Finding My Compass as a Writer

I had the thought pretty early here at Inkhaven that writing a post every day would be demanding, but easily feasible in the sense that I can write anything at all about anything and so long as it meets the word count, it counts.

Most of my writing here so far has been a fair bit above the minimum word count. I had decided that I would very likely not know how to judge the quality of my posts (not just in terms of what other people think about them, but what I will think about them myself four months after the program ends). But if I do not know the quality of my posts, what can I use as my north star generally speaking as I go through my days?

I figured that “becoming a better writer” would be a good goal, but this can be pretty nondescript. How do I make it something more tangible?

I’ve thus been thinking about what questions or standards I can use, for it. Here are some that I have come up with so far, in no order.

• Length

  • This one is interesting because I am not using length as an indicator of quality in itself, but I am using length as an indicator on if I’m making progress on a shortfall I know I have, which is not explaining things in enough detail, straight up leaving out key details, stories or concerns, not actually thinking through examples or writing them up, not thinking through about follow-ups, not giving historical or cultural context, or not mentioning why I care about what I’m writing about or what in the world I’ve seen that makes me think that what I’m writing about is more universal, rather than purely personal, such that I feel compelled to share it. Length is therefore a proxy for if I’m doing any of these things more, because if I make no other changes around topic or writing style, my pieces should just all be longer if I am doing any of these things more.

• Time spent writing a post

  • This one is interesting because it’s not that I want writing each post to be “faster” or “save me more time,” or become a “faster writer,” (since speed depends so much on the content you are writing) but rather doing enough work at each of the stages, such that each of the stages is optimized for itself as a stage. If fleshing out the idea is taking me a while, then I should spend that time and flesh out the idea. If editing is taking me a while, that I should spend that time editing. But the hope is not to mix up stages too much, or move between them in ways that aren’t very good. And so the time spent writing a post is a proxy for if there is “wasted time” from distraction or not finishing the work in a different stage.

• Personal exhaustion and joy

  • If the writing is not causing me sadness of exhaustion, that means I am doing something right in terms of emotional management around the writing, which is important for sustainability.

• Personal joy in reading my writing

  • If I check my posts for something related to adding a picture or changing something small, and see myself sucked back into my own writing, just reading it straight

• Curiosity about a variety of topics

  • Generally with writing that feels worthwhile, there are more cool conversations and there becomes growing interest and a feeling of “glowiness” or “sparkle” about a topic. It is not that the writing exhausts the curiosity, but generates more.

• Iterations on the same seed idea, tracking the what and the how

  • I could track cycles that I go through, after I have an idea, where I iterate back on the same idea, germinating the seed, or intensifying a cloud, imagining a small cloud and then spinning it more and adding more water vapor and energy and seeing it expand in size such that it’s closer to the idea cloud in my brain that originally made the idea, but both more imaginative and more clear than the original cloud in my mind. I do not often practice asking and clearly articulating, to and for myself, both “this what I want this post to say” and “this is how I think it should say it” as a pointer and a starting point for the initial cloud shape to then germinate. Most of the creative force goes into the linear arc of getting it onto the page, and then refining how I did it. Getting more cycles in earlier in the process could be cool to try and time spent in that stage can be cool to track in the form of tracking cycles.

• Number of lost ideas

  • This one is kind of funny, because “forgotten” “lost” or “forever unwritten” posts is something that would be hard to track. However I wanted to include it as a metric. “Something I thought was funny, then never wrote it, then a week later don’t really think it’s funny anymore, but more because I exhausted thinking about the joke than it never having been funny” would be a sad failure mode, in that 6 months later I may really enjoy reading about this joke and would be sad that it never got written! And so something about working towards “less leakiness” in all stages of the writing process (perhaps I don’t make a full post about the joke but write it down somewhere where it’s fresh) seems like something to work towards.

• Consistency of posting

  • At Inkhaven, this is the main metric that is tracked by the facilitators, as we have to post every single day. Posting every day, or on any regular schedule, regardless of quality is a cool metric because it is a metric about work done as a more pure axis of work than work that leads to quality. Lots of work that can be deemed “not quality enough” can easily be abandoned, and so having consistency as a metric all by itself serves as a buttress around quality being the only metrics, as quality can be very subjective, and it is hard to actually improve quality without more work put in in the format of consistency and just doing it, and so having it as a metric is good. Even “this is too hard, I won’t get the quality, I’ll work on something else because I have to do something today, even the least viable easiest thing you can think of to do, is still doing something instead of nothing, and doing any writing means you are doing some higher quality writing than doing no writing! Lots of things get born as distractions or side projects of something else!

• Going through with an idea in the time it takes to execute

  • This can look like having an idea to write something in a day, or work on something that day, and actually working on that thing that day instead of finding a different thing or a tangential thing to work on. It shows that certain writing blocks are being consistently worked through (you won’t work on the writing that is easiest for you, consistently and not avoiding writing things that are hard for too long).

• Adding in more habits that I like

  • This can include anything that you hope your writing process would have, that it might not yet, or that you might want to be doing more of. This can include things like reading more books and poetry, spending time with tools that I like (paper and pencil, the typewriters, post-it notes, the whiteboards), and also things like having more time for editing.

• Motivation to add to or fix up old posts

  • This one is funny as a proxy. The motivation for this bullet point is that you like the things you are writing and posting enough to find it worth fiddling with it and improving it when the inspiration strikes you (rather than for example not thinking it is worth it, or not thinking your base draft was coherent enough at all for edits or improvements to feel like they are adding bricks or adding artwork to something that is a strong enough foundation that you care about refining).