This is an old note that’s interesting because it was from a while after I left my job, but before I started really succeeding. Will be interesting to reference in the future.

Simplification: 

1. Tired of writing inner monologue as word vomit 
2. Want to write for a living 
3. Need to have a body of work 
4. Need to get started 
5. Start where? Curiosities. Unfinished essays. 
6. How to choose? Focus on what would be interesting to other Visas.
   

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I’ve been feeling a little blocked for a while, as a writer. I’m tired of articulating my internal monologue, because it doesn’t seem to have changed much these past 3 years or so. It might be worth summarizing and compressing, but I find the idea of doing that quite unappealing right now. Maybe later. 

In a previous vomit I tried to explore and sketch out what a writing career would look like. Broadly, I’d have to build a body of work, cultivate an audience of readers and then carve out a path to monetization. The highest order bit in that equation is the body of work. So I need to solve for that first. 

So what do I want to write?  

I felt like I had hundreds of possible starting points, so I needed to develop a system or heuristic or algorithm for prioritizing what to write first. “ 

Just start with whatever” seemed like it would lead to too many false starts, which I can’t afford.  

It seems necessary to start with a niche of some sort, but I didn’t want to pick one that’s already superdefined and saturated- that’s paved-road territory; the returns are already diminishing.  

If I want to make something good I have to follow my nose and do something that I feel hasn’t been done adequately well by anybody else. Something where my contribution would be at least relatively or marginally significant. 

Here I came to stumble on a few things. The most recent was- I recently read a book by a material scientist titled “stuff matters”, which I greatly enjoyed. And it made me realize I like the stories behind objects and ideas.  

Here I recall Tim Urban’s description of his writing process- how he’d feel ignorant about some topic, and so do all the research and reading to get a sense of what it’s about, then write about it to clarify it for himself and share it with others. I want to do that. (Electricity…) 

I also remembered that I already have an existing, growing list of curiosities on my blog. It would be satisfying to flesh them out and get them out of my system. That was already part of my initial intent, which had faded out of focus, so it’s nice to feel like things are coming together. 

What are the potential problems? I think it’s (relatively) easy to just ramble and list a collection of interesting facts and thoughts. The challenge is to turn that into a coherent, enjoyable reading experience. To make ships in bottles, as Carl Zimmer put it. 

There are some next actions I need to flesh out. 

0. Schedule time to explicitly do all of the following tasks, without multitasking. 

1. Make a list of my all time favorite writers, and figure out what it is that I like about them  

2. Make a list of my favorite living writers, and identify what it is that I like about them.  

2b. Make a list of my favorite online writing, and identify what it is I like about them. 

3. Make a list of publications that I’d like to contribute to, figure out why, and submit a pitch to each one. 

4. Reevaluate my bookshelf to see what I liked and why.  

5. Put together a centralized roadmap of all my writing plans- currently scattered across mutiple pages and lists.