I am an immature writer

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• Useful Resources

I’m an immature writer.

I know this, because I can clearly see the immaturity and skilllessness that’s trailed my public written words for a long time, and I don’t yet know how to debug that and fix this problem. So, to fix it, I’m pursuing the tried-and-true method of:

If you cannot get quality, aim for quantity.

I’m trying to get back into regular writing, and I need to reduce the friction between putting words on paper and publishing them. Most of this friction isn’t technical, it’s mental/emotional.

I’ve written myself ‘escape hatches’, so I can run away from the blame/shame of the claim:

Josh, this [written piece] is crap.

I wrote Write It Now for just this eventuality. Some of my writing is driven by moods, and timing, and the more I can manage the moods, and reduce the time it takes me to publish something, the better.

I also shared Type Publish Done, to capture how I want my writing to be evaluated.

I want to crawl out of the hole I’ve been in for a long time. I reflect back upon when I started this ‘blog’; I’d never mentioned the reason, but I’d found myself suddenly unemployed and felt pain over how it had happened. I don’t think I ever wrote about that particular ‘unemployment event’, but I found it helpful to get other thoughts on paper.

I’ve recently been reflecting upon Lin Manuel Miranda’s song from Hamilton: Eye of a Hurricane

I wrote my way out

Wrote everything down far as I could see

I wrote my way out

The last several years have been quite challenging in many dimensions, and looking forward, I see as much opportunity for difficulty and pain as I do for rest and repair, and I hunger to make meaning from it all.

Writing has always helped me make meaning of my life, and in hindsight the focus of a written piece on {topic} helps capture the flow/energy of my easily distracted brain, and marshal that energy in a consistent direction.

I have a tiny “audience”. I write for me, primarily, and I want to practice, a lot. It feels safer writing knowing that few people will read what I write, but I also wonder if by avoiding ‘public consumption of what I write’ I’m allowing myself to write low-quality pieces.

I’d like to grow in my writing. My writing skills no longer feel sufficient to express what I want to express, so I choose to upgrade my writing skills. I could go read books and ideas and spend great amounts of time thinking about being a better writer, a better written communicator, but that is needless distraction.

I want better information infrastructure, and this website is one of my primary tools of managing my own information infrastructure, and I’ve let weeds grow. It’s untended. I don’t like my website anymore, and generally feel embarrassed by it instead of proud of it.

So, here’s todays post. As a commitment to “the public”, and to save others from the phenomina I have of sometimes using these posts as something of a journal entry

In the future, I’ll be catching up through old drafts that I want published, and doing some ‘tending’ and ‘gardening’. It’s an obligation I feel to myself and others.

Boom. I wrote this post, and I ‘gardened’ some other aspects of this website.¹

Useful Resources #

• The Value of Tailored Information Infrastructure
• How to Write on Days You Don’t Feel Like Writing

Footnotes #