An Introduction
I have always aspired to write. I'm not sure why — perhaps because one of my favourite activities is to read, and I deeply appreciate quality writing (what comprises quality is, of course, subjective). But I have never really got started, even when the thoughts in my mind turn into phrases I have almost never committed them to paper to start building out the structure of a passage. And why not? On the surface, there's always something more important, something more urgent, always an excuse — work, children, house, garden, et cetera.
The real reason, I suspect, belongs to the gap between my ability and my aspiration, and the very human desire to avoid doing anything which exposes that shortcoming, even to myself. I cringe when I return and re-read something I had written just days earlier, and the human subconsious tries to be helpful by guiding us away from difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable tasks.
I have been inspired recently by a couple of quotes I saw referenced in the comments on HackerNews. Dan Harmon (American scriptwriter) puts it somewhat crudely:
My best advice about writer’s block is: the reason you’re having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it’s the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from “writing well” to “writing badly,” you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don’t like to admit it, because we’re raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let’s just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers.
We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn’t going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster.
And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it’s no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you’re an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft.
Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn’t make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!
Ira Glass motivates a writer similarly:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just got to fight your way through.
I will echo that sentiment: anything worthwhile doing will take more than a modicum of effort. There are few shortcuts in life aside from for the extraordinarily lucky, so few indeed that it is worthwhile approaching any goal with the attitude that it will require hard work, and that it will not come easy. In this age of get-rich-quick schemes and grifters, this idea deserves its own essay.
One final quote, this time from Henry Rollins.
“One day, I’m gonna write that novel.” Pal? You better start tomorrow morning because the right time never happens. It’s when you boldly determine it. It’s like running on a rainy day. You’re fine once you get out there. The only difficulty is getting off the couch when you lace your shoes up.
The Creative Independent has more quotes from Rollins, which I find rather motivating at this point in my life.
But why bother to write this page at all when others have already put it so well? Half of this page is already just quoting others who can articulate the idea more succicntly and with more passion than I can. The world is crowded with voices like never before, and there will always be someone who can write something more interesting, more engaging, and more useful than the best I can produce.
It reminds me of the various ideas I have had for software I have thought would be useful (or profitable!) — inevitably, a web search indicates that someone has already not only chanced upon my obscure idea, and has furthemore already invested thousands of hours in developing a solution which seems far better than anything I could ever create.
But the world is a big place. Perhaps there is room for my words in the smallest corner of the internet. No big data centre will be home for this site. It is fully self-hosted, meaning it runs on a small SBC (single board computer) in my study. I enjoy tinkering with technology, and publishing this way scratches another itch.
My objective here is to become better at communicating using the written word. To practice, using what little skill I have, and with repetition, with effort, to build up this muscle over time.
Who am I writing this for? In the past I have maintained a basic site as a kind of online curriculum vitae, but I am no longer interested in polishing any further the presentation of what are mainstream and mediocre professional skills. In my next post I will summarise and link to my previous academic work, as I do occasionally receive contacts requesting information or details about these research topics.
What topics can you expect to see me write posts on here? The truth is I don't yet know what I will write tomorrow, or in the following weeks and months. I am not writing for an audience, not to pursue some amorphous concept of 'reach', indeed my expectations for readership approach zero. This is not a technology blog, but you may find technical posts. There may be reviews or comments on interesting books I have read. There may be commentary on something I have been thinking about and want to write down in order to better structure my thoughts. There may even be, very rarely, an exegesis. I have an idea for one of those, which I think would make good writing practice to try and communicate and explain the concept in my mind. In summary, expect an eclectic collection of contributions to this site.
I cannot believe that I have to explicitly state this, but since we are in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six, here is the disclaimer: nothing written on this site will be written by generative AI. If I do happen to use AI for something in the future, it will be explicitly called out.
That's not to say I am a Luddite. Indeed, I see some beneficial uses of the technology (alongside many downsides). But I also spend quite a lot time thinking about accountability and governance. I hold strongly the belief that a machine cannot be held accountable for its actions — therefore a human must always be accountable for the actions of any machine. If an AI agent writes and publishes a hit piece then the human who controls and initially prompted the AI agent is as accountable for its writing as if he had written it himself. This is not a hard concept for me to grasp, since an AI agent is simply a piece of computer code, and computer code does not execute itself. If you boot a computer with a blank hard drive, a sea of zeros on the disk, nothing springs from the ether to fill it. But for people with a different mindset or understanding of technology, there seems to be some kind of personification of AI which leads them to believe they can delegate their accountability.
As an aside, the use of this word Luddite during the current AI craze feels most applicable to a subset of opponents of the technology — the description from the first page of the Wikipedia article is "workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality" which reflects a lot of the discussion I have seen online regarding the use of this tool. With AI there are additional concerns with who is using the tool, and what they are using it for, This topic deserves an essay of its own too.
This first post has been somewhat meandering, and has been written exclusively in the hour after 5 a.m. aside a strong cup of coffee, over the course of a few weekends. I am at that point in my life when an hour of undisturbed time can only come when my family is still asleep, and I do not work well in the late evenings. I do not regret my decision to have children, but I do sometimes miss the space to spend an hour or two working away at something, or nothing. Writing this post has been enjoyable — let us see how long this lasts.