“social mistake i used to make a lot was, always engaging with everyone the way I wanted to be engaged with, which was to be taken seriously in a very particular way. turns out a lot of people just* be saying shit**, without necessarily like, putting heavy significance*** about it”
I initially typed the above out as a tweet, but I quickly got the sense that it’s too complicated to manage. the second sentence in particular has paragraphs worth of caveats, and there are all these implications that I don’t particularly intend, and by the time I address all of that I will end up with a completely different set of words.
and then I found myself quickly thinking, wait, that’s a great sign that it should be an essay! and the moment I have THIS thought – “great sign it should be an essay”, another part of my mind sets off on a separate tangent of “ohhhh it’ll be so good to get into like, how some thoughts are better for tweeting and some thoughts are better for writing essays, and like the creative challenge of managing both at the same time…” and I started to get really tired.
the above 3 paragraphs are an interim state. the 3rd paragraph I might end up spinning off into a separate essay entirely. I have another essay in a different window that I initially started on today, and I’m currently negotiating with myself internally about whether I should go back and try and finish that one first, or if I should put that on pause and do this one.
this is a screenshot of my creative process. i am always working through things in my mind like this. layers upon layers. if you sometimes see me write something surprisingly clear, simple, useful, etc, that’s downstream of all of this wrangling. I suppose at some level it must be like how I find it astounding that illustrators are able to sketch a human face beautifully, or draw the scene of a street effortlessly. it’s because they’ve worked through all the wrong interpretations, all the wrong moves. once you understand that stuff and you brush it out of the way, you almost can’t help but do the right things.
all of this is a game that I am playing with myself. when I play it well, it is absolutely exhilarating.
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(2023-2024?) I have a lot of internal conflicts. Doesn’t everyone? Right now I’m thinking about how I’m conflicted about what I’m capable of. My abilities seem quite unpredictable. Sometimes I can get a ton of good writing done, on a whim, in a single day. Sometimes I spend weeks trying to write, and nothing seems to hold together properly. What is the truth of the underlying dynamic here? Is it “random”? I don’t think so, though it can look and feel random “from the outside” – and even I can feel like a stranger to myself when I witness my own creative process sometimes. It’s conceivable to me that an experienced observer might be able to discern things about me that I can’t discern by myself. Historically though I haven’t had nearly as much exposure to skilled observers as I’d like. I believe I have a reasonably good grasp of when people make good observations vs poor ones that mostly reveal their own biases and assumptions and say very little about me. The few times people have made good observations, I tend to become fast friends with them, on the basis of our shared understanding.
Lets wind back a little. What is the truth of the underlying dynamic of my creative process? What do I even know about my creative process? Let’s sketch out some details.
I know that it’s fairly easy for me to come up with ideas. I have loads of ideas. Arguably too many ideas. I’m currently ignoring all of them, because if I start spending time around my ideas I suspect I’ll get swept up into a particular kind of frenzied stupor, and get nothing done – nothing tangible, at least. A case could be made that being in a blurry daze in the midst of all of my ideas, is actually an important part of my creative process that I don’t appreciate enough because it doesn’t look like it’s doing anything. I may be imposing some unnecessary seeing-like-a-state authoritarian-tyranny on myself.
If you asked me “what are your ideas”, my instinct is to bring you to my junkyard of notes, which are overflowing with hundreds of drafts and proto-drafts. Some of them are as short as a phrase like “therapycoded invalidation”, “plaintext literacy”, “advanced stupid”, “artful incompleteness”. There are some even shorter commonplace phrases that I know I want to write about, like “eroticism”, “humility”, “stress”, “talismans”, “divinity”, “consecration”. And there are some strong titles like “in other words”, where I already know I want to write loads of things about all of my thoughts about language, vocabulary, grammar, meaning.
A bunch of my essay drafts start out as tweets that don’t seem quite right. I tend to open up twitter subconsciously with a thought ready to go – I’m not even “consciously thinking” about it. I think a lot of what I enjoy about posting to twitter is how it feels like Flow for me. I just fired off a couple of tweets while writing this, which is a thing that I notice happens almost every time I’m working on an essay. So in a sense, I could say that working on essays produces tweets and working on tweets produces essays. That’s what it looks like. But is that what’s actually happening? I think not quite. I think I’m just thinking out loud, and some thoughts “want” to be in certain containers and not others. Like how some clothes “want” to go with others. You can get as animist about this as you want. Do the items actually spark joy intrinsically? I don’t know. Probably not. Is it “all in my head”? I don’t know. Probably not. The tickle is not in the feather. Perception is a collaborative act between the perceiver and the perceived.
