- I seem to have forgotten how to write longform. That statement seems unlikely to be true in the absolutist sense. But it feels true somewhat, and that feeling to me is a sign that there’s something true in there. I have not entirely forgotten how to write longform, but I have ‘gotten rusty’, or ‘lost my touch’. I have similar experiences when I pick up a guitar or go for a run after months of inactivity. Hypothetically I imagine that ‘getting back into’ writing longform should be easier than guitar (because your fingertips hurt again after you’ve lost your callouses) or running (because your muscles have atrophied, joints and ligaments etc have gotten stiff, cardiovascular system has lost efficiency). But now I’m wondering what exactly is lost, when you haven’t written longform for a long time?
- A thing that’s funny to me is how often it’s necessary to practice the precise thing that you want to get good at, in order to get good at it. In 2012 I started a writing project to write a million words in 1000 sets of 1000 words. I call these ‘wordvomits’, since they’re written in a rapidfire stream-of-consciousness way, with no editing. I’ve published 864/1000 of these so far, and I’m really glad I did. They’ve definitely contributed substantially to my eloquence. But because these are stream-of-consciousness essays, they do very little to help me structure my writing. I used to do structured writing for work from 2013-2018, but I rarely bothered to do it afterwards.
- As I get here I find myself with a couple of thoughts – one is that i’ve long had a personal distaste for structure in general, which I know is something like a childhood aversion to schedules and calendars and routines, which is something I’ve had to unlearn, and will maybe spend the rest of my life unlearning. The other is that I’m reminded of when I was passing time by watching people assemble large jigsaw puzzles on youtube, and observing how practically all of them use ‘staging areas’, like a piece of cardboard on which they could assemble some subset of the puzzle, undistracted by the larger puzzle. This fits a more general pattern of ‘partitioning’– which i’m now reminded that I also had to do when working on my book Introspect. In my experience, it’s not really possible to freestyle a 300-page book without introducing some semblance of partitioning. You work on one chapter at a time, or one section at a time, and so on. There were many days when I woke up to work on my book, tried to freestyle around it, and basically made no progress.
- I did not have a plan in mind when I started writing this essay, but it’s evident that it’s becoming an essay about scaffolding, partitioning, structure. I’m writing this directly in the Substack interface. I’m using bullet points as a way to structure my thoughts so that I can revisit them. A part of me feels like it’s silly, but another part of me notes more strongly that I seem to be in a better place with this particular essay, with its bullets, than I typically end up when I freestyle and meander all over the place. Maybe it’s possible that if I use a bullet structure as scaffolding for a few essays, I’ll then be able to freestyle more artfully without them. But in the meantime, my choice is between “bullet-partitioned essays that actually get published vs freeform drafts that meander into unmanageable chaos”, and at this point in my journey (having published far fewer essays than I’d like to believe that I’m capable of), that’s a really easy choice. Bullet-scaffolded essays it is.
- One of my subconscious deals with myself about these essays is that if I’m going to publish them, they should be worth sharing, and I have a bunch of ideas about what makes an essay worth sharing. In The Temple and the Tavern I talked about contemplation. In A Matryoshka of Possibilities I talked about going through trapdoors. I like to try asking questions- feeling around until I get to something that feels resonant, and then answer that. What are the questions that could really hit for me right now? One is, why have I been averse to structure for so long, and is it possible that I might someday truly be free of that aversion entirely? Let’s put a pin in that and try for a few other questions as well. Why do I meander so much? That feels fairly straightforward… I tend to be dissatisfied easily, get bored easily, I’m always curious to know if there’s something else interesting next door, I’m always looking for cool connections between disparate things.
