Oct: Writer Master Plan

I’ve been doing some soul-searching and I’ve concluded that the one thing I want to do with my life is to write. I want to write essays and stories. Maybe novels, I don’t know what’s the ideal structure for the things that I want to write.  

I think I’m tired of psychoanalyzing myself. I think I’ve pretty much said all there is to say about the person called Visakan, and it’s time for me to move on to writing other things. 

One of the challenges of life is staying alive, which requires food and shelter. In modern times this means earning money. The elegant end-state here is to be paid to write whatever I feel like writing. But it takes a lot of work to get to that point. In the interim I need to trade my time for currency- and currently I’m doing that by being a digital marketer. I will continue to do that for the foreseeable future. But this is not what I want to be doing with my life. I want to spend my life writing as much as I possibly can. 

I have some other goals too. I’d like to be fit and healthy. I want to be a good husband, and maybe I want to have kids and be a good dad. I’d like to do a bit of travelling, I’d like to see the world. I’d like to learn to cook and play guitar. But all of those things are secondary to the fact that I want to be a writer. Becoming a writer, I think, is my highest priority in life. I anticipate that I may grow to become a bit of a public figure, and something about that appeals to me. But that too is secondary to writing great things. 

Okay, so how do I manage the transition? I’ve been writing a lot already but a lot of it is navel-gazing. I need to start writing things that I’d personally want to read. I need to write for an audience. I need to start putting things up. I want to finish my 1000 word vomits project as fast as possible, while simultaneously making progress on my writing goals. I have a neverending avalanche of writing goals in my todo list. I should merge these two goals into one- I should write drafts of essays and stories in the form of 1000-word vomits. That way I’ll make progress on both things. I want to derive pleasure from making progress on that goal. In a year or two I may completely revise my idea of how to achieve the ultimate goal, which is to tell a story that matters, a story of my own creation. I’m 26 now. I’ll happily spend 50 years on this quest, more if I’m lucky enough to keep on living. 

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I’m very infatuated with the idea of crafting master plans. It’s okay for them to go wrong, we can recalibrate them afterwards, but it makes sense to write the plan to begin with. Someone said that plans don’t count for anything, but it’s the planning that makes all the difference. So let’s start. 

I want to be a writer. That is what I want to do with my life. Theoretically, if I spend the rest of my life just writing from time to time without achieving anything out of it, I think that might be a life reasonably well spent. Of course, it would be great if my writing could achieve some level of significance – if I could arrange symbols in a way that other people interpret to be useful. That would be an interesting challenge. 

To pursue this goal I need to ask myself specific questions and answer those questions. Why do I want to become a writer? What’s the difference between what I’m doing right now, and what I want to become? 

Well, right now I feel like I’m still not being very disciplined about my writing. I’ve technically written more words than anybody else I personally know, but maybe that’s a low bar. I should definitely aim higher. By the time I’m done with this project, I’d definitely have written more than almost everyone I know, except prolific writers who do it full-time for a living over several years or longer – AKA a tiny fragment of people.  

I want to write things that resonate with people, but I to avoid being oversimplistic or populist. The problem I’m starting to face is – I’ve written for so long for an audience of just me, that I’m not quite sure what I want to present to the world. I think the way to solve that problem is simple trial-and-error – just present one little thing each day and see how people respond to it. And to bear in mind what I was mindful of before – that… //end