I set myself a challenge, in parallel to the Inkhaven Residency, to publish a post every day of November. I’ve been calling it “inkdiehaven”, a mashup of “indie” and “inkhaven”. A few other people are doing it too I think.
It’s maybe not the optimal way to get people to read my posts in the short-term, since they’re already long, but it does feel like a good way to kind of clean out the pipes.
“The mind is like an engine—it stops working if it has no exhaust” — source I can’t be bothered finding rn
I have a LOT of drafts. This has been true of me for a long time. Someone I talked to recently asked me how long I’d been blogging and I paused and considered that my first blog (on blogspot) goes back to when I was ~13. So 20 years. I am a blogger. I also sometimes did “1 post a day” challenges for that blog, although sometimes it’d just be a napkin sketch or a single tweet-length musing. Back then I didn’t have oodles of drafts.
But as I started writing longer stuff, it became more common for something to get stuck on the way out for whatever reason.
Sometimes I get stuck on wanting a better example, or a better name for the phenomenon, sometimes a draft becomes 6000 words long and I still haven’t said everything, so I back up and I realize that the first 2000 words are just a tangent of a simple premise I wanted to state before getting into the meat of things, so I peel them off but by the time I’ve edited that it’s 3000 words. Conversations are Alive was this for Coalitions Between are made by Coalitions Within and How my liberating insight became a new ruling coalition, which also each grew from 2000 to 3000 words as I edited them. The “I can tell for myself” sequence likewise began as a single piece intending mostly to get to the final point, whose preamble got way too unwieldy.
Sometimes it’s blocked on some timing thing, where eg I don’t want to publish other posts about my mating dance/courtship ideas while I don’t have a version of the course available for sale.
Sometimes it’s more like pure doubt, like I just stare at my idea and go “does this even make any sense?”
One of the most tragic and frustrating things is when my way of thinking/seeing moves on before I get things published. I wrote a blog post called Taking myself seriously back in 2016, which was intended to be the first of a series of like 6 posts on “Excellence Mindset vs Coasting Mindset”, got blocked on how to format the table for post 2 which would lay out the distinction, and by the time I troubleshooted that I had moved on from the frame. But I had posts 3-6 mostly drafted! That basically nobody has read, and that I’m probably not even that proud of anymore.
And I’m right now in the midst of a major transition in how I think/see… and I think that’s one of the things that’s urging me to flush these draft ideas before they become too stale to just say as clearly. I want to leave these breadcrumbs for people. I aim, for deeply principled reasons, to be the kind of person who can still empathize with my previous viewpoints, rather than seeing them as simply misguided, but it’s still nearly impossible to edit drafts from those times, and often the energy isn’t there to bring them to life.
I have tried a lot of strategies to get the drafts moving over the years, including making a giant airtable with some custom css userstyles to create a reasonably-decent article-writing experience IN AIRTABLE (which is basically a glorified spreadsheet/db frontend). I had my drafts in workflowy, probably with some similar weird style magic I would turn on.
I’ve tried having people comment on google docs of drafts, and I’ve tried avoiding letting anybody read my draft until I’m fully ready to ship it as v1, as a way to turn my excitement at sharing the ideas into motivation to write them (this is how I wrote my 21k word ebook, How we get there).
(I’ve been sad, at times, that when I share a gdoc with people I get all these interesting inline comments, but when I share a blog post, I usually get mostly nothing, maybe some tweet-replies or DMs. I so yearn for inline comments on my blog.)
I tried putting my writing in a public roam at intertwingled.blog, so I could have things be in public while half-finished and collecting notes, and where I could thus link between ideas before they’re finished.
I tried showtimes, where I would schedule drafts to go live that were very not-finished, with the idea that getting something out was better than nothing, and that I could always iron out the draft after it went live if I forgot or didn’t have time beforehand.
Few things have worked as well as simply committing to publishing regularly and making it happen, but that also comes at a cost in a kind of rigidity and finding myself trying to drag writing out of myself rather than feeling more like inspired. And yet it also feels good. It has felt amazing to publish so much this week, and to find myself writing something on day 15 and going “ah yes and here I can reference this thing I published on day 8”. So far only 2/15 pieces (3 including this one) were primarily written during November.
It turns out that publishing and writing are different! And writing is very easy for me to find intrinsic motivation to do, but the editing step that often precedes publishing is much more difficult. And… so critical, at times, for actually clarifying the thoughts… but so easy to avoid.
I learn so much from writing, even before publishing (or even when I’m just journalling, not intending to publish). It is such an incredible gift to be able to see my thoughts and rearrange them and have so many of them exist as objects I can manipulate. I resonate with Feynman’s very extended-cognition-vibes comment:
Weiner: Well, the work was done in your head but the record of it is still here.
Feynman: No, it’s not a record, not really, it’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper.
I also learn a lot from editing—from the act of attempting to frame things so that they’ll make sense to a range of people. I’ve noticed I tend towards excessive parentheticals, attempting to forestall edge-case critiques that almost nobody would ever think to make. And every now and then I manage to just remove one of those altogether from the final publication (or turn it into its own post, eg Meta-protocol learning loop which was originally an aside from Open letter: Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam).
And I learn and gain from publishing, from the feeling of having a body of work out there that people can come to know, even though relative to my volume I feel like my writing has not been that widely-popular nor seriously narrowly influential. But it has affected people, and it has created or deepened some of my most meaningful relationships.
