“social mistake i used to make a lot was, always engaging with everyone the way I wanted to be engaged with, which was to be taken seriously in a very particular way. turns out a lot of people just* be saying shit**, without necessarily like, putting heavy significance*** about it”
I initially typed the above out as a tweet, but I quickly got the sense that it’s too complicated to manage. the second sentence in particular has paragraphs worth of caveats, and there are all these implications that I don’t particularly intend, and by the time I address all of that I will end up with a completely different set of words.
and then I found myself quickly thinking, wait, that’s a great sign that it should be an essay! and the moment I have THIS thought – “great sign it should be an essay”, another part of my mind sets off on a separate tangent of “ohhhh it’ll be so good to get into like, how some thoughts are better for tweeting and some thoughts are better for writing essays, and like the creative challenge of managing both at the same time…” and I started to get really tired.
the above 3 paragraphs are an interim state. the 3rd paragraph I might end up spinning off into a separate essay entirely. I have another essay in a different window that I initially started on today, and I’m currently negotiating with myself internally about whether I should go back and try and finish that one first, or if I should put that on pause and do this one.
this is a screenshot of my creative process. i am always working through things in my mind like this. layers upon layers. if you sometimes see me write something surprisingly clear, simple, useful, etc, that’s downstream of all of this wrangling. I suppose at some level it must be like how I find it astounding that illustrators are able to sketch a human face beautifully, or draw the scene of a street effortlessly. it’s because they’ve worked through all the wrong interpretations, all the wrong moves. once you understand that stuff and you brush it out of the way, you almost can’t help but do the right things.
all of this is a game that I am playing with myself. when I play it well, it is absolutely exhilarating.
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(2023-2024?) I have a lot of internal conflicts. Doesn’t everyone? Right now I’m thinking about how I’m conflicted about what I’m capable of. My abilities seem quite unpredictable. Sometimes I can get a ton of good writing done, on a whim, in a single day. Sometimes I spend weeks trying to write, and nothing seems to hold together properly. What is the truth of the underlying dynamic here? Is it “random”? I don’t think so, though it can look and feel random “from the outside” – and even I can feel like a stranger to myself when I witness my own creative process sometimes. It’s conceivable to me that an experienced observer might be able to discern things about me that I can’t discern by myself. Historically though I haven’t had nearly as much exposure to skilled observers as I’d like. I believe I have a reasonably good grasp of when people make good observations vs poor ones that mostly reveal their own biases and assumptions and say very little about me. The few times people have made good observations, I tend to become fast friends with them, on the basis of our shared understanding.
Lets wind back a little. What is the truth of the underlying dynamic of my creative process? What do I even know about my creative process? Let’s sketch out some details.
I know that it’s fairly easy for me to come up with ideas. I have loads of ideas. Arguably too many ideas. I’m currently ignoring all of them, because if I start spending time around my ideas I suspect I’ll get swept up into a particular kind of frenzied stupor, and get nothing done – nothing tangible, at least. A case could be made that being in a blurry daze in the midst of all of my ideas, is actually an important part of my creative process that I don’t appreciate enough because it doesn’t look like it’s doing anything. I may be imposing some unnecessary seeing-like-a-state authoritarian-tyranny on myself.
If you asked me “what are your ideas”, my instinct is to bring you to my junkyard of notes, which are overflowing with hundreds of drafts and proto-drafts. Some of them are as short as a phrase like “therapycoded invalidation”, “plaintext literacy”, “advanced stupid”, “artful incompleteness”. There are some even shorter commonplace phrases that I know I want to write about, like “eroticism”, “humility”, “stress”, “talismans”, “divinity”, “consecration”. And there are some strong titles like “in other words”, where I already know I want to write loads of things about all of my thoughts about language, vocabulary, grammar, meaning.
A bunch of my essay drafts start out as tweets that don’t seem quite right. I tend to open up twitter subconsciously with a thought ready to go – I’m not even “consciously thinking” about it. I think a lot of what I enjoy about posting to twitter is how it feels like Flow for me. I just fired off a couple of tweets while writing this, which is a thing that I notice happens almost every time I’m working on an essay. So in a sense, I could say that working on essays produces tweets and working on tweets produces essays. That’s what it looks like. But is that what’s actually happening? I think not quite. I think I’m just thinking out loud, and some thoughts “want” to be in certain containers and not others. Like how some clothes “want” to go with others. You can get as animist about this as you want. Do the items actually spark joy intrinsically? I don’t know. Probably not. Is it “all in my head”? I don’t know. Probably not. The tickle is not in the feather. Perception is a collaborative act between the perceiver and the perceived.
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