There’s an idea that’s been swirling in my mind for quite some time. The adjacent ideas are “writer’s block” (very common phrase), “supply chain management” (business idea), and the term “content laborer” (I made it up when playing around while thinking about the work I do as a content marketer). Stephen Pressfield’s “The War Of Art” also must’ve influenced my thoughts on this, and “Everything Is A Remix”.

Here’s the situation: We tend to think of writing and other creative work (painting, music, product design, architecture, dance, maybe programming) as something, well, “creative”. It’s “idea work”, and requires “inspiration”. I’m not disputing any of that, I’m adding quotes just to emphasize the fact that all of these words are loaded (as all words are), and I’d like to think a little harder about what those things mean.

Here’s my problem, which is probably really common, something loads of people have probably thought of before: The idea of writing as something whimsical, somewhat random, requiring “genius” (see Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk) is somewhat inhibiting. It creates all sorts of expectations that hinders the process of creation for me.

So I found myself smiling and laughing when the phrase “content laborer” entered my mind. There are all these terms like “growth hacker” and “social media guru” or “ninja” that imply some sort of hidden knowledge, some sort of secret skill. The labels imply a certain elusive quality about them. “Content laborer”, on the other hand, is wonderfully spartan. It’s blue-collar work, digging up data like a miner mining coal from the ground.

Which then got me thinking about process management. Getting a piece of content published– whether a novel or a play or a webapp– is the final step of a long, industrial process. It doesn’t need to be linear. You might start with the raw materials, and then play around with them to see what comes out of it. Or you might start with an idea, and then look for the materials you’ll need. And then you need to work with them. [1]

What I’m vaguely getting at is– the idea that writing is some sort of magical, inspiration-driven process is just the froth at the crest of the wave. The reality of it goes much deeper, and has far more prerequisites than most people ever talk about. If you want to write, you’re going to have to read. You’re going to have to read a lot, you’re going to have to process a ton of information just to spit out a tiny diamond of value. [2]

This post is necessarily clunky. The points don’t flow from one to another, there is no crescendo, no buildup. It’s just a series of thoughts, a series of quotes, a bunch of raw materials sitting in a warehouse on the page. And I’m walking around them, feeling them with my hands, rubbing them against each other, just seeing what happens. And it’s a necessary precursor to the elegant, insightful writing that flows beautifully from start to finish.

There’s something else somebody once wrote about the design sketches hardly anybody sees in the process en route to a product. You look at something like the latest Macbook and think, wow, that’s divine. It’s beautifully designed, it’s so perfect. What went into it? What were all the alternate ideas that were discarded, rejected? What were all the other ways it could’ve turned out, but didn’t? That’s a very important thing to know, if you’re trying to make something. But that’s very rarely presented, and it’s very rarely comprehensible. Beauty emerges out of chaos and mess.

Let’s go back to process management. I was reading a little bit about some of the innovative process thinkers and practitioners who ushered in the Industrial Revolution (and some of those who came around after). When I was younger I hated how industrialized school felt– I felt like I was a mere automaton, jumping through hoops and following instructions for little to no reward, no learning. By extension (leaky perceptions) I developed a distaste for anything that felt industrial or process-focused. I hated the idea of timetables, schedules, plans. I felt it was soulless.

I realize now [3] that it only felt soulless maybe because it was something that I didn’t believe in, or maybe because it feels like the school-factory is producing automatons for which demand is greatly diminished. [4] There might have been a time and a context where following orders paid off beautifully, but when I was going to school it felt like a shitty deal.

It doesn’t change the fact, however, that being good at process and resource management TOWARDS YOUR OWN DESIRED ENDS is incredibly powerful. This is the thing that I need to learn.

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[1] There’s a post on Ribbonfarm which describes how Bronze required some really complex processes to make– you need Tin, which doesn’t form naturally everywhere– so you need to trade for them, which means you need these extended supply chains and trading routes just to get the raw material. And it takes a lot of experience, practice and learning before you can work with the stuff well, so you need guilds and systems of learning.

[2] As I write this I realize that Venkat from Ribbonfarm has already written quite extensively about this, but I feel like it’s necessary for me to come up with my own ideas, my own metaphors, my own language. The better I understand my own process, the better I’ll be able to create the output that I want. The goal is to be limited by resource constraints, not by my own ignorance, my own lack of resourcefulness.

[3] I’ve repeated this realization in several forms, at several times, but it still feels poignant and necessary. I understand this point intellectually but it hasn’t yet sunk in enough to reprogram my earlier habits and distaste towards process. So I will keep doing this (and try other things in parallel) until I figure it out.

[4] 20, 30 years ago in Singapore, if you just studied hard in school, you were pretty much guaranteed a job that would pay pretty well, and you would have a higher standard of living than your parents did. Today, I don’t think this is the case anymore. But I don’t want to go into too much detail into that, because I’m not an expert, and I don’t know my stuff as well as I would like to.