I’ve spent a lot of the past two years thinking about how to do these substack essays. Recently, I was getting so frustrated with the overwhelming, increasing volume of my drafts that I decided to start tweeting about the drafts. I’ve now done 6 threads like this, each quoting the previous one. I knew right away from the first one I did that this is the way. This is what was missing from my process. And this is what is going to lead me to “the promised land” (which of course isn’t a final end-state but a way of being. The Kingdom of God is within you, etc). And I was feeling the crackles from the first, but the BOOM just hit in the most recent one. It hit me that I have been subconsciously trying to write essays that provide people with answers, when really I want to be providing people– and myself, most of all, with contemplation.

I circled around this in an earlier essay, The Tavern and the Temple– rereading it now, let’s do a quick overview: I always gotta be writing somewhere, a part of me starts to dry up if I’m not writing. I’ve written a lot on Twitter (the tavern), which has been great, but I’ve been feeling like there’s an itch I haven’t scratched, which is writing essays (the temple). I then spend most of the rest of the essay talking about the limitations of the tavern, my frustrations with the tavern, which might be summarized by the following line: “there are thoughts that I can’t hear myself think on Twitter, and if I go too long without hearing those thoughts I start to feel alienated from myself”.

What’s funny is noticing that I didn’t actually spend a lot of time or effort articulating what the temple looks like. I do say “I want a sacred temple-library to quietly reflect in”, which is correct… and also not what I’ve been doing! This is the beautiful, amazing, hilarious, incredible thing that happens for me with my writing, which I think is one of the reasons why I write so much.

;;;

What did I really fucken wanna say here lmao. did I want to contemplate contemplation? that sounds wanky. no the point is to get myself out of the old frame of trying to write proper essays, and instead move into writing contemplative stuff. what’s some stuff i’d like to contemplate? I was talking with my wife about how I still don’t feel like I’ve properly transitioned from hobbyist to professional. Yeah that’s the stuff I want to think about. I love that the word “amateur” is rooted in amare, to love. And the word hobby is had to do with like, tiny toy horses, activities that didn’t go anywhere. Doing something just because you like it.

And here there’s an interesting tension, isn’t it? Because I’m talking about being contemplative, which feels like a hobbyist thing to do. But I want to take my stuff seriously. I don’t want to be utilitarian in a way that’s dry, drab, boring, tedious, superficial. I want depth. I want substance. I want to improve language just by using it. I want to be a word-artist. I don’t want to lose the love of the amateur. But I want to take my work more seriously, without taking myself too seriously.

The followup questions reveal themselves: what does taking your work more seriously look like? One thing that came up for me is “get physically fit, because a professional doesn’t let their health be a bottleneck”. So I’ve been working out, and that’s been going well so far. Another thing that came up is, “you should be making regular dents in the things you say you care about”, and the twitter threads of essay drafts are scratching that itch for me. Maybe I should experiment with a publishing schedule for a while.

I can fantasize about bigger changes that are harder to make. My wife and I plan to move to a new home sometime soon-ish, that’s going to be a big project, so it really doesn’t make sense to make big costly changes to my own setup at home. But what I know I will be doing in my new home is designing a much more deliberate home office, with a whiteboard for thinking. And I’ll be printing out my drafts and ideas more often so I can go over them with a red pen.

What else does going pro entail? Well I could be thinking more about how to spend money that helps me do my work better. I’ve bought more books than I otherwise would, because these aren’t just for personal pleasure, but they are of professional interest. There are things that I want to research for my writing. Those are clearly work expenses! In my ideal state I think I might even like to have separate libraries entirely.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is being more deliberate about my media consumption. Again I’ve always been a sort of amateur-hobbyist media theorist…

abandoned