Two hundred and fifty thousand

I was “supposed” to be done with this yesterday, but I seem to have this strange habit of putting off things that seem “important”. Maybe because I have a lot of expectations, and I want everything to be really good, to be perfect, and I’m afraid of criticism. I’m afraid of looking stupid. I’m afraid of admitting ignorance, especially after having functioned in an environment for sometime without confessing ignorance at the start. All of those things need changing.

Anyway, I thought this milestone would be a nice moment to reflect on this entire process. The perfect reflection would involve me already having read, reread and tagged every single vomit so far. I might have re-titled things so that they make more sense, so that they’re more searchable. I wouldn’t have edited things so that they were different, but I might have added some footnotes for context. And I’d have linked them all together, and broken them down into separate trains of thought.

Alas, things rarely happen perfectly. Better to get things done imperfectly than to have them done perfectly.

When I started these vomits, I was dating my girlfriend– now we’re married. I was living with my parents– now I have a home of my own. I was unemployed– now I’ve spent 2 years at a startup that I really enjoy, and am eager to contribute more. Lots has changed. I haven’t yet re-read and reviewed vomits 100 to 200, so my thoughts about my own writing are amusingly under-informed. I suppose it will be interesting to read THIS post again once I’ve reviewed the ones that preceded it.

One of the cool things about writing at this sort of volume is that you start to forget what you’ve written already. It becomes a lot easier to look at your own writing with an incredibly detached eye. All artists know that a crucial part of your work involves “killing your babies”– slaughtering mercilessly the very things that you bring into the world. This is never entirely easy to do, but it becomes a lot easier when you have SO many that you can’t recognize them.

So… what have I learnt? What has this been like for me?

I think I’ve definitely become a better writer, and I’ve also become more conscious of when I’m writing badly. (Not too interested in defining those terms right-here-right-now, maybe in another vomit. It’s all about effective transmission of worthy + desired signal).

I think it’s really nice to have this process to “come home to”, to commit to something “larger”. I don’t want to say “greater than myself” because that’s cheesy. I have a job– that’s greater than me. I have a wife and cats, that’s greater than me. But it’s not quite the same as embarking on a project that has a finite end, yet is remarkably substantial. I’ve never done anything quite like that before. And now I’m about to be 25% done with it. It feels like a long way in and also a long way to go. I’ll just go head down and keep doing it.

I’m conscious of how I over-write things. I repeat myself, I make the same point over and over again (meta– just did it again). I wonder if I’ll be able to shake it off within my vomits at the end of my vomits. Right now I’ve gotten better at eliminating it from my work writing– which has also benefited from these vomits. I wonder if eventually my stream-of-consciousness itself will become succinct. That’s a rather heady, exciting prospect. We’ll see. One word at a time.

I think it’s important to move fast. I think interrupting vomits is a bad idea ( but I still tend to do it anyway.)

I think it’s important to be willing and able to discard imperfect writing quickly and easily. Sometimes I just lose steam halfway, and for me I can start many many times. I can have many, many drafts lying around, lots of them done halfway, and then it can turn into this whole side/sub-project where I just go through all of my versions over and over again. The right thing to do is to discard them and start from scratch. Very rarely if ever is there going to be a sentence or a paragraph that’s so amazing that losing it an outright tragedy. Maybe it’s POSSIBLE, but I think it’s far more valuable to work on keeping the engine running. The team is more important than the player, and the writing process is more important than any specific single piece of writing.

I think it’s important to write fast, I’m just revisiting that from reading Ray Bradbury’s Zen In The Art Of Writing. (Which reminds me, I’ve been wanting to read the “Read Like A Writer” book for some time. I really ought to get it.) There IS something to the idea that there is truth in speed. When you move fast you chase after the next most relevant thought, like jumping from car to car in a highway chase. Sometimes I end up with stuff that isn’t necessarily accurate, valuable, useful, blah blah. But when I move fast, it’s definitely got more feel, more soul. I can write fast and edit slow, but I can’t write slow to end up with something worth editing. Writing slow makes things overly measured and artificial.

What else–

I guess I’m starting to run into “scaling issues” that I hadn’t experienced earlier, but was kind of semi-anticipating and semi-hoping to encounter. What I mean is– as this project becomes larger, it becomes harder for me to navigate. On hindsight, I should’ve made sure that every vomit was well tagged and summarized for easy search + reference afterwards. Since I didn’t do that, I now have to do it on re-read. Which might not necessarily be a bad thing. I don’t want to be too prescriptive about how I do these vomits, I just sort of go with what feels right, adjust things along the way and see how I feel.

I first started these vomits on my main visakanv.com/blog, which is now altogether inactive. The vomits were starting to overwhelm the regular posts and I wasn’t even all that interested in writing regular posts anymore, except in special circumstances (like if there’s some current affairs stuff that I feel very strongly about).

Then I moved the vomits to their own URL at visakanv.com/1000, after my wife suggested the idea. I wonder what’s next. I started out writing about all my interests, and I’ve started to notice that I care about some things more than others. I’m less interested in social commentary and big picture stuff, and I’m more interested now in figuring out how my own mind works, and how to manage my own psychology– how to figure out my own personal issues and limiting beliefs, and how I ought to level up by managing them effectively.

Personally, actually I find “personal issues and limiting beliefs” to be a little boring– but it feels like I need to “solve” them before I can move forward. So that’s the focus for my next 100 vomits or so, I’m guessing. We’ll see. It’s exciting.