I’ve hinted that I find my writing process less than transparent. I’ve demonstrated that I can get from idea to finished product time after time. That doesn’t mean that I have a clear understanding of how I do so.
Being unhappy with that lack of understanding isn’t a sufficient basis to start laying down a new and improved practice. How would I judge whether an idea was either new or improved?
So, I need to invest some thought into understanding how I get to a product that I am comfortable declaring done and worthy of sharing. I need to reverse engineer a process out of whatever clues I can dig out from the artifacts that I can find.
My inclination is to beat myself up because I know how thin and inscrutable these artifacts and clues are likely to be. I know that I am a sprinter at heart. “Powering through” is as central to my writing practice as it was to my race strategy.
Let’s see what we can discern by some powering through on this individual piece. At this point it is about 190 words sitting at the tail end of over 3,000 words of a draft note that I’ve been tinkering with for the last three weeks. That long note has already spawned two previous blog posts (one of 405 words (Claiming identity as a writer), the other 487 (Beginning to think about my writing practice systemically). This will be the third blog post spawned.
Today’s gurus of note-making would chastise me for not already carving that large note into suitably crafted “atomic” or “evergreen” notes. They’ve got a point and I’ve been working on that problem since I first encountered Sonke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes in 2019. But the battle between old habits and new ideas remains secondary to getting to the next finish line. I continue to prioritize the deliverable over the process.
What I am usually looking for in an individual blog post is a lede or a working title. If I can identify that and rough out some bullet points for where I think I want to go from that start, I will usually find a way to cross the finish line. More often than not, I won’t know where I am going to end up until I get there. I’m very much in the “I don’t know what I think until I see what I say” camp. That path to a finish may include a temporary diversion through a handful of additional bullet points to see if I can reach a satisfactory end. Other pieces reveal themselves as temporary waystations on the way to a more distant destination. This piece appears to be a waystation. What remains less clear is what the next stop on the path might be. I’ll declare victory here and we’ll see what comes next another day.