Finishing The Thought
On Discipline and Writing Regularly. Also: Heerengracht Index, Latent Space Siblings, and Jamie xx
I’m almost at 100 weekly newsletters (~10 to go), having not skipped a beat since January 2023. In a weekly writing practice to this extent, one does inevitably encounter weeks where the value does not feel commensurate to the effort, especially if it’s primarily a passion project. But, eventually those weeks that were a struggle become sediment and foundation. A published thought is complete and more able to relate to your other thoughts and in the best case, it becomes a capstone article one continues to link back to. Even if it’s half-formed, in the words of Toby Shorin, you’ve “finished the thought”. I tried snipping this into only a part of the full quote, but the entire take is worth reading here (emphasis mine):
I hear people often express hesitance about writing something they’re thinking about by saying “it’s already been said” or “I’m sure other people have written about this.” A lot of this comes down to a fear of not being seen or accepted by others. The fear is “I’ll look dumb” which is just another way of saying “others won’t accept me”
What I want to tell all those people is that there is a real beauty and satisfaction in doing it for yourself and not for anyone else. Thinking through something, and really figuring it out for yourself, is so rewarding, and so self-evidently valuable. The reason to publish, in my view, is because you have to “finish the thought.”
Few thoughts are ever really finished. But if you don’t write it down, express this thought in a way that others can understand and reason about, there’s a tendency that the thoughts will pile up. It becomes a messy ball of string, and over time it becomes difficult to separate the new ideas from the older, more inchoate ones. References and examples get tangled. You have to cut the string somewhere, knowing that you can always tie a new piece of string on later. Demarcating your thoughts like this means that you can go back and say: “I was wrong about this piece,” or, “here’s how I think about it now, as opposed to then.”
To say something others will understand you have to go through the exercise of thinking it through carefully, wording it well, and articulating it clearly. And at the same time, writing for others in this way is the forcing function for getting clarity for yourself. But the real value in this, and the reason to do it at all, is because you transform yourself in the process of finishing the thought. By the time you publish something you are changed as a person, in ways that are sometimes big and sometimes barely noticeable until later, but nevertheless real.
In fact, it’s also arguably the case that if you ‘finish’ more thoughts and publish more regularly, it changes your approach to writing. By writing more, it becomes easier to write more. This is what Henrik Karlsson discovered when he created a ‘shit blog’ on the side.
What has delighted me about the shit blog is how abundant it has made me feel. I sit down and type as fast as I can, and the results—well, they suck, but they don’t suck that much. They have a certain breeziness and some insights, too—insights of a different kind than I have in the serious essays. Which means I have underestimated my capacity! I can actually just sit down, without energy, without ideas, and if I frame the task in the right way, I can extract something of value from myself. The sense of scarcity I felt previously—feeling that to write the actual essays, I needed hours of high energy, which is scarce since we homeschool our kids, and I work, and the 2-year-old wakes up at night screaming, and feeling, because of this, that I needed to use my limited energy on good ideas—this feeling of scarcity has, I realize, kept me from doing more and better work.
But, there’s obviously a line somewhere. Some days, a discipline is a slog, but more often than not, it has to *feel* good in its process, not just its outcomes.
Jay Springett shared his experiments with adding sound design to his 301 podcast and the struggles around it (emphasis mine).
Because here’s the thing about making stuff and putting it online: You can only ever do the experiments in public. And they are not about making something that everyone loves; it’s about finding what satisfies you and pushing that further. Don’t worry about the clicks and likes and follows, that’s all just a stupid game.
Create something that’s to your taste, and then dig back in. Figure out exactly what it was that worked for you, not the algorithm, and iterate on that and do it again.
Being creative isn’t about the finished product at all. It’s about the process of creating. The search for what satisfies your taste, and why.
I find the final part quite salient. If you have a discipline because you desire some valuable outcome, you still have to ultimately enjoy the process. In this, I look at my running hobby. More often not, I enjoy running regardless of whether I have a goal set for myself. Better health, running races, and endorphins are the outcomes, but if every run was a slog, it wouldn’t be worth it. And thus, if you want those outcomes, the search entails finding exercise that satisfies your taste. For example, I despise treadmill running. Even with a podcast, music, or TV show on an iPad, it’s fundamentally boring for me. If my running hobby was only made out of treadmill running, I would not enjoy it enough to aim to run a half-marathon. It means that by race day, it feels like a celebration and a victory lap regardless of one’s performance.
