As you can see from the past several essays, I am trying to do a lot more writing than I have in the past. However, this has been difficult at times due to my lack of time to engage in this pursuit throughout the day combined with many of the topics that interest me the most requiring a great deal of time and effort to research and write up properly1. I could incrementally work on these research + writing projects, but I fear that I could easily get bogged down in this process without properly exercising my writing muscles as I intend. Eventually I plan on making these more detailed posts, but for this initial period I am trying to do more writing than careful editing and research in my spare time. The hope is that, eventually, my writing chops will be strong enough to enable me to communicate things just as well but with less time and effort on my end.
That point is a long way off though, if I ever reach it, so for now I usually attempt to find topics that both require little research and feel easy to write about. Unfortunately, for this post, I couldn’t think of any subjects that met these criteria. As a solution, I am attempting to just write about whatever is on my mind (hence the rather unfocused nature of the piece so far). This is one common approach to get over one’s difficulties with the twin processes of generating ideas and writing about them. It works to a certain extent, as it does indeed accomplish the goal of characters appearing on the screen, but the resulting tone seems a little more unpolished2. Of course, as the saying goes, you first have to just make something exist; you can make it good later.
One more subtle potential weakness of this approach is that I find it tends to converge towards a kind of “meta” state of writing about writing. Without a strong anchor for my thoughts, such as a topic I am already thinking about but have difficulty putting words to, or a new idea I come up with along the way, I start to focus on the process itself. For instance, I think about how the words I am writing right now come from a kind of inner monologue in my head, and I wonder about the process that generates these words. Is it the same for everyone? I know some people (of which I am one) report having an inner monologue while others don’t. Do words arise differently from the thoughts of the former group than the latter? And if so, how? I’m not sure how you could measure these things, and already this is a concrete idea that could serve as its own post. So I suppose this actually demonstrates the effectiveness of stream-of-consciousness writing after all, letting your mind wander as it pleases to find what it is interested in discussing. Maybe you shouldn’t let it stay there for too long, but maybe you should.