Geekflex

One of the biggest challenges I expected with an undertaking such as NaBloPoMo is coming up with things to write about. I was worried about having nothing to say, or worse, that I would post something of little to no value. It turns out that I’m a much bigger blabbermouth than I knew, because I haven’t run out of things to write or talk about¹.

When I started this blog, I wrote about the difficulties in choosing when to publish:

once my post is done, I’ll read it over. That’s where insecurity kicks in and I begin to second-guess myself. It’s like going over a final exam to double-check all my math, and then asking myself if I really solved the problem using the right method. Often, my first instinct is correct — but looking over the same problem again I start doubting myself

Keeping to the daily schedule imposed by NaBloPoMo is an excuse to ignore my insecurities entirely and just publish so that I maintain the one-post-per-day quota. This week alone there were multiple occasions where I had to submit a post without giving it a thorough re-read, and sometimes without even having a proper conclusion. One post in particular I actually submitted from my phone at 5 minutes to midnight from a pub. I had written most of it earlier in the day but I wanted to add some more points before publishing it. Instead, I let myself get talked into staying for a few more drinks and had to hastily finish up the post and publish it.

So far I’ve been very pleased with the results. The comments I’ve been getting on the blog and through Twitter and Facebook have been overwhelmingly positive and often thought-provoking, leading to interesting discussions. This makes me feel much more capable of providing some quality content on a daily basis. I’ve been learning a lot about my own writing process as I go and I’m curious to see where the next 24 days will lead and if I’ll be able to keep up.

Thanks for all the support, dear readers!

It seems that every other post on this blog is about writing and how I’d like to do it more … and then I go off and post nothing for several months. So I’ve decided to participate in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). NaBloPoMo (formerly, NaNoBloMo) is a spin-off of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which challenges participants to write a 50,000-word novel from scratch throughout the month of November. The goal of NaBloPoMo is to write a one blog post per day throughout an entire month.

I’m hoping that the external motivation encourages me to write more frequently. I entertain no notions that I’ll continue to write daily once the month is over; I only hope to have seeded a habit that will keep me writing regularly. I’m putting forth my best effort to maintain a strong signal/noise ratio despite the fact that I’ll be posting something every day. (This post: pure noise).

The goal of this exercise is to train a habit, and I’ll know that the few “noise” posts that come out of it will have served their purpose if I can maintain a regular writing schedule once the month is over. In the meantime, I’ll also try to stick to the theme I put forth when I started this blog. I have some topics that I’ve written down but have yet to fill in with a full blog post. This month I want to finally Get That Shit Done, and I hope some of it turns out to be useful.

I don’t blog often. The last time I wrote a post was 3 months ago, in August. When I started this blog I had intended to stick to a regular writing schedule, but clearly that’s not how things turned out. I’m very proud of the articles I’ve written here so far, and I let myself get trapped into thinking that each post must be better than the last. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say recently — on the contrary, I’ve had a number of topics bouncing around in my head and I’ve even written down quick outlines and notes for them.

The problem is that at the end of the day I have trouble organizing my thoughts into prose. Written language is so much more subtle than spoken language. I’m much more fluid when speaking to someone (especially if there’s a pint of beer in my hand). I thought of recording a podcast and instantly rejected the idea on the grounds that since I never listen to podcasts, I couldn’t reasonably expect anyone to listen to mine. Writing it is, then.

When I read 7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School I realized I was stuck on Bad Habit #2: “Expecting someone to hand you a writing prompt.” No one is going to tell me what I should be writing about, so I can’t keep bouncing around ideas until someone says “Okay, Skrud, I want to hear about x.” The hardest part about writing is figuring out what the hell I want to say. Once I know what I want to say the words flow naturally, but being indecisive about what I want to say is my writer’s block.

In a way, this is a lot like programming. I’ve always felt that 90% of the effort that goes into programming is just figuring out what it is you want to program. When faced with a particular problem to solve, the bulk of the work is solving it. Translating that solution into code is trivial by comparison. As I become more experienced in the art of programming, solutions become more obvious. Being familiar with the systems I work on allows to make quick assumptions that help me hone in on the problem areas much sooner.

With writing, I often find myself stuck in the what the hell is it I want to write-phase during which I stare at a blank page for uncomfortably long periods of time. Or worse, I get the ideas criss-crossed in my head and start going off on several tangents, failing to combine everything into a cohesive idea. In programming, this is akin to writing brand new APIs and modifying miscellaneous libraries instead of focusing on the problem at hand.

If experience in programming makes solving programming problems easier, then experience in writing should make the writing process easier. The more I do it, the more naturally and easily I’ll be able to put my thoughts into words. In other words, if I want to write more, I need to write more. Duh.

Okay, there are really two hardest parts about blogging.

The most obvious one is actually sitting down to do it on a regular basis and not letting it stagnate. There’s an easy solution for that, and it’s the same one every blogger will you: make a regular schedule and stick to it. Then it becomes routine. It’s just like going to the gym. That’s a horrible analogy because I hate going to the gym. But I love writing.

The more subtle quirk to blogging has more to do with the writing process itself — something I know very little about. The last time I received any kind of formal education in “Creative Writing” was probably in high school. The hard part for me isn’t in translating my thoughts into words, but in knowing when to stop and just click “Publish”.

If I’m left to my own devices, I might just ramble on into eternity flitting from topic to tangent in some kind of endless pattern. If I’m not careful, a post about code could end up with unicorns and rainbows. I need to be able to realize when I’ve said my piece and move on — and not end up in a situation where I’ve combined several unrelated blog post ideas into one massively incoherent post.

And here’s the worst part: once my post is done, I’ll read it over. That’s where insecurity kicks in and I begin to second-guess myself. It’s like going over a final exam to double-check all my math, and then asking myself if I really solved the problem using the right method. Often, my first instinct is correct — but looking over the same problem again I start doubting myself. At this juncture in the writing process I feel like I’m faced with three choices:

• Publish now and release something imperfect on the world
• Revise and edit, running the risk of obscuring my original point
• Discard the post entirely and it will never see the light of day

It’s more like a flow-chart, really:

It was my leaning towards that last option that caused my previous blog to fail more than anything else. There were a number of posts that I’d written which never made it out of the Revise <-> Publish loop, and many more that were written and then discarded.

Publishing takes a combination of guts and apathy. You have to realize that no matter what you release, it will never be perfect. The Revise <-> Publish loop is more likely to just dull down your point until it becomes a softened nub and loses its impact. Each iteration will remove some of the edginess and replace it with something more politically correct, more agreeable, more average. The post ceases to become an expression of original thought, and ends up being a reflection of everyone else’s thoughts. And that’s how I lost my voice in the noise.

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent TED talk, she talks about a disembodied “genius” that provides creativity as a “psychological construct that protects you from the result of your work.” This is why I was motivated into starting a new blog instead of reviving the old one. Calling the blog by something other than my name allows me to distance myself from what I write. I can establish an identity that is mostly-me-but-not-entirely and be far removed from it enough to release something that isn’t perfect. Now when I see something I can think “this is a topic that would be great for Geekflex” as oppose to “this is something that I should blog about sometime.” As for those things that don’t fit on Geekflex, that’s what twitter is for.