote thought I had while writing this was, “can’t this be simplified into simply asking, “what should I write?”” And I think the answer is yes… but the devil is in the details. I have a lot of answers re: “what i should write” in terms of pure subject matter. The challenge is answering “how should I write”. I might indulge myself here by thinking of myself as a chef of a restaurant– the answer to the question “what should I cook” can be simple or complex. Simply, edible food, great food, delicious food. Or we could talk about ingredients– pasta, steak, cocktails…
the challenge goes beyond the thing, to the making-of-the-thing. for example, each day is a container of time, and within those 24 hours there are subcontainers– the next biggest meaningful one is “waking hours” which might be 16 hours or so. I started writing this after getting in bed at about 1:45am. It’s now 2:03am. This is somewhat risky business. I can afford to spend maybe another 30 minutes, maybe 1 hour tops, before I start risking not getting enough sleep, which wouldn’t have been a big deal a year ago, but is now more consequential because I have a 5-month-old baby to care for, and it would be very unfair to my wife if i can’t show up properly for my share of that care because i’m sleep-deprived because i was up writing all night. so i’m mindful of that container of time while I write this post about containers of text. looking back, even when i had seemingly “all the time in the world”, i was often mistaken, naive, arrogant in overestimating how much actual time i had. I’d keep pretending like i was someone who didn’t get tired. And the problem with that is that if i start work without accounting for the fact that i’m going to get tired, i inevitably end up at the point of exhaustion with all of my work in a tangled state of mess. and then i’m too tired to untangle it. a lot of this would be solved with better “signposting”. This directly contradicts what I was talking about in resonance over coherence – I’m basically saying that I oughta be more coherent-as-I-go. Here too is another tension to be managed. I do think it’s possible to get better at both things. They might seem like they’re in conflict, but they don’t actually have to be…
i was thinking recently of doing an overview of my creative output, and it occurs to me that i can do a sketch of that while talking about containers again. i’ve written two books, though i’d say the first one wasn’t “really” a book so much as it is a collection of essays and twitter threads. i was sort of stitching together something resembling a book, but it’s not really a book. the second book is a real book. what’s the difference? in my view, a real book is a cohesive reading experience from start to finish. which isn’t to say you can’t be incoherent or fragmented within it, but those fragments have to cohere in their incoherence. how do you tell the difference? i’m not sure i can actually explain that one very well. i can feel it. <the grammar of tweets:> when I write a really good twitter thread, and i copy it over into a text document, it instantly feels weird. because when i write tweets, i’m mindful of how each tweet feels as a standalone piece. i’m mindful of how it feels as part of a feed someone might be scrolling through. there is a pacing and a grammar to that. once the text of those tweets is extracted from the context and moved to a blank page, it suddenly feels “off”. the pacing suddenly feels stilted and forced.
cont// I’ve written in many different contexts. I used to enjoy posting on forums, where sometimes you can “win” by writing something really short, quippy, clever, surprising, and sometimes the big winning move is to write something really thorough, with formatting and citations and links and footnotes and so on. I also recall quite fondly that I used to sometimes write facebook status essays when I was on the train commuting home from work… here’s one that I remembered to copy over and tag on my archives
i’m getting sleepy so it’s probably time for me to start wrapping things up– i don’t think i’m going to publish this now, but i seem to have made a thing that’s worth expanding on. it occurs to me that i could point at jeremy mann somewhere and i could also talk about artful incompleteness somewhere