Frankly I don’t think I’m that good at writing. I am good at thinking, and understanding things and putting them together. I have a lot to say that is worth saying—I have never lacked for that. And I am good at being earnest and honest. I’d like to become better at writing. I’m almost unsure whether I want it enough to work at it or if I’d rather just keep thinking out loud and seeing what happens.
One inspiration for this latest wave of getting things out is a piece by my friend Tasshin called “what’s the value of a blog post?” which says the following:
Writing a blog post (or creating any content on the internet) is an investment. Visa and others call this “free real estate”: free or cheap to make and publish, but grows in value over time. It has negligible value to start, but if U create abundant content of good quality, each piece of content grows exponentially in value over time, to potentially untold value in the future.
In other words, internet content is an appreciating asset class.
A single blog post may not be worth much, especially immediately. But if U draw it out over time, the value goes up. Moreover, if U make lots of blog posts, if U create a whole interwoven web of content, if U build a corpus—an entire body of work, across multiple platforms, hyperlinked between each other so as to be mutually supportive—the value over time goes way, way, way up.
I resonate with the way my writing has formed a corpus, and long-term nobody will notice or care that these posts all came out in one month, so the important thing is that they got out. In a weird way, also, I feel like simply having the writing in the public sphere feels like it’s a surprisingly large fraction of what matters to me about writing, beyond having anybody read it on any time scale. Or maybe it’s just a large fraction of the value I’m getting, because I’m not solving for distribution that well, at least not in the short-term.
Anyway, now that I’ve gone through my main backlog of nearly-finished unpublished drafts, I’m kind of nervous about how to approach the remaining 2 weeks of my inkdiehaven, where I’ll have to dig deeper into my draft pile, or write more new pieces, or convert twitter threads, or something. Is it time to focus on quality over quantity? I’m really unsure.
One of the things that is very confusing to me is that sometimes I end up spending a lot of time editing my pieces, and it’s not even clear that they’re getting any better than a raw braindump would be. Maybe they’re even ending up overwrought and a single uninterrupted unedited train of thought would actually be clearer. I don’t think this is always true, but sometimes. Maybe even often, in my case.
Do I write more “all in one breath standing on one foot” bullet-point onepagers?
Even with the low bar that those set, I’m still nervous to publish them, thinking that someone might get a bad intro to my ideas and dismiss them.
And yet… I don’t think those posts are even on average worse.
Man, I am going in neurotic loops.
I kind of vaguely imagine it’s for the inkhaven folks, many of whom are new to blogging and might benefit from… something. But would it even help? Why would anybody read this? It feels like mostly noise. An entire >1700 words, “9 minutes read time” as of this paragraph. I certainly would not want someone to spend their time reading this when they could be spending it reading the posts I’ve written that I feel contain original and important contributions to the knowledge of humanity! (the most recent core one being the Coalitions piece, but literally any of the other posts I’ve published are in some sense more worth reading than this one).
And yet… in some sense while yes, one wants to curate a certain quality level for one’s blog, and while the act of speaking something is somewhat saying “this is worth something”… it’s not up to me to decide what’s relevant to other people. Digital paper and ink is basically free. Increase the surface area. Don’t put noise in the middle of a post that’ll ruin someone’s ability to follow it, but: it’s not up to me to decide who should read what of my writing, except to the extent that I (A) want to keep something private or (B) want to suggest a particular piece to a particular person or group.
There’s a kind of faith in the collective relevance realization systems, that I have (although I wish I had more of it—both like, more faith in it, given how it already is, and that I wish it warranted more of my faith) that ideas will find their way to the right people. And now that includes not just friends sharing links or algorithmic recommender engines, but also LLMs who gobble up the entire internet and then remix it for everybody at the perfect moment.
And I’ll admit, even though I sometimes feel like almost nobody reads what I write—and people are maybe even less likely to somehow read it when there’s something new every single day so they can’t keep up—one thing that inspires me about getting all of this up onto the internet in this era is the idea that at least the LLMs will get something from it. In their training, they’ll “read” every single post, multiple times, and pay close attention to attempt to guess every single next word, so that whatever structures are generating my writing are structures they can simulate.
Anyway, it’s feeling good to clear the pipes. I’m feeling a bit dumb that I spent 2h writing this tonight (I intended to spend about 10-15 minutes and write something short) rather than working on one of the pieces that felt important (or sleeping, tbh). But in a way this too is good for the exhaust process—part of the self-cleaning cycle of my blog. The previous one was dropping balms in 2023, and before that Nothing is Behind in 2019, and maybe before that Why I blog in 2015. There’s something here about surrendering to the process.
If you’re reading this, this piece of writing is apparently for you! And it would mean a lot to me if you went and checked out whichever of these titles intrigues you most, from the past 2 weeks, and left a comment on the post (or, if you already read one, you could go leave a comment on that). I often feel like I’m writing into the void, and it’d be nice to hear an echo and get a sense of what my ideas are bouncing off of.
Or leave a comment on this piece (or I suppose just hit reply if you’re getting this by email) and say hi and say something that closes the loop between this dogged blogger and his audience.
I have some hopes that, having gotten out more of my backlog, I might find myself with more space to turn my attention to how to present one of my ideas really well, and to learn how to edit my own writing better or to write more purposefully. But we’ll see. I’ve cleaned out most of my nearly-completed drafts, but I still have uncounted dozens of ideas that haven’t even been drafted yet, and the more I write the more I think of. Wait.. uh-oh.
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
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