In this post I mostly repeat a bunch of stuff I’ve written about in the past about my creative process. It feels necessary for me to retrace this steps so I can get back to the frontier of where I was. Feel free to skim, skip, ignore.
i. routine
These days my night routine is as follows: dinner, and then I bathe my 16mo toddler, then I get him dressed and I rock him to sleep in a rocking chair while playing chess on my phone. Once he’s asleep, I transfer him into his cot, and then I hang out with my wife for a few minutes before I shower and then get into bed and get my laptop out. At this point I hope to get some work done, and ‘work’ is a pretty nebulous thing for me. Sometimes it means working on an essay, which often ends up being an unfinished draft that I set aside for later. Sometimes it means going through my notes and drafts and tidying things up. Oftentimes though I end up spending an hour or two on twitter, or play more chess, or otherwise sorta dick around aimlessly.
This routine strikes me as suboptimal. It’s not too different from just vegetating in front of the television to decompress. Which… if someone else has that routine, I wouldn’t particularly judge them for it, but in my case I can feel it slowly draining me, because I’m not making as much progress as I’d like on the things that matter to me. Do I necessarily have to do this at bedtime? Well- bedtime is one of the most high-potential moments I have, because my kid is asleep. He tends to wake us up in the morning, and most of the day tends to be us reacting to his needs– making sure he’s fed, making sure he takes a nap, bringing him out for a walk and some playground time at some point, and so on.
It feels like most of my past year has been like this. I do enjoy my moments with my son immensely– I spend 2-3hrs almost every afternoon having him nap on me while I’m on my phone, which… strikes part of me as inefficient, but my internal consensus is “before you know it, he’s not gonna wanna nap on you anymore, and you’ll miss this”, and so I’m mostly okay with the trade-off. Though I’m now reaching a point where I’m thinking, okay maybe I should transfer him sooner, or maybe I should take half of the naps, something like that. There are several different paths to a marginally more optimal configuration…
ii. containers
Anyway, what I really wanted to get into here was about the specifics of my writing process. I often find myself choosing to play chess instead– and I now ask myself, why? Because it’s fun and satisfying. I typically play games with 10 minutes on the timer, so a game might take up to 20 minutes, which is quite reminiscent of what I was talking about with the video games of my adolescence in one more turn. Even though I want to be writing, I find the finitude of a timed chess game is less daunting than an unbounded writing session. It feels like I’m choosing between a guaranteed 20 minutes of entertainment, or potentially 2 hours of frustration.
As I write this out, of course, I find myself laughing and thinking “that’s so silly”, because in the context of my own body of work, I am my own editor, and I get to bound my writing sessions. I could timebox it to 20 minutes as well, but I don’t really like the sound or feel of that. There’s a part of me that argues that writing should take as long as it takes. But when I look at the history of my writing practice in the past year, I must concede that the unbounded approach has not been very fruitful. So. If not timeboxing, how should I ‘containerize’ my writing sessions?
Well. I know that the most satisfying thing for me at this current phase of my life would be to write and publish posts on substack, so that’s where my focus should be (as opposed to say, writing more twitter threads, which I am already good at and rather bored of). My grand vision is to write a collection of about 20 beautifully architected essays that, in concert, function as as book about media and perception: ‘Frame Studies’. But I’ve been struggling to manifest that vision, I think in part because my essay-writing chops aren’t up to speed, and in part because I haven’t carved things up properly, and in part because I’m being unrealistic by expecting to write 20 bangers when I’ve barely written one really good essay that I’m really proud of, and it’s not even directly related to Frame Studies.
In a way, all of those issues are the same problem. I could say- in fact I think I’m obligated to say- that I’m clearly framing it wrong. Haha. I need to change my way of thinking entirely, and to look at the whole thing from a different perspective. I can glance over at my twitter corpus and notice that most of my best threads were written quite off-the-cuff, rather than planned or plotted in advance. And I can notice that there are lots of threads that function as ‘practice runs’. And I can reminisce as well on the number of failed attempts I had at writing my books, and how often I had to rewrite them, and how long that took. So rather than try to write 20 Great Essays, it makes more sense for me to attempt to do 200 practice runs, and then see what resonates.
(via drafts: CONTAINERS: therapy as reeducation, helping people conform better. i’ve always bristled at therapy, editors… i just don’t like working with people who can’t figure me out and i don’t like explaining myself to people. sometimes i just fall easily into a great conversation with someone. I prefer to work with those people. So I guess my overarching issue is that I really dislike the search process if figuring out if I’m going to have chemistry with someone via some sort of interview process. I prefer to just play in public and see who shows up to play with me back. )
iii. reconceptualization
ok, so i need to reframe what I’m doing here. what AM I doing here? one of the earliest taglines that came to me while putting this substack together was “over here we surf all the channels at once”. It’s a cool phrase, but what does that look like in practice? It’s not technically possible to actually surf all the channels at once, because that’s overwhelming and discombobulating. Writing is read linearly. I can use lots of hyperlinks to send you in many different directions, but leaning too hard on that is a kind of failure of writing. Done properly, I should be able to stack ‘multiple channels’ in a single piece of writing, without requiring that you click on any hyperlinks to get the point(s). So the less-dramatic phrasing is something like “channel-surfing aggressively” or “changing the channel repeatedly in a way that somehow still creates a coherent experience”. I’ve been straining my mind really hard trying to visualize a beautifully complex form of writing, but it’s really beyond my grasp. Notice the “i. ii. iii.” segmentation format I’m currently using in this post you’re reading right now. I did it in the previous post as well. Part of me feels like it’s a bit of a crutch, but I think… I need to develop some sort of stable, predictable structure first, before I break from it and do something really strange or weird.
