My close friends will tell you that pretty much anytime they ask me \u201chow\u2019s things?\u201d I talk about how I\u2019m working on my essays, how I kinda feel like I\u2019m making some sort of progress on the back-end, but don\u2019t really have much yet to show for it on the front-end, and how that process is quite a lonely and emotionally challenging thing to inhabit\u2013 because how do I know I\u2019m not just bullshitting myself, until I see results? But I know from my own history that these things take time. It\u2019s an ongoing tension that I\u2019ll probably never be rid of\u2013 and never want to be rid of, because overconfidence in this domain likely spells underwhelming work\u2013 but I do believe it should be possible to surf the tension with more zest and gusto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are many different layers at which to approach the infinite game puzzle that I\u2019m working on. I feel like the \u201cwhat\u2019s the subject matter?\u201d question is largely \u2018solved’, but even then I must acknowledge that from time to time encountering a fresh subject can be deeply invigorating and set off wonderful cascades of clarity and resonance. That aside, I feel like my primary challenge seems to be one of \u201cwhat\u2019s my process?\u201d, which is something that has been in flux, roughly since around the time my wife and I found out we were having a baby. It\u2019s been hard to really focus on doing exploratory writing in a jovial idiosyncratic way while worrying about the bills, and while caring for a child who still needs nearly-constant attention. And, if I\u2019m being honest, I deeply cherish the time that I spend with my child, so it\u2019s a tradeoff I\u2019m choosing to make. That said, my time and attention is more fragmented than it\u2019s ever been, and so my challenge has been to figure out how to work in fragments. And all of that is happening while I am transitioning away from primarily writing tweets, which I am good at, to writing essays, which I am not so good at. To be clear: I do believe that I am capable of writing good essays, or that I will be in time, but I am comparatively inexperienced at the process of writing good essays. Which is to say, I can sometimes write good essays, but I am definitely bad at consistently writing good essays, particularly when my time and attention are fragmented. Nonetheless, this is the challenge I have set out for myself, and I intend to face it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A thing I\u2019ve (repeatedly) noticed is that I write more fluidly and freely when I feel like I am enthralled by an idea. I can never seem to do this \u201con command\u201d in a straightforward way, by which I mean I can\u2019t really arbitrarily pick something from my list of ideas and notes and drafts and then just turn that into a good essay in a matter of hours. If I could, I would have published a hundred essays by now. I\u2019d like to believe that I could, but the evidence suggests otherwise. So it would probably be wise to use some different approach, at least as an experiment. So here\u2019s the idea I have. Rather than to \u2018write good on demand\u2019, I simply ramble a random path of words\u2026 until I encounter a digression that\u2019s interesting to me. The good news here is that my digressions are rarely ever truly random\u2013 they\u2019re almost always something that I\u2019ve already written or spoken about in some context, something I\u2019ve already thought about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So to recap\u2013 my idea is, instead of writing carefully about some particular X, which I find I don\u2019t seem to have the capacity for, I\u2019ll simply ramble chaotically about any random X that comes to mind, until I find myself tempted to interrupt with \u2018digression Y\u2019. Then I\u2019ll take that digression as the real prompt, and use that for the body of the essay. As with any other approach to creativity, it won\u2019t always work, but I have a really good feeling about it. I think it\u2019ll work more than my previous method, which mostly left me feeling frustrated with myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve circled around something about this idea a few times. In a matryoshka of possibilities I wrote about \u2018looking for the secret trapdoor\u2019, and I wrote about it again in straight outta tartarus by using the dream-within-a-dream concept from the movie Inception. I\u2019ll have to write about it a few more times so that I really properly internalize it. Both of those posts are clunkier than I\u2019d like, and I fantasize about writing really polished \u2018late-stage\u2019 forms that are really elegant, beautiful reader experiences. But I\u2019m not going to be able to do that anytime soon, so I\u2019m stuck making lots of janky sketches and hoping to at least have some animating spirit that can get me by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n