Week 18: Writing Process Updates

This project is motivated by trying to cultivate a writing practice to help make me a sharper thinker. Setting aside time each week to write in a way that is understandable to others helps tighten my ideas. It is also motivated by a future where I have developed a body of work that I can refer back to and which can be shared with others.

Four months into the year, I have published more writing about novel ideas than in any previous year. But I also have struggled to consistently publish pieces. The pieces I have been publishing are quite long, taking a lot of time to complete. Finishing a piece every week requires spending a sizable amount of time working over the weekend. As my weekends have started being filled with other activities, I have struggled to continue publishing pieces. Now feels like a good opportunity to take stock of how this project is going and to make any adjustments that feel necessary.

The most successful part of this project has been my how I am developing ideas. I have notes and notes filled with topics that I want to explore more deeply through writing. Most of my ideas are sparked away from the laptop when I am reading, on a walk or listening to a podcast. Having one place where I deposit all of these ideas has given me the ability to see themes in my thinking.

Turning those sparks, which are normally a few sentence fragments, into a published piece has still been quite difficult. As I begin writing the scope of what I want to discuss ballons. Pieces with a large scope are difficult to organize in a coherent manner. The larger the piece, the more editing and revising that is necessary.

For me to maintain a consistent writing practice, I have to derive joy from the practice rather than seeing it as a task that I force myself to do because it is good for me. I aspire for writing to feel the same as reading fiction on my kindle. A relaxing activity that gives me more energy than I had when I started. There are three aspects of the writing process where some mental adjustment could help make it a more joyful activity.

Scope

As I begin expanding on an idea, I discover places where my thinking feels incomplete. Since those areas are connected to what I am writing about, it feels like they have to be addressed. That the piece would be insufficient if I did not incorporate them. This scope creep makes sense if my goal is to publish complete airtight arguments. But that would be impossible to do on a weekly basis. My writing practice is instead focused on creating a space to explore the intricacies of an idea in more depth. Rather than writing about a topic once and moving on, I want there to be repetition in my writing. Repetition means I am returning to the same themes and building depth over time. Rather than each piece being a standalone, the body of work I am developing is defined by all the different pieces coming together.

Decreasing the scope of each piece is also important because the longer a piece, the more that is asked of the reader. When I am reading sometimes I get stuck reading the same sentences over and over because my mind was wandered. Good writing does not ask the reader to force themselves to pay attention. It keeps the user’s attention by simulating them. One way to keep a users attention is by removing excess and focusing on brevity.

Moving forward I am going to keep each piece a lot shorter. While writing I am going to cut anything that feels extra. If an idea feels really important I will return to it in a later piece.

Structure

When I begin writing, there is no structure or formula that I follow. I write down any ideas which seem to be connected. Once I start putting those ideas into paragraphs I re-organize them into a sequence mostly by intuition. I do not have tactics for determining the structure of each piece. This lack of process makes writing difficult since it forces me to regularly think about what sequencing makes the most sense. It also probably leads to a worse end product because I am not using any principles to organize my thinking.

Hanif Abdurraqib, one of my favorite writers, describes his process as moving through the following progression:

1. What do I not know but am curious about?
2. What did I just find out?
3. How can I make this exciting to someone else?

He uses this progression to formulate what each piece is going to be about. Every piece starts with something he wants to learn more about. He then has to put those learnings into a form that would be exciting to someone else. Having this process provides concrete steps that need to be taken with every creation.

It could be helpful for my creative process to have some defined steps similar Hanif’s. Looking back at the pieces I have written the following progression could make sense:

1. What is an observation about something that I care about?
2. Why might this observed phenomena be happening?
3. What would a world look like if this observation were different?

If I had applied that progression to this piece it might look like the following:

1. Observation : I am motivated to write regularly, but I find it really difficult to do so consistently
2. Why: I find writing difficult because I try to write too much and have no structure in mind when I start creating
3. Difference: Decreasing the scope of each writing piece and having a more defined process could make writing easier.

For future pieces I am going to try using this structure to formulate my ideas. I will put this small summary at the beginning of each piece.

Audience

One tactic for making hard things easier is to use social accountability and community. Waking up at 6am to work out in college was always accomplished because I knew all my teammates were going to be at the gym as well. It feels more overwhelming and isolating to do things alone.

When I bring up my motivations for writing, I mainly discuss it as something that I am doing for myself. While one of the primary audiences of each piece is myself, it also feels important to acknowledge that ideally writing would be a way to connect with others. I am putting these ideas in a form that others can digest, because I want feedback.

I have found that having a particular audience in mind is a critical aspect of creating good work. When I create a presentation, it is helpful to understand what context my audience is coming in with. At work, my presentations look very different if I am presenting to my team, the entire engineering organization or the entire company. For this writing project I have neglected to pick a specific audience that I am writing for.

Moving forward I am going to imagine that I am writing these pieces for my close friends. I am writing these pieces because I want their feedback, wanting to hear how their experiences are similar or different from my own to my . Inspired by RCFs I am thinking of referring to my writing pieces as VGCs (Vibe Generalization Checks). I am writing to check if the vibe that I am feeling generalizes to others. Going forward I am going to send out each piece as an email.