Teaching myself to go public (Why I'm starting a weekly blog)

I'm not necessarily sure where or how to start this – it's the beginning of a weekly blog.

Why start a weekly blog?

Well, I've been reading the book Tiny Experiments as of late, and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff proposes some ideas that hold growing sway on me. It might be useful to let go of linear, fixed hopes about my life and my career path. She has some practical suggestions for how to go about that. My current openness to these ideas are fueled in part by two sources.

1. I've spent every year of my post-college life continually failing at anything that resembles linear progression.
2. Despite that, I still have a very dogged, nagging ambition to live a life in pursuit of creative storytelling skill. And I don't just want to be decent. I want to reach for mastery.

Before Tiny Experiments, I read a different book (I'm usually reading) called Win the Inside Game by Steve Magness. It's a book centered on the psychology of elite performance. Not just athletes, but anyone who'd like to develop a concrete skill to its highest level. And here again, there's the strong suggestion that concrete growth might be more related to peaceful and quiet commitment than it is to outward signs of achievement.

Hopefully you're spotting the same potential problem that I did. Who shows up day after day to run, write, act, joke, or fight their heart out without a little dreaming of where it might take them?

It's not the first time I've been exposed to this type of thinking. History's great meditators have shouted that true happiness must be unattached to outcomes for thousands of years. I'm trying to listen, but it's hard. (And I do have to mention, one serious argument for the opposing view are studies that have shown a correlation between income and happiness, at least up to a point. A point that I am below.) ((I'm recalling a study cited in the book 80,000 Hours, and I'll update this with a source link when I have a chance.))

This weekly blog will serve not only as my attempt to log the small experiments on which I choose to invest my time – a public record of commitments and reflections thereafter – but also as an attempt to make some narrative sense of what I'm doing with my life. Part of me is hesitant to reveal my open and honest thinking on a public platform... it might actually comfort me if no one reads this. Could be awkward to tell a potential employer I've always dreamed of working at their architectural firm when there's a website in my name contradicting that statement. But a few lines of logic motivate me to try this anyway.

1. I've got a problem with finishing.

I've been practicing some sort of narrative writing since Lockdown 2020, though it took me a few years to grow more serious and ritualistic about it. At this point in time, I'm optimistic that I could write a pretty good novel, short story, or screenplay. I've had plenty of decent ideas (too many, maybe), but I've grown quite proficient at shepherding these ideas for two thousand or twenty thousand words and then abandoning them. It's partially an editing problem, but that's not entirely it. I've proved to myself I can revise the same thousand words over and over for days, and I'll end up with something that looks better, but also a sinking feeling that I haven't really moved anywhere meaningful. So I'm hopeful some more public commitments can help me across the finish line.

2. I need to be willing to learn in public.

Before I considered myself much of a writer, I'd already spent time developing skill with music production, acting, sound design, audio engineering, short-form and long-form improvising, and photography. I was and still am an avid consumer of books and movies, and I had and still have a high standard for what I consider "good" writing.

It can be a vulnerable process, developing new, fresh skills as an adult in the professional world. I am continually sensitive both to my own opinion and to the opinions of others about my writing. But if I ever want to use it for anything other than a journal or a daydream, it has to be done in public. I've struggled to feel any of my narrative projects are worthy of public reception, so the process itself might as well be what I lay out for others to see. And who knows? Perhaps my struggles can shed light for someone else.

3. Focusing on process and experimentation, rather than the development of a single finished piece, might legitimately improve my daily sense of happiness.

This definitely seems to contradict my first line of thinking, but I won't apologize for it. I'm human. And this is all hypothesis, anyway. What's left is to run the test.

These will be small, time-limited pacts with myself to do something creative and reflect on the results. My initial thinking is to try one-month commitments for specified amounts of daily work-time, five days a week. I will use the sixth day in the week to write a reflection post, and I'll use the seventh day to edit and publish that post. At the end of the month (or whatever time frame I've put on the most recent "experiment"), I'll do a final reflection and overview of the work I completed, and I'll decide whether to continue that project for another month, or whether I'd like to engage in a new one. There are no points won or lost either way. My goal is simply to stay active. I expect most of these "experiments" will be based around creative writing, but I'm leaving the door open to non-writing-based "experiments" as well.

So here goes nothing.

It's mid-July, which makes it an awkward time to start a monthly commitment. I'm also posting this a day later than planned, which means I'm off to a great start.

For quite a while now, I've played with this idea of unauthorized adaptations as a tool for practice. As much as any other writer, it's the incredible stories I watch, read, and listen to that inspire my writing, both its content and its form. When I first sit down with a new idea, I often find myself thinking, "I'd like it to feel like the story of X, but more in the style of Y...". This week, I'll spend at least one hour each day, Monday to Friday, typing an adaptation of a work I admire. I'm setting no word count requirement for myself, but I will use a digital stopwatch, and I'll pause it when I lose focus or step away. To be perfectly honest, sixty minutes or more of focused writing still isn't the easiest thing for me. I'm pretty good for forty-five minutes to an hour a pop, but my track record beyond that is spotty. I'd like to improve it, so I'm isolating the problem as much as possible.

In this adaptation – novel to screenplay form – I don't need to make anything up. I don't need to do any rewriting at all. I am planning to just start transcribing dialogue for some pages, before I even try condensing and describing any imagery. Easy, right? Hopefully so. The point is first and foremost to keep me tied to the desk and to get me acquainted with a little more volume, in terms of work load. I hope to slowly dial it up in future weeks, but consistency needs to come first. The second point is to look closely at a story I admire and possibly learn a thing or two by transcription and transformation. If creative changes occur to me, I'll roll with them. This is an unauthorized adaptation after all, and no one will end up seeing it. (For now, I intend this blog series to serve as a tool for personal challenge and reflection, not as an outlet for my narrative writing.)

It's something to do for a week. I'll reflect on how it goes and make another commitment next week. If it's a trainwreck, then oh well! At the end of this month, as August begins, I'll have two teensy experiments under my belt, and I'll strap in for a month-long commitment.

I've delayed answering an important question, which is: What book am I "adapting"?

The Trouble with Peace by Joe Abercrombie.

I make it no secret that I am a big fantasy nerd. I love swords and sorcery, and Abercrombie is a certified king where it comes to fantasy. His most well known trilogy is probably his earlier work, The First Law series. While that series takes place before the events of The Age of Madness (the trilogy that includes The Trouble with Peace), I don't necessarily recommend it to my friends. Abercrombie's sense for energetic violence and for colorful character description are both in full, endlessly entertaining swing, but the overall arc of the story is a tad simplistic, and the story lacks strong female characters in a way that makes it feel dated. But the good news is I think his Age of Madness books make up for that! In more recent years, he's improved on all fronts, and he's telling a much more interesting, socially complex story. The Trouble with Peace is the second of the trilogy, but it's my favorite, so I'm jumping in there.

I'm looking forward to it. Not necessarily the writing I produce this week, or next month, or even the rest of this year. It could all be bad. But I'm looking forward to becoming more like the person I hope I can be. Whether or not that has anything to do with writing at all.