🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (20 tweets)
4. a fun summary of the many iterations of my drafts is: i've been finding out that to address your boredom you have to address your desires, and to address your desires you have to investigate your self-concept, and to investigate your self-concept is to annihilate yourself
at the end of self-annihilation is renewal and rebirth, and when you get there you forget what you were bored about in the first place. sometimes you pull a little thread because you're bored and you accidentally unravel the universe
5. writing a book feels like the most mentally exhausting thing I’ve ever done, tho maybe I’m forgetting if work was worse back when I had a job. I feel like it really tires me out, like a mental workout. maybe similar to doing math all day or something. it’s different than work
6. Tho I’m probably making life harder for myself at some levels by not being more structured in my approach. I mean I *am* more structured in everything than I was a few years ago... it’s complicated https://t.co/rDJAY2U8wi
I think about these two pictures from @joulee a lot – very succinct and powerful way of describing how professional creatives have a more structured process, and how that isn't necessarily limiting – you actually get to try more things this way https://t.co/XUA8zUZBMb
Gretchen was really right about this - multiple books worth of tweets and blogposts are easier than a single book, because a book needs to be internally consistent/coherent in a way that blogs etc are not. I kinda cheated for FAN v1.0 and compromised on this, but will fix for 1.1 https://t.co/RsA6O6mH0q
7. But thinking on it more... A lot of great works don’t actually get it right all the way through, and I might be being too perfectionist here. Like FF7 is broadly considered one of the best games of all time and it could probably do with some editing
8. just shot out of bed wide awake to write a summary of my book. this is a thing that book-writing does to me. it doesn't let me sleep in peace. and yet i welcome this joyfully. is this some kind of stockholm syndrome? idk. it will only be known in retrospect
11. ok this is not a complaint or a grievance but it's quite mystical and amazing to me how, outside of a constrained environment like twitter, I can start writing something and then it really takes on a life of its own with its own desired scale/scope/depth etc
12. a thing I’m noticing on my latest final-final edit reread is that there’s something about the structure of a book, for me, that calls for “more scaffolding than it needs”. But it’s not really obvious until the end what can be stripped away, so maybe it’s the correct amount…
13. what scaffolding looks like to me is “Ted talk energy”, it looks like I was trying to hit certain beats to signal competence and knowledge but I’m not sure those beats are actually useful. I want to peel those layers off and dig into the mucky emotional quality of things
14. if I get a bolt of clarity where I’m currently getting some hinty humming, there’s a good chance I might be able to shave off 30% of the book volume by merging sections that previously weren’t obviously consonant. Both outcomes seem agonising lol. Kill your darlings…
15. you can literally see in my face how my book is doing https://t.co/y1VmeGtxN5
16. I got the bolt of clarity I was looking for, and it deeply restructured me from the inside out... and it was exhilarating in the moment, but the work is not yet done. my back started killing me for seemingly reason. i know i'm close https://t.co/3nWOVX6P0r