- I was thinking in the shower earlier that I’ve always aspired to be a mischievous trickster with a heart of gold, and that I believed in the primacy of ideas, of cleverness, of one excellent turn of phrase, of one good tweet that changes everything. I still believe that those things are valuable, but I’ve since come to simultaneously value execution, persistence, courage, heart. I think I first properly watched the Rocky movies around 2015 or so, when I had been a working adult with a mortgage for a couple of years and life felt like it was beating me down with its relentlessness. When I was a younger kid I’m not sure I’d have cared very much about Rocky, I’d might have written him off as a dumb jock, a meathead, how uncouth it is to aspire to be a pugilist. I was more a fan of Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes, and Kevin from Home Alone, and Rocky was loosely- if you squint your eyes and assume uncharitably– kinda like the sort of person who would bully the Calvins and Kevins of the world. But turns out Rocky is good-hearted too, and after a couple of years in the meat-grinder of being a salaryman, I found myself receptive to admiring his struggle. Rocky’s triumph isn’t even that he wins the boxing match. He doesn’t! He loses! His triumph is that he goes the distance.
- When I take a step back, it’s kind of funny that ‘I’ve always had a problem with structure.’ After all, I love Twitter, and Twitter is a kind of structured writing. Tweets are containerized thoughts. Initially the container was 140 characters, then 280. Now you can do longer tweets, and some people do things like ‘screenshot essays’, but the significant thing is that the culture of Twitter is that it’s where you post short, bite-sized, containerized thoughts. This is something that the people who run social media platforms rarely seem to appreciate. (footnote:) People don’t want to read essays on Twitter, much like how they don’t want to watch feature-length movies on TikTok. The desired user experience is to encounter lots of different thoughts. If you want to build an audience online, Twitter and TikTok are good places to be noticed, to build some interest, but if you want people to engage with substance, it’s probably best to write essays and make longform videos, podcast episodes and so on. Or maybe there’s a logic to violating user experience that I’m not appreciating.
- But that’s the interesting thing.
- Anyway. I think part of my struggle thus far has been that I’ve been trying really hard to make my essays different than my Twitter. Straining and exerting, which basically never leads to good writing. Looking back, I see it as a lack of faith, or an overly intellectual, disembodied approach… i’ve been through this cycle multiple times now. it happened while i was working on Introspect…
- …
- I took a very long pause between the previous bullets and this one… i’m thinking I should include stuff about containers…
- 8sept2024 I had an invigorating 3-hour-long conversation with a friend over the phone yesterday. It had been almost 4 years since our last long conversation, and it was so obvious to both of us that we would both be better off if the intervals between our chats was closer to every 4 months. I want to think out loud about it for a while, I think to persuade myself to make time to talk with more of my friends more often. —— A good 1-1 conversation is a two-person container for thinking and feeling. Between old friends, it’s a high-trust context where you’re both allowed to experiment with your ideas, to share your understandings, and to comment on each other’s perspectives. —— Every level of it can be interesting. We can find that we interpret the same words to have different meanings to varying degrees. We can find that some of our utterances are much more compelling to the other person than the rest of them. We can ask, “are you familiar with <topic>”, and if it turns out that they’re not, we can switch to another frame of reference. —— In another conversation with another dear friend a few days ago, she talked about her frustrations with having been so hyperfocused on a particular project for many months. I empathized, and I also shared that I was amused to hear it, because I remember when I was frustrated with my own hyperfocused work on my last book, but then I remember publishing that book and then, after a period of relief, I began to feel frustration with not having any sort of clear focus about what I was doing. For a while, it was delightful to wander around, trying random things. But I eventually came to crave focus again. We both laughed about it, and we came to the idea that maybe it’s like being in the sun. When you’ve been indoors for a long time, or if it’s been winter, the sun can feel like a blessing, manna from the gods. But it’s also possible to spend so much time in the sun that you get burnt. It’s possible to live somewhere that’s so hot for so long, you crave the respite of a cold shower, of the cool indoors, and even of being in a dark place. —— It seems plausible that everything is like this to us, maybe because of our biological, ecological nature as human beings. You can have too much chocolate.
- “Man, it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” – this is less a standalone and more of a subpost, i think particularly in structures. lady gaga took a while to get comfortable presenting herself as just herself. mile davis said man sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself. lemmy took a while to find his signature look. this essay can work for me if i make it less about myself and more about interesting artists’ trajectories over the years.