I'm going to try a seasonal rhythm with creativity this year. It feels healthier than doing everything all at once all the time.
I've been reading Virginia Woolf's diary this month, and you can see this approach across her life. Each book follows a similar pattern:
* Idea nurturing — no writing, lots of reading, an idea identified and nurtured
* Writing — active, focused attention on the book
* Editing + promotion — drafts to friends, proofs, interviews
* Rest — vacations, plus "easier" writing (criticism, essays)
You can track her emotions through the phases, too: nervous anticipation, intense focus, anxious exhaustion, then finally ease.
One of the personal side effects of the decline and fall of the Farcaster scenius is that I have run out of writing ideas.
I didn't appreciate until now how much of my writing on Paragraph was informed by direct conversations on this network (or things that I was reading here).
It's a personal reminder that creative work does not exist in a vacuum; it is informed, nurtured (or smothered) by the context in which one creates. Finding and maintaining good sources of inspiration is an important aspect of creative work.
Also that value is not always monetizable. How would you monetize (or even measure) a social network that "inspires other people to create more"? It's a hard problem: and so, "the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart"
Greatness can't be planned. The stepping stones don't look like the endpoint.
New essay using Picbreeder (a genetic art experiment) and Melville's whaling voyage to explain why carefully planned careers fail, and what to do instead.
https://paragraph.com/@driftless/melville-and-his-mfa-by-sea
After promising to write more essays a few weeks ago, I immediately started on the next one: a summary of Dorothea Brande's book, "Becoming a Writer."
However, in teasing out her ideas around integrating different personalities, I began to realize that the critical voice in my head was not mine—but something else.
After multiple rewrites, this strange essay emerged. It's about writing platforms, genius, egregores, and the voices in your head.
Today is my birthday and I just published what is probably my most personal essay.
I believe I’ve spent the last 6 years running away from my own writing success, mostly because I had internalized pervasive ideas around writing difficulty and struggle. I was chasing different online platforms hoping for a silver bullet because I did not want to embrace what might, in fact, be my natural form: writing essays.
https://paragraph.com/@driftless/writing-through-denial?referrer=0x33514A171B0eC657a0237Dd388fAA4f39eE2a2E4
PMF is a good framework + goal for writers and creatives, too.
It's the same idea but usually referred to as "finding your voice" or developing your "creative signature." Same concept.
News and social media is an entirely different country. A different planet, even.
I would even go so far as to describe the entire Internet as a collective creative project. A vast novel (or, perhaps a better analogy, a video game) that everyone participates in (some a little, some a lot).
But while we would generally not confuse a novel about 1920s New York with the lived experience of people in 1920s New York, we confuse the Internet of now with the lived reality of now all the time (mostly because the feedback loop is so tight).
We are all Don Quixotes, tilting at windmills, book-mad and unaware of the stories that have infected our brains.
Jorge Luis Borges on timeless beauty in writing. "A beautiful line of verse should be beautiful today as it was centuries ago."
He's pointing toward an objective standard for beauty in art, an idea that has (somewhat ironically) fallen out of style.
I wrote a new story about a company trying to grow infinitely large. A bit of Borges meets Office Space. Check it out if that sounds interesting to you.
https://unnerv.ing/p/infinity-org
I wrote a new essay about how and why it’s so difficult to pay artists.
I’ll be honest: this was a hard essay to write. I started it six months ago, and after 4,000 rambling words, gave it up. It was too depressing.
But I wanted to share, especially in light of all these new tools that are trying to monetize creative work. A map of some of the difficulties might be helpful.
https://paragraph.com/@driftless/why-artists-cant-get-paid?referrer=0x33514A171B0eC657a0237Dd388fAA4f39eE2a2E4
