before inkhaven1, my friend the dynamical systems engineer called me to come to dinner so that he could sit me down and, given his years-long knowledge of my insecurities, anxieties, disposition and tendencies, give me a few words of advice to improve my experience.
he told me that I would become self-conscious of my flowery temperament and I would go hide to do my “serious writing” alone, and that this will conflict with both my desire to socialize and the actual ways I get energy, which is by being around people.
he suggested to me that I forget what it means to be “serious” and write in public in the courtyard on a couch so that I would ambiently get energy, not get FOMO, and meet people when I feel spacey and get up to get a fruit bar.
I continued to use principles from dynamical systems engineering to troubleshoot questions around energy use. If I wanted to accomplish all of my goals at Inkhaven, then energy management becomes important.
In systems engineering, you figure out the leverage points in a system, and that’s the spot where you can make a change, and it will actually make a difference in the system.
easier said than done, but when done carefully and well, it can actually often create the change that you predicted it would.
some aspects that help with stamina include:
reducing the number of things that are tiring
maintaining morale (making things that often are tiring, feel good, or, not feel bad, such that they actually do become less tiring)
Unfortunately, one of the major ways to improve your writing involves doing an activity that generally
has a lot of things that are tiring
is bad for morale
The major way of improving your writing of which I speak is:
Recursion!
Yes! Normal, beautiful recursion.
How does recursion improve your writing? Generally writing becomes better when you put more of yourself into it emotionally, and put more thought into it.
You can recurse on only one part of your writing or stage of writing and that will improve the entire effect of the piece.
Recursion is bad for morale because it can be hard.
How do you pick “what to think about more?” How do you pick “What to feel more intensely about” or for longer? How do you know which cycles of editing actually are helpful, rather than pointless overthinking, normal fear, or some kind of laziness you should work to eradicate?
These end up feeling bad for morale (the tiring things do feel tiring) and because we are talking about recursion here, each cycle of recursion is tiring and there are more units of the tiring, bad-for-morale thing.
So now we have a quandary.
Recursion is, regardless of the style of writing, or the stage of writing, basically a surefire way to improve your writing.
Recursion is, at the same time, something that is not good for your stamina.
How to resolve?
Interestingly, computer science has a solution to this. Different programming languages handle recursion differently, and some ways are much easier for a human being to follow along with than others.
There are different ways to organize “doing something again.”
One is to start another instance of a process inside the one you haven’t finished. This is something recursion can do. The original task waits while another version of the task happens, and the computer has to keep track of the unfinished situation.
This resembles a certain kind of writing experience. I am writing a sentence, but before I finish it I need to improve it, but before I improve it I need to decide what I actually mean, but before I decide what I mean I need to investigate whether I am the kind of person who should be writing this essay.
Meanwhile, I am still halfway through the sentence and am starting to lose my chain of thought.
Another way to organize repetition is iteration: do a pass, carry the result forward, then do another pass.
This second way tends to be a lot easier to think about conceptually.
It is much better for morale, and much better for the costs and weight of “having to remember loops and where you are inside a loop.”
As a writing practice, this might mean to break down the writing process into stages you like that have a beginning and an end, and that carry a legible result forward into the next stage.
Perhaps you can consider some stages:
Having Experiences-Writing Down Ideas-Choosing an Idea to Refine-Refining the Idea-Writing a First Draft-Revising Your Draft-Adding other Embellishments Such As Pictures
You can have a shorter or a longer list. You can also repeat steps that you did earlier, again later, if you wanted to. For example, you can have a “check if the funniest thing about this for you is captured” early in the process when you are fleshing out the idea, and then again later when you are editing.
This process reduces the number of unfinished activities I am holding in my head while I do them.
One major way to reduce redundancy is to separate the “just write it down” and the “I’ll edit this” stages of writing into two very distinct stages in your workflow. Two stages may seem like a lot, compared to one fused stage, but the total of two stages is a lot fewer than the potentially ten stages you would have if you were editing it and recursing on the writing in your mind.
I do believe that recursion often makes writing better—whether it’s another editing pass or another pass at deeper thinking. But I would make those recursion stages their own special stages.
There is a downside of this certain very specific goopy mind-recursion, which is that your brain tends to be pretty organized, and in running this process you may accidentally make it less organized.
I consider this different from “figuring out what you want to say” which usually involves stewing on something for a while in an extremely nonlinear fashion.
Noticing which stage of the process you are lets you have the most indulgent fun in that actual process, without the constraints of another part of the process creeping in, and keeps you organized.
At Inkhaven1, I wrote my ideas on a piece of papyrus, free wrote on the typewriter in the morning, and then in the evening I edited my writing on the computer. Thus, the stages were separated both in the equipment that was used, and separated in time.