Tyranny of a Blank Page

I don't "suffer from insomnia," but that doesn't mean I always get a good night's sleep. Assuming I'm not unreasonably anxious about something, a restful night will be kneecapped by some combination of the following:

1. Staying up late (anything past 9:30-10) on a weekday night

2. Waking up in the middle of the night and unable to quickly go back to sleep

3. Drinking the night before (doesn't help the threshold amount seems to be shrinking as a function of age)

#1 and #3 are entirely my fault and I have no one to blame but myself. I could maybe make an argument about getting stuck in dopamine traps or Sunday Scaries but it would be a half-hearted one at best. #2, losing sleep to a quasi-dozing liminal state in the witching hours, is a more interesting phenomena.

I'll wake up in the middle of the night for any of a million reasons. It's possible there's an inciting incident; more likely I'm just not sleeping deeply enough to overcome being hot, needing to pee, a tight shoulder, etc. A trip to the bathroom and a fresh glass of water happen on autopilot, an automatic reset that usually does the trick. If it doesn't however, I am not quick to realize that fact. Maybe I need some Tums to deal with a spicy dinner; maybe I need some ibuprofen to help release the knot in my hip flexor. Because the reset usually puts me back to sleep it can be hours before I realize maybe I do need to get back out of bed and fix whatever the problem is.

In other words, I have some amount of time where I am awake, comfortable, without a screen, and nothing else I should be doing.

So my brain spins, latching on to whatever idea happens to be floating through the night. And if it's a particularly juicy one, the mental flywheel, lubricated by cortisol and crashing dopamine, builds up more and more momentum until there's absolutely no hope of sleep without another reset.

In a word, it sucks.

Mostly. Some of the things that occur to me in the middle of the night are exciting, great ideas for projects, articles, books, crafts. In short, they're the sort of things that I'd like to make space for in the garage. I should write them down, take action so I don't forget, but I am comfortable (relatively), it's dark and cold outside the covers, and that was a great idea! I'll definitely remember it when it comes time.

So then I sit down at my desk. I open up a doc or my IDE. And I just stare at the screen until I can't take it anymore and the siren song of one of the many sugar-rush activities my computer has to offer takes over.

Seems like an awfully unfair trade if you ask me.

In 2008, Philip Pullman wrote a pep talk for the now-defunct NaNoWriMo. It's a wonderful bit of writing about writing, and thanks to archive.org you can still read it. There's one bit which is particularly relevant to the subject of misbehaving ideas:

The question authors get asked more than any other is "Where do you get your ideas from?" … What I usually say is "I don’t know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I’m not there, they go away again."

Falkner is the attributed source for a pithy remark in the same vein:

I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes at nine o'clock every morning.

What they're both referring to is the development and maintenance of a practice. Doing the thing over and over again, brick by brick, is the only way to get anything meaningful done (if there was another I guarantee we'd all be doing that instead). Systems of repeated practice will always triumph over running on pure motivation for the simple reason that motivation is a fickle resource and is not to be relied upon. It's part of the reason NaNoWriMo was such a smash success while it still existed: participants suddenly had a collective commitment device and a huge moral support network to tackle the arduous challenge that is writing a novel. Motivation didn't matter; having a deadline did.

In my experience, the underlying trick to having a practice relies on the fact that there's a certain mental gear you engage when doing work. Often, the work is complex or invigorating to the point where you enter a flow state, ripping through an entire module or crushing a cool 10km feeling the whole time like you're just getting warmed up. When you have motivation, finding that gear is easy. You're brimming with energy, you can't wait to sit down and knock out the chapter in your head, someone would have to actively stop you getting out into the sunshine. When it's not there, not only is finding that gear hard but even contemplating getting there is awful. Lying in bed at 6:00am listening to the rain and thinking about how cold and dark it's going to be on the lake. All the chattering devils of the short-term internet pulling at your attention as you slog through yet another tedious filler chapter. Actually giving yourself a break doesn't help matters since you then spend the rest of the day in a self-recrimination spiral and it makes it twice as hard to get over the hump the following day.

Hence a practice. You show up, regardless of how miserable or cranky you feel. Because this is work, and sometimes work doesn't make it to the level of type II fun. Sometimes it's just work. Once you get going, it's always better than what you'd built up in your head. Doesn't mean it's good, or enjoyable, or that it would be nicer to be doing literally anything else in the moment. But just like you don't quit your job on impulse because of one crappy customer, you don't quit your practice midway through a session. Giving up the practice is a serious decisionTM and will be considered calmly and rationally at literally any other time other than during said session. Your work persona is not capable of making that choice.

At least, that's the theory. The reality is that it's hard to maintain a practice. Life, uh, finds a way to stick its nose in and interrupt things despite all the best intentions. There's always some event or special case that means you can't do your workout or spend time drawing. Usually, the difference in maintaining the practice boils down to whether or not you're willing to let life push it around. The people who get to their their goal weights are not any more talented at burning calories than anyone else. They simply do not let the fact their dates want to order the crème brûlée distract them from keeping to their macros.

One thing I've realized in recent years is that the biggest, most consistent practice I have in my life is my actual job. It's obvious in retrospect, but when you're trying to establish a creative practice a 9-5 is a big hulking monolith soaking up time and energy. In reality though, it's a practice unto itself—an extremely consistent one at that. And since my job is basically sitting, thinking hard, and typing things into a computer, trying to build a practice around an activity that involves more of the same very much feels like double-dipping. It's the exact problem I ran into this year trying to stand up a game studio. No matter how much inspiration you bring to something, if that something involves 4-6 hours of programming and game design after working 8+ hours in tech, something will give. In the immortal words of Ron Swanson:

So far, I've not been terrible about blog (leaflet?) writing as a practice. It's early days yet and I don't have a consistent schedule or anything, but I'm at least reaching for this rather than spinning my gears in my office when I've nothing else to do. The main thing I'm noticing though is I'm having trouble coming up with actual article ideas. Which is hilarious to me because I have absolutely no trouble coming up with great ideas while NOT working on a post. I even wrote some of them down:

What if there was only $1 in the economy?

If someone asked me to write a graduation speech...

Organizational process is not a dirty word

Emergence in scaling games

Integrating cloud systems: a retrospective

But when the time comes to actually write one of these articles, I immediately get stun-locked upon first encounter with a clean page. It's definitely a writer thing, but it is not helping get over that initial resistance to show up, especially since everything else is pretty nuts and I've got a massive list of games I want to get to.

The strategy I'm going for is "write regardless." Some of it (most of it) is gonna be schlock. Heck, this post has basically gone from what I thought was going to be an insightful analysis of where ideas come from into a vaguely petulant description of habits in the creative process. But that's the game. We're working with the garage door open here. Sometimes it's not gonna be good, and that's fine. More than fine—that's the point. Quality in writing is always preferred, but it is a craft where it is impossible to get to quality without first amassing quantity. The hope is (and it's backed by personal experience), the more I write, the more the ideas stop showing up at inopportune moments and start showing up when it's time to put them on the paper.

So, in short, the blank page will always loom large and will always be one more thing to overcome. The way to get past it is to organize and systematize so every time I sit down it's a little bit easier, the ideas take less stretching to reach, and hopefully themes emerge and turn into veritable rivers of well-considered and melodious prose.

Image Credits: Quentin Blake , /r/SeveranceAppleTvPlus , /r/GetMotivated