drossbucket

[Written as part of Notebook Blog Month.]

I’m veering off the post ideas list today to talk about something that’s come up during the month. David MacIver’s been on a bit of a campaign recently to get people to try a daily writing practice, and has a good Twitter thread and blog post on how to get started. (His notebook blog is the main inspiration for my current notebook experiment.)

It turns out I have some opinions on this, focussed on a slightly different but complementary area: getting over emotional blocks around writing in public at all. If I had time I might try and rewrite this into a more generally applicable ‘advice’ type format. But I don’t, so I’m just going to ramble about what I did, and hope it’s possible to extract something useful out of that. Probably the main points are the classic start with something low-stakes and gradually ramp up, but maybe the details will turn out to be helpful too.

(I do still have an emotional block around anything that looks too much like ‘advice’ or ‘teaching’, actually. Like it’s claiming more authority than I have? I’m feeling some of that even writing this rambling sort of post – I mean, it’s not like I write some amazingly well-written mega-popular blog. But I do 1. regularly write posts that 2. some people read and get something useful out of, and that’s probably a more helpful reference point for people starting out anyway.)

The mechanics of writing blog posts came pretty easily to me. I know how to write in a fairly easy and unforced conversational voice, and have the result be coherent and entertaining enough that people will bother to read it. I have a decent intuitive grasp of how to explain why I care about a topic, and how to give enough background that people can follow along. I didn’t have to work on any of this deliberately and don’t have much insight into how I do it. I’m sure I could still improve a lot at these things, but it’s not been a focus for me.

Getting into a habit of writing frequently and coming up with topics to write about was hard at first, but over time both of these problems just solved themselves. I didn’t specifically put much thought into either, and David’s advice for getting round these at the start (minimal success criterion of ‘just write one sentence’, random book page to generate easy prompts) looks good to me.

What didn’t come easily for me, at all, was hitting the damn Publish button. Even under a pseudonym. I actually started from a level that seems extremely pathetic in retrospect, where I struggled to write comments on other people’s blogs under a consistent pseudonym. I’d write one comment under some name, and then I’d go back and nerve myself to look at it the next day, and it would look so cringily pointless and stupid that I’d never be able to make myself use that name again.

Come to think of it, I originally had this problem even with writing I didn’t publish. I’d write it, and the next day it would look atrociously bad, so I’d just delete it or bin it. So I have very little surviving writing from before age 25 or so. I’m not too sure how I solved that one, except that I kept going and eventually it looked less bad (combination of my writing improving and me dropping my standards way down from the very stupid ‘everything should be crafted carefully at the word level with no stale metaphors, Politics and the English Language style’ ones I’d picked up). I think this sort of ‘taste gap’ is very common when your ability to recognise good writing gets too far ahead of your ability to produce it, but I just had a really overly strong disgust reaction for some reason.

Solving writing in public was also quite accidental at first. I had a lot of time to waste and spent some of it going down the rabbit hole of something called rationalist-adjacent tumblr. I think it’s still going, but the peak was probably around 2015 or so. It’s hard to describe exactly what it was like, but a short version is ‘a bunch of clever but bored and unproductive people with fantastically distinctive writing styles and aesthetics having endless repetitive stupid arguments about dust specks and cupcakes and trying to befriend anybody who came along to join the argument.’ (Those two links give a better idea.) I never quite became part of the community there, more of a lurker and occasional commenter, but I did start writing. Mainly because it was incredibly low-stakes, and there was an easy ladder of increasing difficulty. First just reading and liking posts, then replying with the odd comment, then writing my own posts on low-controversy topics nobody was going to start a big fuss about. I started exploring my thoughts on mathematical intuition and discovering that I had something to say.

Around this time I started figuring out what was happening, and stretching my abilities deliberately. One big influence was Sarah Constantin’s post A Return To Discussion. This was aimed at people who were fleeing the spotlight of public discussion:

I have noticed personally is that people have gotten intimidated by more formal and public kinds of online conversation. I know quite a few people who used to keep a “real blog” and have become afraid to touch it, preferring instead to chat on social media. It’s a weird kind of locus for perfectionism — nobody ever imagined that blogs were meant to be masterpieces. But I do see people fleeing towards more ephemeral, more stream-of-consciousness types of communication, or communication that involves no words at all (reblogging, image-sharing, etc.) There seems to be a fear of becoming too visible as a distinctive writing voice.

But it also turned out to be useful for someone trying to learn how to do it in the first place. It called out some of my strategies and pushed me towards doing better:

You can preempt embarrassment by declaring that you’re doing something shitty on purpose. That puts you in a position of safety. You move to a space for trashy, casual, unedited talk, and you signal clearly that you don’t want to be taken seriously, in order to avoid looking pretentious and being deflated by criticism. I think that a lot of online mannerisms, like using all-lowercase punctuation, or using really self-deprecating language, or deeply nested meta-levels of meme irony, are ways of saying “I’m cool because I’m not putting myself out there where I can be judged. Only pompous idiots are so naive as to think their opinions are actually valuable.”

Very on point for someone with a tumblr called ‘drossbucket’! (That I’m-being-shitty-on-purpose thing did get me writing, though, even if it’s limiting in the long run. If you need it to start writing at all, I’d say go with it.)

That post also gets into the moral dimension of being able to have opinions in public, in terms of accountability and open debate. I’m not going to get into that, partly because it would take too long and partly because I don’t feel like I’m there yet. Still too conflict-averse to stick my neck out on most things that matter.

Still, I’ve kept working on it, increasing the difficulty level in small steps. I got this wordpress blog and moved over there, starting off by writing the same sort of short posts I wrote on tumblr. Then I started upping the quality standards and writing longer pieces that I’d obviously put time and thought into. No hiding behind the shitty-on-purpose label if it turned out bad. I got a Twitter account and started talking to people there. Then I attached the blog to my real name, but didn’t advertise that much. Then I added my real name and face to Twitter as well.

I was helped a lot by ending up in a fantastic corner of Twitter where people are really thoughtful and encourage each other with their writing projects, rather than trying to knock each other down and look clever all the time. Same for blog comments. I’d never have managed it otherwise. I’m not at the point where I could venture into some fraught culture war quagmire, or open up about anything deeply personal and upsetting. (I’m not even sure that I want to be able to do those things!) But by now there’s a pretty wide scope of topics where I’m able to blab out some thoughts with my name attached. And I want to keep pushing the scope of what I can do. Either directly on this blog, or by spinning up new alts to explore something different and merging them in.

So, yeah, I guess my advice did boil down to ‘start small and ramp up’ in the end. I hope the details are interesting to read though. Good luck to anyone trying this!