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nervous but i'll give it a shot: for my second @threadapalooza i'ma do 100 tweets about @introspectvv, the ebook i've been wrangling and wrestling with all year. i'll write both about the book itself, and about the process of writing/editing it
1. I didn't really set out to write this book in particular, it's more of an emergent thing from my own journaling and from the many conversations I've had with people about it over the years. people recurrently ask me "how to X...?" and the answer is recurrently ~ "journal!"
2. it's a hilariously, frustratingly meta book that gets me second-guessing myself more than almost anything else I've written. it's sort of like: writing well is hard, writing well about how to write well is even harder. errors and imperfections feel even more inexcusable
3. introspect is my second ebook. the first was Friendly Ambitious Nerd, which was much easier to write a v1.0 of in comparison. and I guess I had fewer expectations of it, since it was wonderful to get anything out at all. My sympathies for anyone working on any kind of sequel
4. also I guess all of the things in FAN are things that I think about a lot and talk about a lot all the time, so it flowed naturally. INTROSPECT is in a sense about part of the *process* that I used to help me write FAN, and part of that process is opaque even to me
5. so I am very nervous and worried about saying the wrong things, or saying things in the wrong order, or framing things in the wrong way, or making errors of omission. this has been a hilarious kind of self-torture, i've worked myself up into anxiety and nausea over it 😂😩
6. but I think it's worth it, because the process of working through it is teaching me things about myself. there is absolutely a truth to the fact that you learn things by trying to teach other people about it – and the learning is more complete, more comprehensive, inside out
7. I have repeatedly been tempted to just give up. and I could say that I give up periodically from time to time. I am committed to finishing it eventually, I'd really like to ship it before the year is up. hoping this thread clarifies things for me enough to upload and publish
8. it's so easy to get really lost in the weeds when writing a book. everything is wrong to some degree. there's an infinite set of mistakes and errors, and some of them will wreck the whole thing, or maim it terribly. you have to be a field surgeon, making ugly tradeoffs
9. when you haven't yet set out on the journey of writing a book, or any kind of journey I suppose, it's fun to fantasize. but there's always something grim about the reality of it. george orwell talked about this stuff better than I'll ever be able to: https://t.co/Vbp0zi7TtJ https://t.co/kuEz0Huigf
10. it's a mystical thing, writing a book with intention, and how you have to walk this tightrope of taking yourself very seriously ("I have stuff worth saying") and simultaneously not at all ("these are but mere words", so you can edit them). it's a psychological extreme sport
11. which once again brings me back to how meta it is to write about introspection, which is self-similar to the act of writing a book. it's a kind of interior investigation, narrative troubleshooting, hitting inspect element on everything, making sense of it, finding meaning
12. it would be silly and incompetent of me to spend more than 10-15% of this 100 tweet thread talking about the woe-is-me aspects of writing. see the challenge? the challenge is to be accurate without overwhelming the story. and there is always more to the story
13. it's always helpful to revisit the thoughts and letters of people who have walked the path before you. orwell said that his writing suffered when it lacked political purpose (he meant politics in the broadest sense – about knowing the outcome you want to see in the world)...
14. and for me, similarly, the purpose is to help other people. genuinely. I have seen firsthand how people in my DMs have had their spirits lifted from our conversations, and I feel a certain obligation to take that material and share it with more people, anyone who needs it
15. and so that's what I have to keep in mind. I shouldn't be writing to defend myself from critics (tho it would be nice to avoid unneccessarily getting my ass kicked), or to impress people (tho that's nice too). the goal is that readers come away nourished, strong, clear
16. so ok enough meta-flaffing, let's talk about the book. wtf is the book about, anyway. can it be summarized into a few tweets? if you're discerning, you may have already gotten the message from the tweets so far, in which case you might not care to read any more – totally cool
17. but one of the major lessons I've learned – and ironically have to relearn over and over again 😂 – is the value of repetition. you have to reaffirm your learnings. you have to repeat them in different ways, in new contexts, so that you really grasp them properly
18. I do not claim to be a guru, prophet or authority who has it all figured out, and I make an effort to shoo away people who treat me as such. it's not just an ego thing, I think such gestures weaken my ability to do my work. i am an imperfect person who struggles
19. there are many people far more accomplished, well-adjusted etc who have written similar things. but I write anyway, because I remember when I was a kid, I didn't just want to hear from unrelatable superhumans, I wanted to hear from Someone Like Me https://t.co/nrRSqdyZkk
20. btw, do you you notice the conflict in the past few tweets? I'm trying to Get On With It, but I'm also trying to Talk About The Struggle 😂 I'm thinking most editors'd say "stop fucking around and Get On WIth It", but it's precisely The Struggle that I wanted to know about
21. OKAY. enough preeamble. let's talk about the fucking book. my personal approach to introspection – and obviously there are many approaches, but this is mine – is to start by doing lots of stream-of-consciousness writing. if *nothing* else, I want to persuade people to try it
22. the point of stream-of-consciousness writing is to just get words out of your system as quickly as possible. the words don't have to make sense. don't worry about punctuation or capitalization or sentence structure or spelling or grammar. just fucking gooooo and keep going
23. the idea here is that if you go really fucking fast, and generate lots and lots of rambly text, along the way you'll slip past the cops in your head. and this is part of the core premise of introspect. I won't claim that you'll find The Core Truth(s) About Who You Are, but...
