I tend to be a hopeless romantic about my writing. Whenever I set out on a new writing endeavor, I get swept away by grand visions. I pledge undying loyalty to the craft. This time, I’ll put in a ton of time tinkering, editing, and polishing, so that everything I produce is positively flawless. This time, I’ll churn out work consistently and prolifically, gritting my teeth through difficult times to maintain that constant drumbeat. This time, I’ll do my homework, I’ll cite research, I’ll read 3 books on a topic to support my ideas, I’ll include the precise memes that are both hilarious and drive my point home.
Then, without fail, I abandon everything after about a week.
Done is better than perfect. Simply showing up and doing the real thing is leaps and bounds better than nothing. My perfectionism and romanticism hasn’t led to high quality writing, it’s just led to… me not writing at all. I’m not building a rocket ship that needs to be done EXACTLY RIGHT or else people will die. I can afford to be loose with my writing.
This is an experimental reboot. Inspiration for this came from a few places: David MacIver’s Notebook, Devon Zuegel’s blog, and Andy Matuschak’s idea of “Working with the garage door up”. I want to consider this website more of a rough “notebook”–a place to put my thoughts, notes, read books, some basic code findings, and whatever else I find interesting. I’ll be contradicting myself, changing my mind, finding mistakes later. Themes will probably come and go as my interests change. I don’t mind if this notebook comes to focus on coding, movies I watch, a log of my bird watching expeditions, or a mix of all three of those things. My criterion is just that I keep up some sort of public writing.
Most posts will probably be short and simple. I may have a longer tutorial or essay here and there, but it will be infrequent. I’m going to keep posts as lightly edited as possible. In the past my perfectionism with writing translated into over-editing everything I post, well past the point where I got sick of it. I’m going to do best best to kill this tendency and just post.
My “success” conditions for this notebook are
- Learn and explore thoughts more effectively
- Improve my writing skills
- People beyond myself occasionally find my writing useful or at least interesting
Let’s try this out!