My journal is full of entries, my Ulysses inbox is full of notions and half-starts. So I’m writing a lot. I’m writing a lot. Good. Great. But I’m not quite getting to what I want to with a lot of it. I want to be on that Austin Kleon wavelength, you know? That easy, collected, curious tone of a blog written by someone who knows what they’re into and what they’re about, and also knows what people are into about them.
This is maybe the fifth post I’ve started writing tonight. Gotta finish something to be able to publish something, so I’m gonna commit to publishing this one now and keep going.
The difficulty isn’t word making so much thing making. I can make the words go all damn day. The first draft of my book was twice as long as they wanted (whoops). So that’s not hard. Laborious maybe, but not hard. It’s the discipline, the shaping, guiding the words somewhere, toward a thing, a unit you can post and share and promote … or at least pick a damned title for. That’s hard. For me, anyway.
My buddy Rob tweeted recently about not trying to make his posts perfect, and instead just publishing more, which I think is a great sentiment. Perfectionism is a big bad in my productivity rogues’ gallery. But I don’t think that’s quite what I’m wrestling with lately.
“So what am I wrestling with?”, he asked himself, in the hopes of prompting an answer from within.
…
…
Yeah, not sure.
I think some of it, tonight especially, has been tripping over … what, ambition? Lack of discipline? Something that starts small and might make for a nice little post blooms out into stubs for several posts, or an idea for a project, or no wait maybe I’ll start a Twitter thread about this! So instead of one simple little finished thing I have five little unfinished things or one big unfinished thing, and in either case they’ve sort of sucked the air out of the room.
My experience with these things is that it’s often a matter of habit. Get used to stopping, proofing it, naming it, hitting publish. Sometimes to finish you’ve just got to stop. So let’s.
(Update: Wrote this several nights ago and not sure why I didn’t publish it? This is maybe a different problem.)