Less Consuming, More Writing

For someone who thinks of himself as a writer, I don't spend nearly enough time actually performing the act of writing.  I always feel bad about this, of course.  "I really should be writing" I tell myself, but there's always another level to beat, another chapter to read, or, more recently, another wall to paint.

Actually that last one really is a valid excuse, but the others are not.  Right now, I spend a little too much time "consuming."  I have that down pat.  I'm not a big TV person, although living with cable in the house has changed that.  I certainly watch more TV than I used to, but I'm still pretty far down on chart for overall viewing time.  I do, however, spend a good chunk of time playing video games and a significant chunk of my time reading.  Video games are at least interactive so I'm participating rather than simply absorbing, and I'm often co-operating with friends.  Still, at the end of the game, all I've got to show for my time is another pile of digital trophies, the modern equivalent of a high score.  That's nice, I guess, but not all that fulfilling, and not something I'd be proud to put in the annual family newsletter.

Books are just about the same.  I consume them and at the end I have a new experience, something I can talk about with others who have read the same book, but not much to write home about.  It can be enriching and, especially if I want to be a good writer, it's necessary to build up piles of these experiences but that's not really a concern for me.  By this point in my life, I've probably read more books than the next five people combined so I could probably afford to slow down a little.

Also, there's the Internet.  I think I may have mentioned my inability to walk through a room without stopping if someone is watching a TV show in that room.  Well, the Internet is worse.  I just get sucked in.  Stop to check one thing, don't surface for hours.  And it's all crap!  I occasionally find a useful resource or an insightful writer, and I'll follow that for a while, but it's not what I gravitate towards.  Those "getting sucked in for hours" incidents are mostly webcomics or internet fiction (sort of like reading books but much more variable in quality).

I just finished reading Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus" which is all about how people are starting to use their free time in more productive ways than simple consumption.  It's a decent book, ties in to some things Bruce Sterling claims about spimes and wranglers, namely that our culture is headed towards a more participatory model: one where "amateur" is no longer a slur on the quality of work.

In other words, I'm feeling more guilty than usual about not posting anything here for a while.  Blogging isn't the most culturally beneficial form of participation, but it beats re-reading webcomics.  And besides, for a variety of reasons (guilt included), I've had a burst of inspiration in my fiction.  I'm producing there again, too, and, as with the end of every previous hiatus in my writing, I realized just how much I missed doing it.  I really do love this thing I claim to do but never quite get around to.

Clearly I haven't solved my procrastination problem.  There are a number of factors here, many of which I know and recognize, but I haven't quite worked out how to fight it yet.  Guilt is not a particularly healthy or (ultimately) effective motivator but at least it will get me started when I stop too long.  I'm not going to promise anything, I'll work on the doing instead.

Time to be me again

I have been free from classes for some time now. I turned in my last assignment more than a week ago and got my grades a few days later. Year two is done. One more year to go. Now it is summer break, and it truly is break time for me. I have no summer job as yet, but expect to soon. For now, I have nothing in particular to do. It's awesome. Or it was. Sometime yesterday I hit the "I'm bored now" stage. I realized I haven't actually seen anyone besides the Pennocks or my girlfriend in about a week. Just me and my apartment.

And my Xbox 360. Sarah is awesome and took it upon herself to organize several of my friends to get me one for my birthday. This helps explain the lack of blog posts. I beat Halo 3 on Heroic and picked up a number of achievements there. I've been working through Bioshock (creepy, but fascinating) more recently. I am deeply enjoying this thing. My days have been a combination of video games, reading, and to-do-lists. Finally I'm getting to a lot of things that were pushed aside by the school work. I have reached the point though where my time is starting to feel a little empty.

I recognize this feeling and I know what it means. It means two things: I need to create something and I need to talk to someone. I have at least learned about myself that I need a job, or a schedule, that lets me interact with a variety of people on a regular basis. I also need to be creating whether it be writing, designing, or simply building. I have a habit of letting myself just coast (books and video games are good for that) when I don't have anything specific to accomplish. The empty feeling that follows suggests I need to be more diligent about those things I keep saying I should do (or wish I'd done). When school was on, I always had tasks to accomplish. It represents, however, the opposite extreme, all tasks all the time and no chance to pause unless I made it myself (with all the additional guilt and stress that implies).