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2024jul14 I want to spend some time thinking about my creative process. It’s funny, I’ve always believed that we can solve problems by thinking, but I’ve spent remarkably little time thinking about my creative process. I do think I know why this is. I’ve always thought of myself as a hobbyist, an amateur in the olden sense (amare, amore, to do it for love). And I wanted to protect that. There was a part of me that was afraid that approaching my hobby with a professional “let’s think about this seriously” lens would somehow kill the golden goose, spoil the fun, extinguish the magic. This was a bit of a ‘luxury belief’, in the sense that for a few years I could get away with being slovenly in my approach to my work, and romanticize that. But since the birth of my son, I find myself chronically short on time and energy. maybe i’ll start by thinking …. (abandoned)
effortless mastery in writing: What if instead of thinking about what I wanted to write I simply let my fingers write whatever they wanted to? I still have thoughts, I’m still thinking hm maybe they want to write swear words, or clever words, or or or or what? Fingers like rhythm and aren’t all that interested in content. The content somehow makes sense anyway, probably because of remnants… in the mind? Remnants from the mind that remained cached in the body, maybe? Maybe it’s all in the mind, it’s hard to know for certain, and certainty isn’t actually necessary in this endeavor. You can actually go ahead with just a vague sense and then improvise from there. We can start anywhere. If we can start anywhere, why do we so often start from the same few places? Part of it might just be unconscious habit. After all we tend to wake up every day in our beds, and most of our journeys begin from home. But does it matter if we start in the same place every time? The point is to experience something fun and interesting. Take a different route. Go somewhere new. The second moment can be considered a new first moment of its own. It’s all about how you frame it
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2025may09
one – It’s 426pm. I have a thing at 7pm. And I might be interrupted sooner than that. I want to try and do something here in the meantime. I want to get a glimpse of something that feels like magic. What do I have to do for that? One of the things I believe to be true is that you can start somewhere arbitrary, then try to go in a marginally interesting direction, and then repeat until you end up somewhere cool. I can feel some of the thoughts and ideas in my mind’s drawer rustling about a little bit, a little over-eager to contribute. I don’t want to make too much of an effort to suppress them, but I don’t want to introduce them either. I want to channel a spirit of irreverence that has felt like it’s eluded me for some time.
two – I’ve heard that the line “Where do we go now?” in Sweet Child O’ Mine emerged naturally in a jamming session– Axl Rose literally sang the question out loud when trying to figure out what lyrics to put in the bridge, and it seemed good enough, and so that’s what it is. Is it really the best possible line for that song? It’s hard to imagine it being anything else. But it’s the kind of move you can only really use once– if you repeat it in multiple songs you reveal that you don’t really have any ideas.
three – sometimes I like to use bullets or numbers as a kind of navigational aid when writing. It’s a way of creating some sense of structure, even if it’s completely arbitrary. You can always take them out later.
four – one of the weird things about writing is that you might write the first draft in a linear fashion, but then you travel ‘back in time’ by going back to the start of the piece and changing something about it. Sometimes this is visible to the reader, but usually it isn’t, and most readers probably don’t care. Yet it’s something I get somewhat self-conscious about, maybe because of my long habit of doing twitter threads, where each tweet cannot be edited. You can subsequently recontextualize it by quoting it in a new thread, or by adding more tweets at the end, but you can’t edit what you’ve already written. I wonder if it would be a good idea for me to continue with this arbitrary constraint when trying to write longform pieces, so that I don’t confuse myself with too many options.
five – I have always been someone who tries to do many different things simultaneously. Sometimes it’s lead to really interesting outcomes, but for the most part I don’t particularly recommend it. It feels more like an affliction than a blessing. Maybe it’s both. My first book Friendly Ambitious Nerd, for example, simply insisted on being about three different things at once. As a result each section is a little weaker than it could otherwise be, but I feel that the combination is important. I sometimes fantasize about writing an airport book titled ‘Reply Game’, but the idea of it kinda tires me out after a moment. The sensible thing to do would probably be to write an essay for starters, but I don’t even really feel like doing that, even though I imagine it would probably be worthwhile to do. Why not do it? I feel like I’m waiting for something, but I don’t know what exactly, until I encounter it. I already have the ‘primary frame’, but I think that’s not quite enough. There’s something like a ‘secondary frame’, or the stories you want to tell through the primary frame, etc.
six – maybe this is where we’re going: the big puzzle of my creative life is, how come I haven’t just already done all the things that I seem to want to do? How come, for example, my essay on wretchedness isn’t done yet? Okay, let’s say it’s a kind of perfectionism. How come I haven’t written a janky draft? Wait, I do have a janky draft. It’s just… disassembled. And here I went on a bit of a journey– I had searched “visakanv wretchedness”, found a podcast that I did with Jim O’Shaughnessy, and realized that I ought to tidy up the transcript (which I’m currently doing in another window via Claude.ai), and publish that, probably on my blog.
seven – I just got back from a run and I’m feeling good physically. My body is sore and I’m going to hurt tomorrow, hopefully more good-hurt than bad-hurt, but running feels like a nice… /fin
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