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Back to basics (and writing in the editor)

August 2, 2019

It’s been a while since I published anything on this blog. So I’m just going to write for a few minutes and post it to shake some of the cobwebs off.

I want to get back to the fundamentals. After all, the fundamentals are fundamental. I read Adam Savage’s book, Every Tool’s a Hammer, this past month. (Check out my video about it!) In one chapter, he talks about the importance of drawing in his process. It’s one of the fundamental skills in creative work. It was useful 1000 years ago and will likely be useful 100 years from now. It’s one of the most effective ways to transfer an idea from your head to somebody else’s. (Though it might be lower resolution than inception.)

I do want to draw more. But it’s the publishing muscle that I need to get reps in with. For me, publishing a blog post has the least friction of everything I make.

Maybe friction isn’t the word. A couple things come to mind that could better describe things. 

First, I went to a Chuck Klosterman book signing (go pick up Raised in Captivity, I’m loving it so far) — he talks about how writing has changed for him. It used to be that he could work on a piece, send it out into the world, and that was the end of it. There’d be a few reviews after, but there wasn’t really an outlet to respond. Now the release is the middle of the process. You then have to monitor people’s reactions and you have the means to react to each individual reaction if you feel like it. One of the luxuries of posting to a blog that nobody reads is that there’s nothing to monitor after hitting “publish”.

Second, time craters. This is a phrase from Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (go pick that up too!) — I read it last year and recently picked the audiobook up to go back through again. It’s great. I used to always appreciate when authors narrate their book. Then I got to some books where the author probably shouldn’t have narrated their book. Make Time is very heavily a good case of the author narrating their own book. Or co-authors, in this case. The back-and-forth translates really well to the audiobook.

Oh yeah, time craters. An example of a time crater is a tweet. You post to Twitter. It takes a minute. Then it makes the dinosaurs go extinct. Or your attention, at least. That tweet can occupy some part of your mind for the next few hours. How is it doing? Did people laugh? With me or at me? Did they react at all?

So I’m going to try to write more in the short term. Just get comfortable hitting publish with no reactions. And hopefully move on to where I’m a little more scared to hit publish.

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