ios\/substack draft<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A love letter to my process\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Feels a bit tacky to write so much about writing. But this is an internal feeling. Most of my substack audience wouldn\u2019t mind, or even notice. In fact there\u2018a probably a significant subset of readers who\u2019d like it if I made my entire substack be about writing\u2013 as a marketing guy I know that it would be lucrative in a sense. You grow your audience faster when you\u2019re targeting a clear and specific niche. It\u2019s easier to say yes to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But my process won\u2019t allow that. And I\u2019m often fighting my process and feeling quite guilty about it. What does my process really want? Well a part of it wants everything. It wants to be sublime and mundane, prosaic and profound, you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around <\/p>\n\n\n\n My friend Tiago likes to say that perfectionism is fear with an excuse<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t think I\u2019m super perfectionist. I shipped both of my ebooks in states of incomplete. So clearly my process is okay with things being incomplete. But they have to be good. They have to be compelling in some way. A bumpy road is tolerable if it gets to an interesting destination<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the problem is I can\u2019t quite just pick a destination. I have literally hundreds of drafts lying around. And if a friend asked me for advice I\u2019d say don\u2019t think so hard about it, just ship something. But\u2026 am I a hypocrite? Maybe a little bit! But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s just that. I think sometimes when you have a contradiction it\u2019s because there\u2019s something more complex happening that you just don\u2019t understand yet. And it\u2019s the illusion of understanding that will really mess you up. So that\u2019s what I strive for. Understanding. If <\/p>\n\n\n\n ### <\/p>\n\n\n\n looking back over the past 20+ years of my journalling and reflection I think one of the most core central challenges has been something like insubordination <\/p>\n\n\n\n I do a lot of my best writing\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n pacing a small stretch in my house between my kitchen and the front door. Trying to resist this seems unwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m 32 years old<\/p>\n\n\n\n fun thing is I can now say I\u2019ve been writing for decades<\/p>\n\n\n\n Started with digimon poetry <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not a fan of the word procrastination<\/p>\n\n\n\n I find it to be a clunky and cumbersome word. it\u2019s kind of like the word masturbation<\/p>\n\n\n\n I been struggling to write a second post for my suvsradk and I haven\u2019t really taken the time to ask why<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think it\u2019s because of the gulf between my reality and my expectations, hopeful idealistic naive<\/p>\n\n\n\n I spend a lot of time sitting around agonising about my writing. That sounds dramatic. Okay it\u2019s not that dramatic. But a lot of my writing takes place in my head in a place that I don\u2019t have a lot of clarity about. And I have spent a long time trying to shine a light down there in that dusty cellar and it doesn\u2019t work<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think I just gotta make my peace with it<\/p>\n\n\n\n My writing style has always been confessional and I think a part of me loves it and a part of me hates it. Maybe like how women feel about their bodies<\/p>\n\n\n\n I haven\u2019t really properly introduced myself, have I? And yet sometimes it feels like that\u2019s all I ever do, just continually introduce and reintroduce myself over and over again. It\u2019s boring. And I think the biggest crime in writing is to be bored, to be boring. I wrote an entire book with the intention of understanding what the fuck boredom even is so I might never be bored again. I think I succeeded at understanding boredom but that doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019ve defeated it permanently. It can\u2019t be and we shouldn\u2019t really try(?). <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n 2022nov18: I\u2019ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about how to write a set of essays that I would be really proud of. It\u2019s been my dominant preoccupation, which is somewhat questionable from a cost-benefit standpoint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I do quite a bit of my thinking by<\/em> writing \u2013 I don\u2019t just sit around daydreaming (although that\u2019s absolutely a critical part of my process), I have tens of thousands of words spread across dozens of drafts and notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t know if I want to share this<\/em> (essay draft) publicly. This is shaping up to feel like a behind-the-scenes document. I do want to weave in some behind-the-scenes content into my work, but I want it to be a deliberate choice on my part. This doesn\u2019t quite feel like the right move at this point. I might share it with some friends. So maybe I should be writing it in a google docs instead. But I\u2019m already here (in the Substack text editor) and I want to get more cosy with it, so I\u2019ll continue here, and maybe copy it out later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was going through some old notes and I found one from 2021 where I was introspecting about my book-writing process and how I was struggling with it because I didn\u2019t quite scope it properly. I was too ambitious, I wanted to do too much. I bit off more than I can chew. Slightly annoying thing about me is that I almost can\u2019t bring myself to work on something unless it\u2019s more than I can chew. It\u2019s almost like I need to manufacture crises in order to keep myself interested. Which is probably correlated with my ADHD complex\/cluster of traits, but that\u2019s not what I want to be talking about here\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n A part of me does believe that writing should be fun and effortless. I\u2019d like to be luxuriating in my words, enjoying myself. If I haven\u2019t been doing that much lately, it\u2019s probably because I\u2019ve been getting into a tyrannical state of mind, trying to force myself to do something that I don\u2019t particularly feel like doing. This is a tricky mess to navigate, I wrote a whole book about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ios\/substack draft A love letter to my process\u00a0 Feels a bit tacky to write so much about writing. But this is an internal feeling. Most of my substack audience wouldn\u2019t mind, or even notice. In fact there\u2018a probably a significant subset of readers who\u2019d like it if I made my… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[727],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drafts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3v1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13456,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13455\/revisions\/13456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}