Trying to Write

I meant to do this a long time ago

I think I claimed this Substack domain in January and got a few drafts going between then and now, but nothing I managed to finish and feel was publishable. In that, I’ve failed to do the basic thing I set out to, which was to write some things, be embarrassed, and let that (regular) embarrassment fuel me to be better. I have Seth Godin to thank, who in turn has Isaac Asimov to thank as he does in this line from his Conversations with Tyler interview:

Isaac worked with me when I was 24 years old. He wrote and published 400 books. I was sitting in his living room in Lincoln Center in New York City, and I said, “Isaac” — being presumptuous — “how do you go about writing 400 books?” He said, “Here’s the secret.” He pointed to this old manual typewriter. He said, “Every morning, I sit in front of this typewriter at 7:00 am, and I type until noon. It doesn’t have to be good, but I have to keep typing.”

The lesson is, once your subconscious knows you’re going to keep typing no matter what, it becomes sufficiently embarrassed by the bad stuff that it will let some good stuff in. People who think they have writer’s block don’t have writer’s block. They have fear of bad writing. If you show me all your bad writing, sooner or later you’re going to have to show me some good writing.

This is advice I sometimes give advisees and it’s high time I just took it, so here I am, fessing up.

So long as this first post consists mostly of appreciation for the people who’ve motivated me to write it, I should also mention Conor Barnes and his 100 Tips for a Better Life, particularly these two:

17. Done is better than perfect. 

34. How you spend every day is how you spend your life. 

Number 34 hits particularly hard. One theme of my advice and thinking lately is that we are all trapped within ourselves and that kind of trap is really quite tight. The only time we can ever hope to get out is right now. Plans to do so ‘later’ always seem to collapse into a bunch of successive “nows” where we are ourselves again, not the people we wished we were when we did the planning. After a long time planning, I finally feel a tiny bit less myself.

I’m going to leave the title of this post as “Trying to Write” instead of “Writing” or something else in the spirit of “try not, do,” because I genuinely doubt myself and want the consolation of at least being a well calibrated predictor. I’m not thrilled about this on the object or meta level, but it is the reality. If you want the version of this thought with the happy ending, you can read about Zvi Mowshowitz’s experience with timeless decision theory here, which was a third source on inspiration for me.

The next post will take a half step towards substance, talking about what I plan to write about and where I place myself among others.