2020-09-08 > Writing is the most easy, pain-free, and happy way to pass the time of all the arts. As I write this, for example, I am sitting comfortably in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I'm never at a loss for what to type. I just look deep into the heart of the rose, read its story, and then write it down. > —[[Ref. Steve Martin 1996 - WRITING IS EASY!]] > Been working every day and going good. Makes a hell of a dull life too. But it is more fun than anything else. Do you remember how old Ford [Madox] was always writing how [Joseph] Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier du chien [a dog’s trade] etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don’t at all. Suffer like a bastard when don’t write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing. > —Hemingway to Malcolm Cowley, 1945 Selected Letters, pp. 604–605, from [[Ref. Hemingway edited by Philips 1984 - Ernest Hemingway on Writing]] > Let's say you train your biceps. Blood is rushing into your muscles, and that's what we call the pump. It's as satisfying to me as coming is. As having sex with a woman and coming. > —[[Young Arnold - pumping iron feels like coming]] > I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else. > –Niklas Luhmann [[Ref. Ahrens 2017, How to take smart notes]] > A different way is to cooperate fully, humbly, and joyfully with inspiration. > –Elizabeth Gilbert, *Big Magic* > If it hurts, you’re probably doing it wrong. You’re not trying your best if you’re not happy. Happiness is really, really instrumentally useful. Being happy gives you more energy, increases your physical health and lifespan, makes you more creative and risk-tolerant, and (even if all the previous effects are unreplicated pseudoscience) causes other people to like you more. > –Xiaoyu He 2020, [[Pain is not the unit of effort]] --- It might be true that in any moment of writing you're ready to write about *something*. If so, and if you can [[Find the easy next step]], and if you write regularly, and have a way to capture all the value in a way that it accumulates, then maybe you can make a thing out of it. Maybe you can [[Build your success on top of activities you love]]. If you spend a lot of time writing when it's not easy, suffering and struggling and forcing, you're at risk of developing a [[Fuckwad]]: if you succeed, you'll have succeeded on the back of an awful process that you don't want to repeat, but now you'll be incentivized to repeat it. Or, maybe you'll just fail. The number one cause of insomnia is basically people spending hours in bed fretting about not sleeping. The most effective component of the best-evidenced treatment for insomnia, CBT-i, is sleep restriction, which basically just prevents you from trying to sleep when it's not easy to sleep. Perhaps there should be a CBT-w — CBT for writers. Tracks how much time you spend trying to write, vs actually writing, and just limits your writing time to the latter. Unless you have your [[Back against the wall]], I think you should only write what you're ready to write. Minimize wheel spinning. It's not productive. It's anti-productive. Either [[Find the easy next step]], or do something else. # [[Journal section]] ### 2020-09-08 Anohter way of thinking about this. Thought experiment. At any given moment, we can imagine a list of all the questions and topics you might write about. And we can imagine giving each of them a score that indicates how easy it would be for you to write about that topic right now. And we can imagine ranking the list. The thing is: those scores change over time. Those scores would be informed by things like how much you know about hte topic, what kind of mood you're in, what ideas feel 'alive' to you right now, what your muses and daemons for whatever reasons are producing thoughts on at the moment, etc. So at any given moment if we queried the system, we'd get a different ranked list. The idea of 'only write when it's easy' is something like always write about something that's high on the list, and only when it's above some threshold of 'easy'.` This principle is important, I think, to making writing sustainable ([[How can I make writing work (hub)]]), because it allows the writing process itself to become a positive experience. Take the [[Third-person level]] view, and train your animal. If the positive experience is combined with value capture through the process, then you have a self-sustaining process that accrues value over time. [[Value accretion problem]]. Now you're default winning, and you get to evolve and optimize to win even harder. [[What is my writing process]] is an attempt to do that. > A different way is to cooperate fully, humbly, and joyfully with inspiration. > –Elizabeth Gilbert, *Big Magic* > If it hurts, you’re probably doing it wrong. You’re not trying your best if you’re not happy. Happiness is really, really instrumentally useful. Being happy gives you more energy, increases your physical health and lifespan, makes you more creative and risk-tolerant, and (even if all the previous effects are unreplicated pseudoscience) causes other people to like you more. > –Xiaoyu He 2020, [[Pain is not the unit of effort]] ### 2021-02-03 07:53 In order to only write when it's easy, you have to have the landing pad made. You have to avoid getting your [[Back against the wall]]. Start the documents early. There has to be a place for the writing to land. If you have an idea and you think, "ah, I should remember that; I'll want it when I write about this later" then you're not doing it right. Instead you should think, "ah, that's a good idea; it's connected to x, I'll go add it to x doc right now." [[Obsidian]] is good for this. ### 2022-10-20 Thu 11:30 AM Maybe better than saying "only write when it's easy" would be to say something like: "find the way that is easy". Noticing this on [[2022-10-20 Thu]], experimenting with [[Set the poet up to flow]] as a process-orienting idea, and reflecting on how yesterday I just let myself dive deep into research on Stoicism. And how good that felt. It was easy, other than the background sense that it was taking longer than I had planned, that I was going deeper or wider or reading more things than I had planned.