There is no Step Two

After a relatively prolific start with my leaflet, I'm coming up on a fortnight without a post. It's not for lack of effort; even feeling a bit burned out and a couple of nights of bad sleep rendering me useless the following day and I've still managed to get ~3,000 words down into drafts, refile my LLC, and get some progress in an RTS prototype using the Godot multiplayer framework. My cider also finished fermenting and it tastes pretty good! (Admittedly I didn't have to do anything to make that happen but it's an achievement of sorts).

I lamented about the struggles involved in sitting down and coming up with ideas to write about in a previous post, but what I'm realizing is not that I have a creativity or energy problem. Rather, returning to writing has disabused me of the notion that I have the level of mastery (or at least competency) I thought I had not just over the art form, but the process of writing itself.

The strengths and weaknesses of my prose aren't really at issue here. I guarantee I'm more self-critical than any of the tiny handful of people who read my stuff, and I doubt anyone is interested in a technique analysis of how I go about putting words on the page. What I think is instructive is understanding that developing a writing practice is as much of a skill as composing an essay is—one that I've tended to ignore to my own peril.

An ideal practice

The idea that you need to develop a practice is not a new one to me. I imagine it is not a new one to most people who identify as a creative to any extent. I am a painter because I paint. I am a sculptor because I sculpt. The idea extends beyond creative pursuits as well. I am a doctor because I heal patients. I am a lawyer because I practice law. I am a runner because I run.

It's a simple idea. And like most simple ideas, it sits on the shelf, innocuous, unassuming. Until you try to actually execute on it, at which point it opens a portal to whichever layer of hell has all the demons of distraction and avoidance:

"I'm tired"

"I couldn't find the time"

"It's cold/wet/windy outside"

...and so on and so on

Developing a writing practice involves its own special flavor of torments, but (un)luckily for us procrastination hell is infinite and never short of monsters. The tools involved to find your way to creative deliverance, John Bunyan-style, are rudimentary in the extreme. You sit, and you write, and you do it again tomorrow. Which means there's not a lot of room to whitewash the process, and it's why external structures like the erstwhile NaNoWriMo (RIP) were so effective. Writing is hard, and it always helps to have a friend cheering you on.

At least in theory. In practice, there are infinite ways to go about getting into a productive routine. Every author will have a process varying along several different axes. Some are messy, spur-of-the-moment types; others meticulous plan every single detail of their work and their schedules. All have different working environments and use different media to get the words down.

What they share are the fundamentals. Writers and authors read like crazy. They care about how sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and stories are crafted. They are merciless when it comes to self-critique. They know the conventions of whatever form they are working in; as they improve they develop a sense of when they can bend or break them.

Most importantly, they sit and write. Their specific writing process might look different to their peers', but it's window-dressing designed to make a tough job as comfortable and palatable as possible.

Or so I thought.

The Jedi and the scrub

I've done my fair share of battling in the prose arena. Certainly enough to have actual lived experience, not just theoretical knowledge. I assumed I had a real, visceral understanding of the procrastination problem space. I've been writing in one form or another for over two decades; surely I was on the right-hand side of the bell curve in that field.

The thing is, you're never as far from the center as you think you are. The bell curve meme is funny because we've all been the amateur or the student over-complicating things as we apply new concepts. (Sorry if explaining the joke has now ruined it for you). You don't need $300 shoes and $1,000 clothes to run a marathon. You just gotta run. A lot.

Many people go for all the bells and whistles and frameworks because "it's the meta" and it's how you get good, not understanding the things the pros are doing they're doing to solve problems that only exist once you have the baseline level of competence. A novice chess player doesn't benefit from learning 24 moves of Sicilian Dragon theory because even if they do get that theoretically winning position they don't have the skill or understanding to not blunder the game away on move 25. Only once they've developed the fundamentals to respond to basic threats and are playing opponents at a similar level will they start to benefit from opening theory. The tool solves a problem they now have.

Framing it this way highlights something I think often gets missed. At risk of overanalyzing internet humor, we should remember there is a HUGE difference between the Jedi and the scrub. Our novice chess player, when asked what move he'd make in a position, might say something like "knight to f4, attacking their queen." The master might say the exact same thing as the novice. No one would think that just because they had the same answer means they have the same understanding of the position. Nor would you suddenly believe a club player would lose to the novice just because they overthought things and decided to move their bishop instead.

