{"id":14141,"date":"2023-06-28T17:53:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T17:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14141"},"modified":"2024-03-19T17:54:22","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T17:54:22","slug":"improv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2023\/06\/28\/improv\/","title":{"rendered":"improv"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I like writing, so here I am. I don\u2019t have a particular thing in mind that I want to write about, so I\u2019m going to improvise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That feels good, \u201cI\u2019m going to improvise.\u201d I don\u2019t improvise nearly as much as I\u2019d like. I feel like one of the annoying things about \u201chaving a substack\u201d, for me, is thinking \u201coh, I should write some Proper Essays\u201d, and then getting all swept up in the shoulds, and forgetting to just have fun with words. (Subsequently wrote that the only thing about Proper Essays is that it\u2019s me writing with a stick up my ass.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I do believe that a part of me genuinely does want to write some Proper Essays \u2013 I have many, many drafts, and several of them are Proper Essay Drafts. I\u2019d like to see them blossom and flourish, and I know in my heart of hearts that they\u2019re going to be good, and people are going to enjoy them, get value out of them, It\u2019s going to be great. But it\u2019s a process that takes time, and frustratingly, me being impatient about it makes things go even slower. So working on my essays has become a kind of meditation practice for me, a lesson in gentle acceptance, finding balance, ayy lmao<\/a>, all that jazz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But also, I just want to write<\/em>. I like writing! And sometimes all this Proper Essay business gets in the way of \u201cjust writing\u201d. Tweeting is great, and I don\u2019t intend to stop tweeting anytime soon, but I also think that there are limits to what you can do with Twitter, and having posted over 232,000 tweets, I think I\u2019m justified in saying that I have brushed against some of the limits of what is possible for me on the birdsite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me point at a couple of the best tweets I\u2019ve ever written (top 100), which happened fairly recently:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a>
(source<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The first one is my favorite current 1-tweet summary I have of my first book Friendly Ambitious Nerd<\/a> (which I also recently summarized in ~750 words<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second is a 4-5-word summary of a longer tweet that\u2019s very foundational for me, about wanting to be a word-artist-magician:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a>
(source)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These 3 tweets capture a lot of the mood of what I\u2019m doing in a remarkably tiny amount of space. I\u2019m proud of that. I think there\u2019s an artistry to it that comes from years of practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And\u2026 I also want to do something else. I\u2019m reminded of a 1996 quote from an interview with Brian Eno, talking about how he produced the Windows startup sound<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Q: How did you come to compose “The Microsoft Sound”?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A: The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1\/4 seconds long.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, so. Having produced hundreds of thousands of \u201ctiny little jewels\u201d, I\u2019d like to now go back to working with \u201coceans of words\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier I said what my problem is: being overly fixated on the frame of \u201cI should write Proper Essays\u201d. There are many parts to this fixation. One is that I have a bunch of title ideas that I really like. Sometimes that\u2019s excellent, and a good title leads to me writing a good essay. But sometimes the goodness of the title can be a trap. I end up putting the title on a pedestal and I struggle to live up to it. This is making me realize I gotta be naughtier, sillier, more subversive in my process. I\u2019ve been straining and stretching too much. And to be fair, I\u2019m trying to write better than I\u2019ve ever written. I\u2019m trying to lift more weight, go a longer distance, faster. It\u2019s work! It\u2019s tiresome, even if I love it! And all the important growth happens at the threshold of my competence, which means in uncharted territory, where the rules can be different than what I am accustomed to. As I type this out I can imagine my younger self gleefully going \u201cHell yeah, that\u2019s exactly the life I want to live.\u201d (Insert \u201cyeah, I know, I know\u201d GIF of the older Captain America responding to his past self saying \u201cI can do this all day.\u201d) He\u2019s right. This is<\/em> the life I want to live. I would be even more frustrated working a desk job. Worse than frustrated \u2013 I\u2019d be depressed, despondent\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 that might be oversimplifying things. But I do have a very specific memory that always comes to mind when I think about these things. In 2012, I had no idea what I was going to do for a living. I was hoping to get a job as a flight steward with Singapore Airlines, so that I might pay the bills and hopefully do some blogging while sitting in quaint little cafes in exotic foreign countries. Around that time, I got an email from a guy who ran a software company selling referral programs to ecommerce stores. He liked my blog, and he asked me out for coffee, to see if I\u2019d be interested in working on his marketing team. I actually said no at first, because I wanted to be a flight steward! But I didn\u2019t make it past the first round of selection, and so by luck I ended up in a job that turned out to be better than I even imagined possible for me.<\/em> The pay was better than I believed I deserved at the time. It was a small team\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

25jul2023 I\u2019ve spent the past month or so of my time \u2013 it feels like the past year, really \u2013 staying up late at night going through my notes, moving sentences and phrases around, trying to find some semblance of meaningful order. Part of the hope is that I might turn them into essays, but actually I think the deeper thing is just\u2026 I want my material to make deep sense to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve sometimes talked about this in terms of learning songs as a musician. There are many different songs that follow similar patterns. A lot of pop music uses the same 4 chords, although they might be dressed up in slightly different disguises. Once you understand the pattern underlying the changes, you find that you don\u2019t need to use as much mental effort to try and remember everything. Instead of remember dozens of seemingly arbitrary different structures, you have a deep understanding of the handful of deep structures that everything else is made up of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here I want to take a short break from this essay to continue sorting my drafts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\/\/\/ Of course that\u2019s not the only thing I\u2019ve been doing \u2013 sometimes I open up a blank page and just start writing, like I\u2019m doing now. Sometimes it feels really good, like I\u2019m making real progress on something. Sometimes it feels like I\u2019m just killing time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like writing, so here I am. I don\u2019t have a particular thing in mind that I want to write about, so I\u2019m going to improvise. That feels good, \u201cI\u2019m going to improvise.\u201d I don\u2019t improvise nearly as much as I\u2019d like. I feel like one of the annoying things… <\/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":[1],"tags":[730],"class_list":["post-14141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-substack"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5gxNz-improv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14141","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=14141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14142,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14141\/revisions\/14142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}