And so, in a weekly writing practice, the goal is to search what one wants to write about every week such that the process and outcome is enjoyable. One thing that’s great about running is that what you put in, you generally get out. You can run further more comfortably over time even when you just stick to easy running. What I don’t always get from a weekly newsletter writing practice is the feeling of compounding that one gets from say a regular running schedule. In other words, not only just using the discipline to write more ‘finished thoughts’, but to use it for the equivalent of training for a race. In some sense, writing a novel in the background could be seen as that equivalent, but I feel it’s like running regularly to do a cycle race. You’ll do okay, but it won’t work well. It thus makes me wonder if there’s a format where if I write every week, I can then compile it into longer-form book-ish adjacent projects as a compounding benefit. eg, I would like to take 2023’s writing and condense it into 5 - 10 essays.
But, it means, I have to switch how I approach this newsletter as a weekly writing practice. Each week you write something you hope to combine into a book of essays and then spend a month to combine it (of which those 4 weeks, the newsletter turns into a process newsletter or popup). But not enough to make it feel like a new forced discipline. Some days treating it as a ‘shit blog’ is what’s necessary. As is often the case in running, sometimes you just have put one foot in front of the other for the first 2-3km so that your soul can catch up to the joy of it.
Hopefully, I’ll finish this thought it at some point. :)
Bonus Content!
Been a great week spending most of it with family. Played tourist and chauffeur and discovered a part of the city I live in I hadn’t paid much attention to (play parks!). It’s meant I’m behind on TV and reading. I’m aleo excited to try the new Zelda soon. 👀
✍️ Writing
Haven’t been working on my novel the past week or so since having family visit and it’s done me good to take a short break and step back from it. It’s like seeing a painting by taking a step back from the canvas. It’s left me more confident of where it’s at and I’m excited to finish draft 2 soon!
🖼️ Art - Lumen Prize Auction
Got an update on art! I’m participating in an auction with Sotheby’s for benefit of the Lumen Prize with my artwork ‘See You There’. Thanks to the current collector (and longtime supporter, Spencer Graham), we’re participating in this together!
I’ve been meaning to post about ‘See You There’ in the beginning of the year, but I had actually anticipated launching a companion work called “We Were Here”, which I had not done yet. It’s been finished since January (😱), and so hopefully once draft 2 of my novel is done, I can get to launching the companion work.
💾 Links
Copyright for Dummies
As issues around generative AI and copyright will become more mainstream and covered in the news, this post from Andres gives a great short rundown on copyright and what matters. There’s a tendency for a lot of takes one see online to only account for the USA, which has their own rules (like other countries) on how copyright (and its exceptions) functions.
Extrapolating from Amsterdam Housing Prices
Much of real estate indexes don’t really go further back than the era of digitization. But, there’s an index that’s stood for a very long time: the price of house along the Heerengracht canal in Amsterdam.
A study looked at the prices and there’s some interesting insights in here.
From 1600-ish to 1973, the *real* value only increased by 3.2%, which is remarkable.
When extrapolated to 2020, the index still boxes into that window, but after the 2000s seemed to balloon out of the range.
The arrows indicate a 18.6 year cycle of dips. Not sure how reliable this is to look at. That being said, an asset that only loses maximum of ~75% of its value and now up to %250+ over almost 400 years is quite remarkable all things considered.
One other comment I’d like to add: I always wonder to what extent booming prices since the 70s is really just attributable to global population without requisite housing development. We’re still behind by several decades in having sufficient amount of housing. Elect YIMBY’s y’all.
ht Stephen!
I’m With You
I’ve enjoyed Kevin’s writing and art. I’ve talked about his takes on manglecore and blockchain based generative art in the past. He’s releasing a new collection called “I’m With You” that’s really clever, haunting, and immediately evocative.
He trained an AI model on photos of his brother that passed away a while ago and then uses a technique that creates a hazy image in a single-step diffusion. In other words, it’s latent space glimpses of an early AI image before it becomes high definition. As a result, it’s not fully formed, presenting a haunting view of his brother and the adjacent possible space of his life.
Love the interplay between memory, grief, and possibility as it also relates to how AI models might treat its own latent space.
🎶 Music
Jamie xx - Breather
My gini-coefficient of listening to Jamie xx is quite high. A few songs get a lot of plays. But, this new album on the whole is really great. Better than I expected. Breather is the one I have on repeat right now.
Enjoy!
Take care and hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset. Been quite rainy here so unfortunately it has been missing from my life. Hope to see a good one again soon.
Simon
Ahh thank you Simon! Glad it's resonating
Edit: Oh also agreed, the Jamie xx album is great