• Writing for me is like breathing. I mean this in the sense that I can do it on purpose if I want, but most of the time it’s something that happens by itself, and I almost don’t even notice it. A lot of my best writing happens without much involvement from me.
• A thing that happens, then, for me as a writer, is that I accumulate drafts. Many of my drafts simply accumulate by themselves. Some of them are things that I’ve deliberately tried to write. I’m reminded of Borges and I, where the author describes a schism within himself, and ends a passage with “I do not know which of us has written this page”.
• I relate to that, so much. To some people this might seem almost like mental illness, which is something we can get into a MASSIVE SIDENOTE about, re: coherent selves… oh shit I just remembered that I have an existing substack about coherence! Aw yeah, it’s all coming together.
• And it’s beginning to dawn on me that maybe this partially explains why I have such a tedious, fraught relationship with my drafts. What right do I have to mess with stuff that someone else made? But here we get to some interesting thoughts about

I have fond memories of times I used to write. Right now it’s 755am on a Sunday morning – it’s the day of my wedding anniversary, I’m awake because my son, all of 7 weeks old, was crying and needed a diaper change. Now he’s back asleep in his crib with a face of quiet bliss, and I’m in bed with my “secondary laptop” – something that I would’ve considered great riches a decade ago.

I’ve written tens of thousands of tweets on my phone pacing a very narrow stretch of space between my living room and kitchen. The phones changed over the years, but the behavior pattern remained the same. Although that too will change, maybe next year, when we move to a new home, closer to where we grew up, in the eastern part of Singapore.

✱

writing on commutes

From 2013 to 2018, I used to write diligently on my phone on my commutes. I’d write both on the way to work, and on the way back home from work, sometimes squished and sandwiched between other tired office workers on the trains. This was a very stable pattern of behavior for me, which I was very proud of, and grateful to myself for. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s one of the primary ways in which I rebuilt trust in myself after my more tumultuous teenage years, when I felt like I was always struggling to stay afloat, thrashing about just to keep up with the vagaries of everyday life.

Over those ~5 years, I believe I wrote about 700,000 words, most of which I published on visakanv.com/1000/, aka 1000wordvomits – a project I had started a little earlier in Dec 2012 with the simple goal of writing a million words. The idea was simple, too: I want to be a good writer. You get good at writing by writing. Preferably a lot. Therefore, let’s start a writing project with the primary purpose of writing a lot. And write a lot, I did. As of right now, in Jul 2023, I’ve written over 832,000 words on that one blog. And that’s without taking into account all of the writing I do everywhere else all the time, from “regular” blogposts to twitter threads and forum posts and comments and text messages and so on. I now feel comfortable estimating that I’ve probably written over 2 million words in total. And I’d like my lifetime total to be something in the ballpark of say Isaac Asimov’s published 7.5 million. (I’m guessing he must’ve written at least twice that amount.

My last day of salaried work was in June 2018, after which I’ve basically not had a “proper” job since. I published my first ebook Friendly Ambitious Nerd in February 2020, when the covid pandemic hit and I then spent the next 2 years working on my second ebook, Introspect. I’m very glad that I did both of those things. Working on those projects made me a substantially better writer in every sense.

But what has been striking for me is that I haven’t quite been able to recreate the writing habit that I had from 2013-2018. And I’d like to understand this better. Why? Well- right now, I’m in a headspace where, I believe that one of the best things I could do with my time and energy, is write a bunch of essays. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve read at least some of my other Substack essays too, so you’d know that I have been doing this a bunch.

One other big thing that changed apart from my commutes was that I started tweeting a lot. I’ve had a Twitter account for a pretty long time – since October 2008, which was almost 15 year ago. For the first few years I tweeted fairly sporadically, mainly just to my local friends in Singapore. (If you look up some of my older tweets from before ~2016, you’ll notice that I often tweeted in Singlish.) In April 2016, I noticed one of my friends was making Twitter threads where he’d update older threads that he’d written. I asked him how he did it, and he taught me the magic of Twitter search. This completely changed the game for me, and I began to write the elaborate, intricate web of Twitter threads that I’m now probably best known for.

After I left my job, my top personal priority – after spending a bunch of time decompressing, lounging around playing video games and eating junk food – was to do as much personal creative writing as I could. I quickly found Twitter to be the most exciting place to be, in large part because of the quoting-and-threading dynamic, and also in large part because of the quality of conversation I had stumbled into. (It’s impossible to paint a perfect picture of what was happening, because many different things were happening all at once, but I would say that I found a lot of my favorite people from hanging out in the replies of Venkatesh Rao, who isn’t active on Twitter much anymore.

✱;

My wife bought me my first smartphone for Valentine’s Day- it was a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and I remember at the time I used to write primarily in Evernote. At some point I got another phone, I think it was a Note 4, and then subsequently I got my first iPhone. At that point I think I switched to writing in my iOS Notes app. I didn’t really care what app I did my writing in. I just wanted to do as much writing for myself as I possibly could. And over those ~5…… /abandoned

✱

It’s 524am on a Sunday morning, I slept a few hours before waking up and now I feel compelled to write about the history of my writing. I wanted to start by writing about my commutes from 2013–2018, though maybe we should go back further than that.

Around 2005 when I was still in secondary school, I remember going to the school library to use the computer during break times. I remember excitedly logging on to Diary-X – a now defunct blogging platform – and sitting down and writing away, and feeling quite proud of myself while I did it. What was I even writing about as a 14 year old? Sadly most of that writing is lost, but if I remember correctly, I would just… write about my day. My feelings. I’d comment on the news. I’d talk about hanging out with my friends. It was very stream-of-consciousness, not too dissimilar from how lots of people wrote Facebook statuses around 2010 or so, maybe. Looking back from my present vantage point, it’s interesting and revealing to me that that was a thing I chose to do. There was no financial reward. There was hardly any “status” reward. I think it’s fair to say that I did it because I liked doing it.