Fortunately, I've learned these things about myself and have a better idea about how to motivate myself. The trick is to avoid the coasting AND the exhaustion. If I had a laptop, I'd take myself away from my apartment with all its video games and books, and go find someplace to write. As it is, I set aside time earlier in the semester where I turned off my phone and my internet (I had to literally unplug the modem) and just wrote. It worked. I have most of a new story written. I'd have all of it done, but homework sort of took over my life at the end of the semester. Not entirely unexpected. Well there's no homework now. I've got time and that empty feeling that tells me I have taken the "unwinding" period a little too far. So it's time to reestablish the writing period. Let's see if I can do it every day. I think I can.

Getting to the Point

My default writing style is pretty much the complete opposite of that recommended for research papers or other professional and academic communication. My style is, for one thing, a lot less likely to stay on track. I like qualifiers and modifiers. I like a certain goofiness. I like tangents. I like parenthetical asides. I really like parenthetical asides. You can see only a hint of it by reading my previous blog entries but you still have no idea just how many I remove in the process of editing what goes up here. Also, I'm having a very hard time not adding one now.

This particular style works fine for, say, a blog where the essential purpose (whatever else we may claim) is to show off. It's not very useful in a term paper or thesis. I can adapt, however. I don't really have any trouble writing in the style required for such papers. I just don't do it here. Nor, and this is where I'm headed with this entry, do I use a particularly concise style in emails.

I became aware some years ago that my email style was not entirely compatible with the email-reading habits of some of my friends. Only recently, however, have I come to recognize just how prevalent this discord is and, perhaps more importantly, how much it obscures my real message for people with little time.

The first indication came through an off-hand comment from a friend about five years ago. She told me, "Oh I don't usually read your whole email." This was pretty painful for me to hear, although she had no idea. I think from her perspective it was equivalent of telling me "I never quite got around to reading that article you recommended," in other words no big deal. From my end, though, it sounded more like, "I know you've been talking earnestly for the last ten minutes, but I wasn't really listening." It hurt (and clearly still bothers me, to a certain extent) but I understood it wasn't meant to be insulting. It was a fundamental difference in the way the two of us saw email.

I don't just write emails, I craft them. I like writing. If you get an email of a significant length from me (and admittedly my threshold for "significant" is probably higher than most), odds are good that I spent too much time drafting, editing, and tweaking it to get that perfect "casually witty" look (It's sort of like the idea of "artfully mussed hair"). As I pointed out above, however, I have more recently begun to realize that all that "craft" can obscure my original purpose.

In the past few years, more of my friends have made similar comments to the one I mentioned above. It took me a little while, but I finally started to generalize the concept and to realize that, as much fun as I find long emails, my readers don't always feel the same way.

Recently I have also begun following a blog called "43 Folders" which offers advice on being more productive and working more efficiently. It has an Apple focus, so I skip large parts of it, but the general non-Apple stuff is pretty useful. It's helping with my studies already. A large section of this blog is directed at email processing and also at email writing. Seeing the other point of view described there, that of the person who has to comb through all the "casual witty" to get to the actual information in the email, helped me realize just why some people are not inclined to read my whole email.

I have begun now to be more careful of my emailing efforts. If I'm writing an email with a purpose I'm dropping the clever subject in favor of the informative subject. I'm replacing the cryptic-yet-enticing first line with a sentence detailing exactly why I'm sending the email. I'm also discarding all (well almost all) of the irrelevant comments and asides I usually stick in the main body and then I'm signing off with a specific declaration of what I'm asking of them. Recipients should find it easier to figure out why I sent the email, whether they need to read it, and what I expect in return if they do. Hopefully it will make things easier for all involved (maybe now people will actually send RSVPs to my invitations, but efficiency may not actually be the real problem there).

I should point out that this new approach only goes for purposeful emails. I have no intentions of reducing my rambling if I'm just saying hi (I'm not going to let efficiency suck ALL the fun out of my life). Also, almost all B&B emails are exempt (October 27th, mark your calendars). For those we've always had the summary at the end anyway, so people can just deal.

For the rest, though, I'm cleaning up my act.