A couple of different rabbitholes have lead me to reading about Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It was written in Middle English in the last decades of the 1300s, and it’s a remarkable accomplishment, despite not actually being properly completed. It’s a collection of stories told by a diverse set of characters– including a knight, a miller, a nun, a merchant, a shipman and so on– who are all going on a pilgrimage together. It’s a great framing, particularly because those characters would be unlikely to meet in any other context in medieval England. Chaucer himself was a government official who had to travel extensively for work, which may have influenced the ‘panoramic vision’ of the Tales, according to a TED-Ed video which also describes Chaucer as “seamlessly blending the lofty and the lowly”– love it!!
Anyway– the Canterbury Tales strikes me as a great example of ‘surfing all the channels at once’, or I suppose you could say ‘telling all the stories at once’, and it’s a little ominous that Chaucer never actually finished it. I’m thinking also about Bocaccio’s Decameron, and Scheherazade’s Thousand and One Nights– all these panoramic stories-of-stories that are collections and remixes of older folklore, which are really far beyond what any one person could come up with by themselves. And why even valorize the unnecessary self-limitation of working in isolation? A person can assemble a great work that is ‘merely’ a commentary on a collection of other great works, and that would be a worthwhile thing to do.
I’ve digressed somewhat from my intention with this section. let me try and return to the heart of it. I know I’m capable of writing plentifully, with ease, given the right context. My challenge has been that I have been ‘decontextualized’ in a way. And I need to ‘recontextualize’ or ‘reorient’ myself in relation to my work, in relation to my wider world, and find a way to think and talk/write about things in a way that feels fruitful to me. My “just write good essays bro” directive-to-self has not been working too well, I think because… I have to pause here and really feel for the truth here… it’s because… it’s premature optimization. I cannot get to the heart of interestingness by demanding it. I have to warm things up more generally. So I should change my directive. And in this post itself I have begun to reorient somewhat. I have a daily routine where I try to get some writing done. I’m getting more comfortable with this ‘section-based’ format. So maybe instead of trying to write good essays, I’ll just try to write something like 3-5 good sections per writing session. And I’ll ship a bunch of those as substack posts. And once I get to maybe 300-500 good sections I can start seeing more clearly what the good essays would be. But I don’t even need to think that far ahead. I just need to get moving and keep moving.
iv. working episodically
Earlier here I wrote up a section that I crossed out entirely– I was exploring the idea of “wouldn’t it be nice if I could throw in something from my junkyard of notes in here as a section?”, and I decided that actually no, because it wouldn’t be resonant with the other sections. And I feel good about that, it feels like a decisive path-not-taken in a way that means I’m getting warmer, going where I want to be going.
It’s becoming clearer to me that I would like to develop this “write in sections” form further, and one of the things I look forward to doing is to switch things up more drastically between sections. Like entirely different characters telling entirely different stories in The Canterbury Tales. Or like a dream in Inception being completely different than the dream it’s being dreamed within. My chosen ‘logo’ or ‘icon’ for Frame Studies is ▣, a square within a square, a thing within a thing, ‘nestedness’. Everything exists within a context, and things can be quite startlingly different than the context they are in. I wonder, do I have the time, space and inclination to attempt that right now, in this post? It would feel a little contrived, but maybe being a little contrived on purpose is better than not trying at all. I should do it, just to see how it feels. But I want to try and take a swing at a decent moment. I find myself thinking in chess moves– there are varying degrees of bad moves– inaccuracies, mistakes, blunders– and there good moves, great moves and brilliant moves. I don’t think I will be capable of making a great or brilliant move in this context, but I think I can avoid a bad one.
How would I approach this if I were giving a talk? One approach is to keep rambling to see if anything interesting comes up. Another approach is to recap and review what’s been said so far… routines… containers… reconceptualization… what’s the missing quality? an a-ha momemt? a conclusion? a good tension? when in doubt I think it’s helpful to find a tension and describe it, or find a frustration and introduce it. A strange thing about this post is, at this stage in the post I still don’t know what I’m going to title it, or what graphic I’m going to use as a featured image. Would it be weird to name a post after its final section?
v. satisfaction
As I scroll back up to review what I’ve written, so far, I notice that these sections kinda feel like tweets to me, or longtweets maybe. they each seem to ‘want’ to be self-contained, in a way. and I can work with that. There’s room in that for tinkering and improvement, in a way that I expect to find satisfying. And… isn’t that what I’m really looking for here, in all of this? Satisfaction? What’s the point of doing anything if it isn’t satisfying? And here I know there’s a question of time horizons– some things are satisfying in the short-term but unfulfilling in the long-term, while other things are satisfying in the long-term but frustrating in the short-term. To be reductively simplistic about it, I could say that, for me, good tweets are immediately satisfying but yield the ‘weakest’ long-term satisfaction whereas good books are immediately frustrating to work on but yield far greater long-term satisfaction.