The master is the master because they have the deepest understanding of the problem space. When a situation calls for straightforward, basic, or fundamental approaches, they do the simple thing. When the challenge grows beyond those tools, the master can recognize the characteristics of the new situation and know how to approach the complications. Hand the scrub the master's toolbox and you may as well have given them an instruction book in Greek. Hand the amateur the toolbox and though they might understand it, the odds of them consistently picking the right tools and using them effectively are vanishingly small.

I've felt this most viscerally as I've taught myself programming over the last five years. When I first started, it was a struggle to even write a function that did what I wanted it to do. As I mastered the basics and started writing bigger programs, I found I had the new problem of getting all those pieces to talk to one another and not lose track of who was doing what. Those frustrations led me to discover programming patterns and principles. Soon my projects were chock full of observers and command patterns and strategies and all the rest. Those projects died under the weight of their frameworks; they were all hyper-extensible and ready to deal with every situation, and none of them actually did anything useful.

Since then, I've dialed it back on abstraction and unnecessary frameworks. I go for simple and readable where possible; I ignore precepts about statics, singletons, and coupling where it suits me; plenty of my projects have giant monoliths and messy, messy functions at their hearts. On the other hand, I find I use patterns in certain situations without even thinking about it; more than once I have actually reinvented existing patterns I wasn't familiar with out of necessity.

In short, I have internalized the principles of programming and I am experienced enough with that problem space to know when to use them and when to ignore them.

You can't not do it

Cultural analysis of early 2020s meme culture is useful here not just as a diversion, but to better understand my recent "aha" moment(s). I've been writing for over two decades in one form or another (for reference, my first NaNoWriMo was the 4th one in 2003!). In all that time, I've treated writing of any sort the way Barney Stinson treats marathon running:

I figured I was doing it right since I wasn't waiting to be "seized by the passions of the muses" to get stuff done. On better days I would sit, even if I didn't have much of an idea, and work on the first thing that came to mind. Never mind doing so often involved forcing myself to sit down whenever I found myself with a free gap in my schedule. If I was distracted by the internet or video games, or just felt comfortable sitting on the couch, the struggle multiplied hundredfold.

But these days I'm older and (marginally) wiser. I've also been down lots of rabbit holes in productivity, organizational design, and psychology. And what's clear to me is that the Stinson approach of "Step one: write" is the scrub side of the curve. You can build a practice that way. It'll be shaky, prone to crumble when motivation fails or deadlines pass, but you will write. You may also develop an antagonistic relationship with the craft.

Remember, the over-reliance on tools and techniques of the amateur is not born of nothing. The scrub has started to build a writing practice, and they have a problem: it sucks forcing yourself to write. The amateur, looking for ways to alleviate that pain, looks for ways to mitigate it. They read about Falkner working in timed blocks with pen and paper, or Murakami writing from 4am to 10am every day. The benefits of routine seem like they might help. So they figure out something that might work for them and implement it.

And it still sucks! Writing is hard!

They also find their routine isn't as good as they think it is. Perhaps they need a specific environment to think in. Maybe working longhand is the only way they can avoid internet distractions. For whatever reason they have to wear a certain sweater or specific hat. Slowly, their practice is refined and tailored to who they are. It becomes resilient. Just like a runner who worries about missing a run due to travel, the amateur writer becomes concerned with finding space to write. They find they can work in situations outside the norm. Sometimes, if they're extremely lucky, they stumble into a personal Köln Concert and write with a skill and flair they didn't know they had.

They are internalizing the practice. Eventually, they reach a point where it is no longer something they must do, a self-imposed chore crammed into an already-packed schedule. It becomes the default. The Jedi can't not write. Every day, they put some words down somewhere. Some of those words are garbage. Some of them are forgettable. Not every runner's run is a personal best, or even a pleasant experience. But with every drop of ink the tide rises a bit further, and while it never gets easy it does stop being hard.

The Jedi's approach to writing is the same as the scrub's. "You just gotta write." The difference lies under the water, the 90% of the iceberg supporting those four little words. A master knows just how much is required of themselves to make that happen; the scrub cannot conceive of what is needed to rewire themselves to reach that level of consistency.

Climbing the bell curve is a journey. It gets harder before it gets easier.