update: published in May 2023 https://visakanv.substack.com/p/resonance-over-coherence/

This is an abandoned Substack draft from March 2023

I have hundreds of drafts and thousands of notes. Sometimes I feel a sense of pride about it – it’s proof that I’m “doing something” – and sometimes I feel the opposite, something like shame, because gosh, what a tedious mess it all is. Zooming out, neither view seems entirely “correct”. Maybe because it’s both, it’s more complex. I often fantasize about my notes achieving a level of coherence and resonance that they don’t currently have. Part of this fantasy seems unattainable, like grasping at immortality or perfection. But part of it seems like something that’s constantly being realized through mundane trial-and-error. I’m continually working towards more coherence and resonance. When I step back to consider it all, though, I find myself thinking that resonance is more important than coherence, and I want to get into that in more detail.

gave some talks recently – what did i love about it?

I recently gave a couple of talks that I’m quite proud of. The first one was particularly important to me, for I was being paid to fly across the planet to give it, and the people I was giving it to were especially the sort of people that I would want to have a meaningful impact on (other internet writers, ie people like myself).

how i prepared: I did some preparation for it because I wanted it to be good. I recorded myself giving an improvised, freestyle version of the speech, transcribed it, reread it, asked a few people for feedback, did a second freestyle version which I did not publish, and then had a few conversations about it with people that I met in the days leading up to the speech. But up until the moment of the speech, I did not have carefully prepared remarks. I knew what I wanted to talk about, I knew that I had had many conversations about it. I had about 15-20 minutes to give the talk and I knew that I could talk about it for 3 hours, so compressing was a challenge.

how it went: it went really well! had lots of laughs, applause, lots of questions. I could feel that people were really engaged. How I like to think about it was – I myself wasn’t completely sure of where the speech was going, and I was working it out in real time in front of them. And if I may indulge myself, I’m reminded of how Miles Davis’s drummer described how Miles liked to run his band – he wanted them to make mistakes and fix them live onstage, to explode safely with a bit of danger. That’s how I’d like my talks to be. I want to feel a rush, I want there to be a thrill, I want there to be a bit of confusion and I’d like to resolve it. It’s risky because I don’t have absolute certainty about where it’s going, and whether I’ll pull off the thing that I’m hoping to do, but that bit of danger is also what charges the whole endeavor with meaning. Someone told me that my speech felt like a standup set even though I wasn’t technically doing comedy – and people often laughed, in a good way. I can get a crowd engaged because I get them involved in the puzzle that I’m working on. I’m not doing some rehearsed lecture at them, they could watch a youtube video if they wanted that. I’m inviting them to think with me.

funnily thing about youtube video – even my youtube videos are things that my viewers tell me they enjoy precisely because of the “figure-it-out-as-you-go performance art”.

resonance over polish?

halfway while thinking about this essay it occurred to me that a “clearer” title would be “resonance over polish”. That’s an easier thing to agree with. Polish should “obviously” be the final layer in a creative process. There is little value in adding polish before you need it. It will often limit your process and experimentation and have you stuck in a stage that you might not want to be stuck at. This is why designers often say things like, when you’re sharing wireframes and sketches with people, keep those sketches sketchy so that the form of the presentation itself conveys to the audience that it is a work-in-progress, so that they feel more confident in making suggested changes and so on. This is a variable you can control. If you want more deep-structural feedback, keep things ‘flimsy’. If you turn the polish knob, you will get a different kind of feedback. People will assume, correctly or otherwise, that you’re not going to make massive structural overhauls to your work, and the class of comments you’ll get would be different. (Different how exactly?)

but no I decided that I want to stick with resonance over coherence. we can leave things unpolished to deter the shine-seekers. that’s fine. that’s easy. resonance vs coherence is a harder thing to grapple with, and it will divide more people. because incoherence is “obviously bad” in a way that “unpolished” isn’t necessarily.

✱

At some point in this essay I’ll talk about what I mean by each of those things. Because from some perspectives, they can mean the same thing. It might be as simple as “intelligible” or even more vaguely “good”. What does it mean when we describe something as “well-written”? Different people mean different things. “It resonated with me”, “it makes a lot of sense”, “it’s so clear”.

When I want to discuss words, I often like to dive into the etymologies of those words. In this case, resonance and coherence are both latin-origin words. Resonance basically means “to sound again, sound back, echo”, while “Coherence roughly means “to stick together”. Think of “cohere” in relation to “adhere”, “adhesive”. (not relevant?)

I do some of my best writing while on my phone, pacing around my kitchen and living room. Right now I’m not doing that, right now I’m seated at my desk, my hair still wet from a shower, I’m trying to capture lightning in a bottle and hopefully hit publish at the end of it. i’m hoping for resonance…

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