By reflecting on how to do things and how things are done you realize how things are made by many components. And you realize how to do things you need to pass through several steps. Sometimes the path is linear. Some others it is not.
Writing about a process allows you to understand better how it flows, and why you need to go through step B if you want to reach C, starting from A.
Can we brand a thinking process? Think about a toy brick, a 2-by-4 piece. It’s standard, created with high precision to respects specific dimensions, shapes and feature. Now think about what you can do with that piece. Within its constrained shape it offers infinite combinatorial possibilities with multiple instances of itself. Now take a set of instructions guiding you to use a given set of those bricks to be assembled into the model of a duck. We have building blocks and instructions like we could have ingredients and recipes.
Now imagine not having any user guide and playing with pieces until you find meaningful combinations. You might discover that three pieces form a leg so you can replicate the discovered pattern to add two or more legs tonyou fantasy creature. If you write done the sequence of steps needed to reproduce the little bear you just randomly assembled you would provide instructions to replicate your model.
But what happens if you collect the ways and the approaches you came up with to build the leg pattern in the first place? You would offer creative techniques to build more complex shaped out of atomic components.
And what if you discover how to 3d print your building blocks? Or designing and creating new formats of bricks?
This is what happens when we analyze the world around us and we transform data into information and then into knowledge. We identify atoms we can clearly distinguish, we recognize patterns of aggregated blocks and we learn how to do it through the process of learning and making.
I am dreaming about mental building blocks, thinking bricks and processes and techniques to discover new ways of thinking and novel and useful combinations of existing thoughts to innovate what we know and what we can discover.
How is this thing called? What is it? Who study that? What do we know about it? How can we work on it?
There will be a time in the future when I will have organized part of my knowledge. I will be able to point at it as a tangible artifact and say, look, here is my book|website|course|software. I will feel proud although still not completely satisfied. It might be the moment when I will realize how much I have waited for that and I will ask myself: why didn’t I start earlier?
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Read aloud your draft. Does it make sense the sound of what you are saying? It’s not important to fix the big and small syntax mistakes. You want first to have a piece which is expressing what you want to communicate in an effective way.
After an initial round of revisions, when the writing flows then it’s time to wordsmithing, cherry-picking and finessing.
As somebody said in computer science, premature optimization is the root of all evil.
The question is not why I wrote this article but why you should read it. That’s one great realization I made today.
The other is a simple summarization of how to write: just do it. Badly. And accumulate drafts. Then refine them up until one of them is good to publish. That’s it. So if you don’t accumulate drafts you’re making so much effort to conceive something decent and you would be really lucky if you achieve it.
Improvisation requires a lot of work. Relevance, too.
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Free-flowing means writing whatever is coming to your mind and passing through your mind. Without stopping. Without looking back. Not knowing exactly what you are going to write. Not even approximately, actually. The trick is to transcribe your thoughts, not to think about what you might think. Or you might want to think. You are actually thinking about what you are writing.
That could be a nice, impromptu explanation of what a free-flowing practice could be. I find it fantastic to warm up my fingertips and my neurons. Usually, it takes me from five to fifteen minutes to get in the flow. But if practice and I get accustomed to this way of creating spontaneously, then, I could be in the flow after a few dozens of seconds.
The point is: what are you going to expect from this when you are in the flow? You want to go beyond the rust and routine and, slowly, gently, reach out to your inner self and really touch your deepest thoughts. If you have the patience and the guts to keep on writing, at a certain magical point, you will forget about your surroundings, reality will fade away and leave space for the sound of your thoughts forming on the screen.
It’s not easy, the first time. And it’s really difficult to maintain concentration. Even the faintest noise could break the spell. Don’t stop. Insist and persist. During several months of practice, one day, you will discover yourself taking an inner journey into your thoughts with an unbreakable concentration. There will be no family member, no dog, no bill, no ugly noise able to get you out of your creative tunnel.
Try.
I constantly struggle against unnecessary artificial complexity and find myself uncomfortable when someone wants to communicate with me in an unnecessarily convoluted way. Likewise, I like to be straightforward and direct when I communicate, even, and especially, in more formal environments.
The consideration that might seem obvious, however, is that writing well and concisely takes time, effort, and skill. It is much easier to let yourself go to an uncontrolled river of words, fueling the selfishness of unloading on others the task of extracting its value. “What do I care? I told you, now it’s up to you to do something about it.”
Writing effectively and efficiently is a service rendered to others. It requires love, dedication but also the time and resources needed to do it. How do we always keep it short and direct?
My solution: write a lot, about everything, often. Reread everything, cut and forge sentences with our interlocutors in mind. It is a job, a discipline, an art. Never sufficiently appreciated and practiced.
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I am establishing a new habit: journaling and free-flowing writing but privately. I feel very distant from the urge of publishing my thoughts. Weird. That’s the reason why I started this idea of publishing daily for a year. But I am struggling. All of my behaviors hint at me not wanting to do that. I am creating any possible situation and excuses not to post. In the last few weeks I’ve been writing my daily blog post with the same mood of checking my bank account balance before paying taxes. It’s profoundly unsettling. Still, I am managing to do it, every day. I am missing 60 days. And I see this time as what separates me from a new phase of my creative life. But which one? What is going to happen after the 15 of November 2021? It became stupid, shallow and childish, I won’t find much value from these rushed posts. And, maybe, that’s the lesson I was looking for.
Well, sick of this parade, I’m carving back my space for private writing. It’s a different need in a different context. I have nothing to demonstrate to anybody. I can go with the flow, careless of hurting somebody, especially the spell-checker (fuck it!). I have different goals. Or better, I am still looking for the same thing: continuity. But a different kind of it. While here, on the blog, I am striving for keeping the daily streak, rather indifferent to the quality, the outcome, the feedback, again, just to check the boxes, when I write in my journal I can really hear my voice. I can be in a safe space with my thoughts. It’s there, now, that I want to grow a thinking practice. Rather than always vomiting spontaneous and seldomly related thoughts, I want to extract threads and build upon them. That gives me more sense of purpose and meaning. It’s going to require time, and hard work and I am not sure it might directly impact my public articles soon but I feel more compelled by that kind of creative practice right now.
Until my next flow of conscience.
I write daily and I find immense benefits in writing but it is hard and harder. Yesterday I missed my day and I feel liberated. I am tired of publishing bullshits only for the sake of checking the day. Now I have to understand if and how to catch-up for that missed day so I have a double problem: filling in yesterday’s in addition to today’s one. Why is that making me bored? Isn’t that what I wanted? I committed to publishing daily for one year, 60 days are remaining and I am not going to stop now.
Writing in the morning, first thing, is nice. Especially if I don’t set the goal to publish it. I feel more free to go in the flow, to listen to my thoughts. I can even writer longer, up to one hour continuously.
I am not concerned about not making immediate use of the morning writing for blog posts. I can feel a deeper work, aiming at creating the foundations for something more robust and long-term.
That is why, here, I am left with the metawriting, the writing about the writing that happened. It’s still positive and useful. And I am honoring my daily commitment to publish.
So far so good.