24. practically everybody has all sorts of guard rails and "no entry" signs and all sorts of bullshit mechanisms in their head that contain & constrain their thinking, their self-image, everything. S.O.C. writing is about making attempts at escaping those constraints
25. I sometimes describe this as "be so prolific you don't recognize yourself". another way of thinking about this is, imagine going on a literal journey. like, step outside your house and start walking, one step at a time. at first you walk past all your familiar haunts & joints
26. but as you keep going, eventually you'll get to the threshold– the furthest you've ever been away from home. and past that threshold is *unknown*. you can undertake this journey "entirely" inside your own head, with your own words, and you will be transformed by it https://t.co/7hAfbOxgdK
27. I put "entirely" in quotes, becaus the nature of journeys, real journeys, is that they are transformational. it's funny how often self-help books promise transformation in such cheerful terms. I feel obliged to share it as a warning. maybe that's how I should frame this...
29. I'm currently at almost 800k words of introspective journaling. I'd say... about every 150k or so, you become an "entirely" different person. there are elements of the old self in the new self. but also you can't really go back. I feel we should be honest about these things
30. is this an overly dramatic a way of talking about introspection? 😂 hey, I love this, I'm arriving at some of my personal points of contention and disagreement with myself, which explain why I've been taking so long with the book. and I get to demonstrate this in real time
31. I think I'm kind of writing a guide for ultramarathoners. and ultramarathoning is dramatic. this is not a guide for casual joggers, although casual joggers may be curious about it. but my mistake is that I've been trying to write for both groups simultaneously. can't do that
32. for most people, introspection might simply mean something like, think about your goals, then think about what's in the way of your goals, then address that. which is fine! good for you! but for me, the goals themselves Oughta Be Interrogated (with gentle + firm curiosity)
33. "guide for ultramarathon introspectors" sounds pretentious and ugh though. you see my problem 😂 it's a solvable problem, but it requires finesse, it requires subtlety and the ability to be oblique – it requires me to be more skillful than I currently am
34. still! this is useful clarity that I will be bringing to my ebook. it will make the ebook better by influencing lots of little decisions in lots of little ways. and I only got here through a moderately-unfiltered stream of consciousness thread, w/o knowing it in advance
35. I'm trying to convey a sense of fun and adventure about this whole enterprise. there's also dark and forboding elements. you will laugh and you will cry, but please, god, don't approach this trying/hoping to become More Productive in some narrow utilitarian sense
36. ooh here's a riff coming to me that I don't think is in the book yet, not in the right form: introspection to me is, amongst many other things, about cultivating a healthy relationship with the unknown. pair this with: https://t.co/OCjp5vevOq
37. I suppose we are now in a "let's talk about all the conflicts and tensions" phase of this thread. so one of my conflicts is: do I give people a bunch of instructions of what to do? that's what lots of people ask for! but I don't... entirely want to do that 😂
38. I *do* have a set of instructions in the book, because I don't want to be annoyingly evasive, but I'm anxious about people *reducing* the book to that. because the spirit of how you do things is much more important than the letter of what you do https://t.co/Y8gBdTGrvO
39. feel myself getting a little tired and bored writing this stuff, which is itself something that bothers me. I *know* that this stuff is valuable, and good, and *powerful*, so how come I'm not excited? I must be framing it wrongly, still. there's always a move. brb
@visakanv thinking in game design terms: you can design a game for hardcore fans first, and then maybe carefully onboard it and balance the early-game so that casual players get some mileage out of it but you can't add the kind of depth you need with iteration and focus-testing