Having a shit blog has made me feel abundant
From Giacometti’s sketch book
An earlier version of this essay was previously published in my waste book.
As some of you know, I have had a “secret” second blog called waste book for a little while. It is an experiment where I write about whatever is on my mind as fast as possible and then publish it without edits.
When I write on Escaping Flatland, I tend to be obsessive about researching and rewriting—I typically spend between 20 and 100 hours on a piece, spread over a few months. I think the conventional internet wisdom that quantity leads to quality is flawed. The deeper levels of insight and simplicity can only be reached by thinking in writing, questioning your assumptions, getting feedback, rewriting, and refactoring. If you are impatient, you miss almost all of the value of writing. I think doing a proper job is underrated.
But I also like to test my assumptions, so, without telling anyone, I spun up a new blog, and then, a few times a week, when I felt too tired to do “real” work, I wrung the last fifteen minutes out of myself by writing something for what I’ve come to call “my shit blog.” I’ve been surprised by how useful and interesting this turned out to be.
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.
The waste book has become a sort of writer’s diary / notebook where I talk process and sketch out new ideas in rough form. I don’t want too many people to read it, and it grew a bit faster than I wanted, so last week I decided to make it private. (But I’d happily add those of you who fund Escaping Flatland if you feel like witnessing the spectacle of Henrik thinking without editing himself. Just write a comment here or send me a direct message.)
I feel expansive inside when a constraint I used to live under has been removed. Yesterday, for example, I had a day of tasks back to back for twelve hours, and when it was done—and the kids were asleep—I felt, fuck, I haven’t written anything today, and fuck, how could I possibly do that now? And then I thought: well, of course, I can do it the way I do it on the shit blog; just sit down and type stuff without any expectations. So I walked around the farm for ten minutes and felt around for a way in and then I threw myself on the keyboard and typed hard for three hours.
And it was kind of good?
Another thing that happens when I have a shit blog is that I can burn through all the ideas that come into my head much faster, and take larger “risks.”