My last suggestion is for those of you who, like me, want to pursue writing. In this regard, my most important tip is to publish often. Don’t get too hung up on whether or not something is good, whether it’s optimised with the right keywords or if the structure of the piece is perfect. When you’re starting out it is all about repetitions. Putting in the practice time is what will make you better. So instead focus on writing, get it published, and move on to the next piece.
- Lars-Christian Simonsen, Building a writing habit
So back in high school I had these creative writing classes that I that I took and what I had started to notice is that nobody, including me, was ever finishing anything. You’re not building the skill of completing something, you’re not building the skill of walking away from something, you’re constantly in this state of like “okay well this is just a beginning”. I knew that I needed to build the skills of finishing, of walking away. [What I did was that I] come up with a creative task and you have 24 hours to finish it and at the end of that 24 hours it doesn’t matter what state it’s in. You consider that state to be done. It’s not “oh well here’s a good start of something”, or “if I put another 10 hours into this it would be so much better”. This is complete even if it’s awful, even if it’s broken. It is done and then you walk away. [It’s about] learning to finish something and learning to accept that things are done, and also helping yourself move away from the emotional investment
- Dan Olson, Finding Motivation (sidenote: Transcribed and edited for conciseness.)
I’ve been watching some motivational videos about music and the argument they made was that you can’t actually get good at making stuff unless you actually finish things. Which I interpreted as, there is stuff that happens in the back half you’ll never get experience with if you keep starting over. That’s true but I’m now seeing that there’s another reason: it’s easier to have faith that something that sucks might turn into something decent with more work if you’ve done the work before and know what the progression looks like.
- An acquaintance on Discord
I’ve seen this advice for creative pursuits multiple times that you should practice finishing your projects. I think it is great advice so I thought I’d share some reflections on what has worked for me. In retrospect, it is somehow both in the spirit of this advice, and a complete inversion of it at the same time.
Zettelkasten is what made me be able to write blog posts at all (see Introducing this blog thing). To simplify, instead of writing with the goal of making an entire essay, I would write fragments. When I say fragments I don’t mean that they are broken on the sentence or paragraph level, but that they aren’t a full essay, just a paragraph or two about a specific idea. They are attempts at explaining the idea as clearly as I can, without the worrying about how it fits into a larger text.
Basically what it allowed me to do was finish things very early, so I got to try my hand at a bunch of different things. As I wrote more atomic notes about single ideas it got easier to write, and it got easier to formulate ideas in clearer ways. That both made it easier to accumulate material for bigger projects, but also to just write longer stuff from the get go. By removing the constraint that it was supposed to be for the public and the constraint that each thing I try write is going to be part of a big project, it got easier to write more things and get more practice.
My zettlekasten is a tool for cultivating ideas. Since ideas don’t have to result in a blog post or essay I am more free to act on them. I don’t have to make a judgment on whether an idea is worthy of my effort, and I am not under any obligation to turn this particular idea into a project. That means that I act upon more ideas, and I have become better at turning ideas into writing. Some are one-off things that I don’t revisit, but others are things I return to time and time again that end up as a blog post.
Writing like this has given me more confidence. Since I act upon more of my ideas I have learned to recognize more of them. I know that they will keep coming, so I don’t have to clutch at the first one that comes to me. I know that I will have more ideas, I just have to recognize them, and give them care and energy. By acting on more of those ideas I let more of them cultivate, and I get better at the act of cultivating them. I have become a gardener in my personal little garden. Some texts won’t grow much, or just grow very slowly — and that is fine, they can stay in the garden. No need to waste energy and frustration on something that isn’t ready for it, there is always something else I could be working on. Someday I might revisit them, but I don’t have to. There are always more ideas. Sometimes an idea appeals to me a lot and I feel like I have enough material for it, then I might try to work on it more, refine it, write and rewrite it, until it becomes an essay I’m proud to show to others.
This is what has helped me the most when it comes to my creative pursuits with writing. I don’t know if it would be of help to others, or if it is applicable to other mediums. Would it work for fiction writing? Probably, something similar can be achieved by writing a lot of scenes. Music? Maybe, through making shorter tunes without worrying about fleshing it out into a perfect song. Games? I can imagine making lots of small board games, but many computer games are about complicated systems interacting with each other. Sounds hard to me to make small versions of games that have to be big to be that kind of game.
On some level, what it all boils down to is to finish a lot of creative tasks by not really finishing them, which is to say that I’m not sure how much I’m following the advice that I praised in the beginning. It has let me practice writing in large volumes, but I suppose I still struggle with the closing words, precisely because I don’t finish things as often. Sooo, yeah. Peace.