I’m one week in and I’ve already missed my goal of publishing 1,000 words per week. In my defense I do have a few hundred words drafted about an idea I’m excited about, plus a bunch more research and notes that just need to be integrated into the final product. But it’s not done, and it’s been over a week, and that was the whole thing I was trying to avoid with this project. Whoops.

What can I learn from this?

First, I’m going to relax the 1,000 word requirement. I’m not sure it does me any good. It’s a completely arbitrary number, and I think it probably encourages bad behaviors and bad writing. If I’m close to my target, I feel compelled to sprint to the finish and my writing gets sloppier. If I’m far from my target, there’s more friction to starting because I need to get over the mental hump of “I’ll do a bunch of work and then probably not even be done at the end” before I start.

I also recognize it now as an instance of an unhealthy behavior pattern in myself: when I get it into my head that something is a good idea (working out, cycling, writing) I am attracted to systems for objectively measuring and tracking my progress in it (power lifting training programs with spreadsheets, Strava). Then I set ambitious goals for myself and usually don’t meet them and give up.

So now I’m just not going to do that. Minimum word count getting in the way of publishing consistently? Poof: it’s gone. When are posts done? When they’re done.

Second, if I’m actually going to publish regularly I’ll need to have a pipeline with more than one project in it at a time. I should probably also have a buffer of a few weeks of “fluff” posts and use them as filling between “passion” posts. There’s a lot of information about how to set up systems like this out there, and I haven’t had a chance to design something I think will work for me yet. It didn’t occur to me that this was something people did when I started last week, but in retrospect I’m kind of surprised it didn’t. (I guess I’d just assumed all writers operated on a single-threaded “ideate → write → publish” loop for some reason?)

I think this is actually a closely related problem to the first. If a deadline is bearing down on me and there’s only one piece in the pipeline, my decisions will be distorted by the pressure and quality will suffer. Then I’ll find myself unable to meet the standards I set for myself. Then I get frustrated by my lack of forward progress and give up. So, I won’t do that either: with a bunch of posts in various stages of cooking at all times every decision can be made with breathing room. When do decisions get made? When the right decision is clear. When do posts graduate from the pipeline? When they’re done.

David Perell's How I Write

Before book sales and PR buzz, your favorite writers began with two things: the blank page and an idea. Each week on How I Write, we go behind-the-scenes with the world's great writers to uncover the meta-mechanics of writing and the lifestyle behind it.

While researching this, I discovered How I Write, a podcast where working writers are interviewed about exactly this topic. It seems promising from the one-and-a-half episodes I’ve listened to so far! Even though it doesn’t feel great to whiff this early into a new project for myself, I’m also glad that it happened as early as it did because it led me to recognize that something big was missing before I got too burned out.

So: a smaller pile of words, a bigger pile of drafts, and a little less faith in the plan I had a week ago. Check back in a week and we’ll see how much of this new plan survives contact with another seven days.

This post is my attempt at doing something different. I’m just going to write a whole bunch of words then publish it with minimal revising. I will do this every week, and over time I’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t and create my own writing process informed by real world experience instead of reading a bunch of other writers’ essays about their process and thinking “neat, I should do that” and then not doing that.

Early posts will be rough, but that’s okay because this blog has no readers. Well, my girlfriend Leah Waites will read it and give me notes. I’m excited for this because I’m sure they will be useful notes! She has a BA in English and is currently in law school and her law school friends all ask her for writing advice so she knows a lot of stuff about how to write well. That said, she isn’t going to get to see this post before I publish it. If she sees it she might tell me her notes then and there and I’d get anxious about publishing this post which would defeat the whole purpose of this experiment.

I’m also 1.5 White Claw Surges into the night, which is helping. White Claw Surge was probably my favorite drink in college. I never really got too into beer, so it was my default option for getting a little buzzed without getting drunk. (This is also where I am now! I think I might actually be more productive in this state than I am sober, at least for creative work. Programmers call this the “Ballmer Peak.”) Some other favorites from college:

• Ketel One Botanicals, especially in the peach flavor. They can’t call it “vodka” because it’s 30% ABV or something but it’s basically vodka and it’s a fantastic flavor

• Capriccio Sangria Red. I just love sweets of all kinds and drinks are no exception. It’s very sweet, and causes awful hangovers I assume due to high sugar content but it’s worth it.

That was a quick topic switch! It kind of reminds me of reading the output of base (pre-instruction-fine-tuning) language models. Hah, there’s another topic switch! Anyway...

Michel Montaigne’s Essays (which I have not read) was once described to me as a mind watching itself think, with the author meandering around wherever his interest takes him and sometimes even changing his mind on a topic within the span of a single page. I suppose that at least initially this blog will continue that tradition. As a perfectionist who’s ~working on it~ I don’t feel great about publicly putting my name on something this sloppy, and I found Montaigne hard to follow and kind of boring when I tried to read him but I guess French people love this stuff so whatever.

Scott Alexander says that when he writes he just writes whatever he’d want to say out loud. I guess this post is also my first serious attempt at writing in this style. It’s been a long time since I’ve really written any non-functional text (probably the last time was a modern Arabic literature course in college?) and everything I did write was for a grade so I was more focused on saying what the teacher wanted to hear in the format the teacher wanted instead of what I wanted to say in the format that I thought made the most sense.

Of course, just as I wrote that I kind of stalled out after the last paragraph. Maybe I’d said everything I had to say about the topic, and my inability to write what I wanted to say was evidence that the post was done? Or is it done? Maybe this paragraph is the continuation? Sure, I’ll go with that.

No one likes reading an essay’s meta-commentary on itself, especially when it’s trying to be cute and funny about it. No worries, let’s talk about serious stuff instead. Haaretz published an article today about how IDF soldiers who participated in or witnessed the murder, torture, and rape of Gazan civilians now feel bad about it.

The article introduced me to the concept of “moral injury” which while reading it honestly kind of just seemed like “PTSD and self-loathing but the patient 100% deserves it because they really are evil.” (I know this isn’t fair and Wikipedia informed me of how e.g. healthcare workers and human trafficking survivors can suffer from it too.) One IDF HR officer, “Maya,” recounted the IDF’s killing of four men in a group of five with indiscriminate bullet fire, then hurriedly burying the dead and imprisoning the remaining man in a cage outdoors in freezing cold where they urinated on and taunted him throughout the night. She further recalls that she “might” have laughed along with the rest of them too.

“I felt like a hypocrite, dirty. I would take three showers a day; the image of his helplessness wouldn’t leave me. Thoughts gnaw at me constantly – how could I just stand there and do nothing? How could I, somebody who acts all moral and volunteers with refugees and goes to protests, agree to go along with it? How did I not say anything to them, and what does that say about me? I don’t have an answer.”

Good question, Maya! I hope she keeps wrestling with it. I suspect the answer is that her moral commitments are skin deep, and that in lieu of thinking for herself she just mimics what the people around her do. When she’s surrounded by vegans in Tel Aviv, her heart bleeds for caged chickens in factory farms. When she’s surrounded by sadists in Gaza, she laughs while human beings are tortured in cages.

I’m reminded of Mr. B from the classic “Who Goes Nazi?“

Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why? . . . Why the one and not the other?
[...]
Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

Well, that’s 1,000. See you next week!