Greetings! I’m back(ish) after a brief mid-summer hiatus…
Over the past six weeks or so I had the chance to take a writing course from
, the essayist and author of The End of Burnout (worth the read).The course was “Academic Writing for the Public” and has had me thinking a bit differently about how I read and how I write.
Something I have really enjoyed about writing a newsletter is treating it as a way of practicing writing. Both because it’s fun to write things and to interact with people about those things, and because I would like to continue doing that on a larger scale, especially with my next book.
Writing is a practice (like most things), which means it requires a posture of return. In order to do it, you must persist. In order to do it well, you must persist a lot (at least I must). And so, I figured writing at a faster clip (i.e., publishing a newsletter weekly) would help me improve.
That push has been incredibly useful. It’s given me access to some needed time pressure and some insight into what it feels like to pull an idea together into a readable format even when my brain feels like one gigantic whistling desert, lone tumbleweed and all.
Even in the midst of that feeling, even still, it’s still possible to type words, put sentences together, and express an idea.
Generally speaking, I like the you have to write bad ideas to write good ideas theory of creativity.
The idea that the task is less about waiting for “good ideas” to occur and then pulling them out and putting them on a page, and more about just pouring all the ideas out and discovering/editing/revising your way to the good ones.
In fact, studies have suggested this may work:
“when people begin working on a creative task, they usually experience a rush of ideas right away. Then the pace of idea production starts to slow, and people assume that the well has gone dry: no more creative ideas will be forthcoming.
But this assumption is wrong […] creativity stays steady or even increases across the length of an idea-generation session. Conventional and obvious notions are often the first to surface, and it takes a while to clear these out and move on to more original ideas.”
After taking Jon’s writing class, I realized that I am probably the type of (gulp) writer who needs a bit more time than one week to noodle on things, pour out all the bad ideas, noodle some more, and then pull together the kind of thing I think I’m after.
And also - let me just tell you - getting a toe-hold on this book project has been a challenge the past few weeks, and I am feeling the need to bore all of my writing energy in that direction for a time. But I’ll still holler if I have a thought that coalesces, or if I read/listen to something that piques my interest.
So, this a 600 word way of saying that the once-every-week cadence with which I have been sending you this newsletter will be shifting to roughly once-every-sometimes.
And I of course will let you know when I change my mind about that too. Everything in moderation, as they say, especially moderation.