There are other little artifacts. From earlier still, when I was about 10 years old, I used to play Neopets, which was – and seemingly still is – a ‘virtual pets website’. You could have a pet or several, and you could have a shop, you could play games, earn ‘Neopoints’, which was the in-game currency. There was a stock market, which I had no interest in, even though supposedly it was one of the best ways to make lots of Neopoints in a short amount of time. There was a ‘local paper’ called The Neopian times, and I excitedly wrote a submission for it:

What’s fascinating for me reading this again as a 32 year old is the degree to which I was preempting what other people might think or say. “Some people will say…” is evidence of social awareness that I’m not sure I would have claimed to have had at 10 years old, if I didn’t see evidence of it.

I got a little toy trophy for writing for the Neopian Times – a jpg of a little gold quill:

It meant a lot to me at the time! Looking back, it’s all so arbitrary, and yet something about it was really meaningful.

I used to write a lot on Quora. I discovered it in 2012 – I think the first thing I read on it was something someone shared on Facebook about… trophy wives?

✱

Still figuring it out: Prior to this, I’ve written and published 16 substack essays. I’m still figuring out what I’m really doing with these. Initially I was hoping to do a set of really polished, “timeless” essays, but it’s become clear that I was underestimating how much work that would take, and how long it would take me. I remain committed to writing those essays in the long-term, but in the short-term I think it would be wise for me to figure out other things I can do along the way. For a bunch of reasons – audience-building is one, but also I just want to… keep the engine warm, continually be writing, continually be interacting with people. The parable of the pottery class comes to mind again – I do believe that I’m likelier to get good at writing essays by writing a lot of them, than by agonizing over a handful of them. I did also underestimate how much getting good at doing Twitter threads would help me when it comes to writing essays – it did help a lot when it comes to clarifying my thinking, but a longform piece of writing is a fundamentally different creature than a Twitter thread, which I tried to express somewhat in The Tavern and The Temple.

One big question for creatives of all kinds is: do I go heads down and work long-term, or do I try to produce a little bit at a regular cadence? There are pros and cons to each. I think often about how Lin-Manuel Miranda spent 7 straight years working on Hamilton, and how Carl Jung spent 16 years on The Red Book. These are big bets and I’m not sure that I’m comfortable making such big bets. I’m sure Jung was doing other things while working on the Red Book, I’m not so sure about Lin-Manuel.

What is a proper essay? This current piece is more of an “update” than a “proper essay”. I’m not sure if I’ve precisely defined what a “proper essay” is to me, though if you’ve read a bunch of the preceding essays you might get a sense. But let’s give it a quick try. A “proper essay” for me is something that makes a substantial dent in a problem. It raises some interesting questions in interesting ways. It doesn’t necessarily have to give final answers to those questions, but it offers fresh ways of seeing. Fresh doesn’t necessarily mean “novel” or “original” in an absolute sense – in fact I’m confident that some of the freshest material any of us could put out today would be to simply translate old material from writers past, into natural, contemporary language. // The author might not necessarily even know what the problem is that they’re trying to make a dent in. They might just be trying to describe something properly. “Just describe things bro” is a placeholder title I have for an essay draft which I haven’t made a lot of progress on, and as I write this I find myself inwardly giggling at the recursiveness of it all, and how it can be simultaneously silly, profound, frustrating and tremendous all at once.

Overviews: One of the things I want to do is what I’ll call “overviews”. It would be more intuitive to people if I call them reviews, but it annoys me that reviews in popular parlance have often come to mean, “is this book/movie/album good or bad?” I find this to be a very… simplistic, binary way of thinking about things, which I feel strips a lot of the interestingness out of anything. Sometimes I can have a very interesting experience watching a “bad” movie, and I’d like to share my thoughts and feelings about my experience. I don’t necessarily want to condense a book into a set of “takeaways”, I find that sort of impatience to be counterproductive. Here’s a random anecdote someone shared with me about swimming: when she was a competitive swimmer she used to avoid breathing on her left because it felt unnatural and it slowed her down. Now that she’s a middle-aged mom, she’s no longer worried about speed, and so she taught herself to breathe properly, and now she’s faster for it. I feel that this “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” dynamic applies in all sorts of domains, including media appreciation. I want to select for an audience that believes that it’s worthwhile taking the time to properly savor things. This does also apply I believe to writing. I want to be publishing regularly, but I also want to take my time with things. There are a few ways of navigating this challenge. I’ve decided that I want to publish my notes on 0xSB.substack.com. I think. I’m not 100% certain. But I do have a lot of notes that are languishing in my drafts that I’d like to publish somewhere that isn’t any of my existing channels.

I could talk a bunch about my whiteboard. I’ve had several whiteboards in my house for years now, I bought 3 of them when I was last really excited about them, and for a while before I got a TV in my living room, I had two big whiteboards that I would fill with thoughts. I put one in my bedroom. I suppose what’s interesting is that I don’t use them all the time, and sometimes I find myself thinking “I oughta use my whiteboards more”. But in practice what usually actually happens is that once in a rare while – sometimes once every 2 years or so – there’s a moment late at night where I suddenly find myself just bursting with thoughts in every direction, and then I spill it all out onto my whiteboards, and take photos of them to capture them.

abandoned