On Writing

Aghhhhhhhhhh

It’s 2:59am. I am tired and hungry. If I don’t publish a 1000+ word article on substack within the hour, I will lose £50. I didn’t want to write a metacommentary desperation post, but I guess here we are - cause there’s no way I’m getting the article I was planning in time. Why do I always do this to myself?

I have a complicated relationship with writing.

On one hand, it’s something I care about a lot. There is a distinct sense of wonder I feel in the presence of a masterfully crafted piece of writing, especially those that weave together disparate threads of narrative into a coherent whole, or those that carefully consider the sound and feeling of each word they use, to create an incredibly precise impression in the reader. I guess it’s one of the reasons I’m currently enrolled in a Computer Science and Philosophy degree - I think the ability to communicate well is one of the most useful skills you can have in life.

On the other hand, it is something that I find incredibly painful, and do not consider myself particularly good at, mostly by virtue finding it incredibly painful, and so I struggle to ever bring myself to do enough of it to get better. In the entirety of my last academic year, I did not submit a single philosophy essay on time. Every time I had to stare at that wretched page and squeeze out an essay, usually until the early hours of the morning, I would seriously consider dropping the subject. I was responsible for my friend starting a daily blog post writing call, and joined countless times, without ever producing a proper completed blog post. And even now, I’ve been considering just losing £50 for the sake of not having to deal with this.

Why do I find writing so painful?

I’m not entirely sure to be honest, but here’s a guess at a few reasons:

1. The obvious one - perfectionism. My bar for publishable writing is much higher than my ability to produce good writing. I’ll start out with an idea I like and then start to write something and quickly realise I hate the idea and whatever I will write will not be worth posting anyway because it’s not sufficiently {original, interesting, well written}.

2. Decision paralysis. This seems perhaps more fundamental. The blank page gives me too many options. All are arbitrary (though some less arbitrary than others). And all are suboptimal. I think my brain, trained in years of STEM and philosophy, has learnt to do a bunch of convergent thinking about well scoped problems but has not had much practice at more divergent creative thinking where I have to make decisions with no clear criteria of success. And so it panics.

3. I lack the patience and care. The agents are good now. I barely have to do anything hard anymore. It has been very bad for my attention span. But even before this was the case, I have a feeling of constant urgency and things that need doing running through my life that taking the time and patience to craft something well is quite difficult actually.

4. Audience. Sending a massive block of messages to someone is easy for me. Because I know who I’m talking to, and I know (roughly) what they believe, what context they’re coming from, and I have a pretty good idea of how to present info to them in a way that makes sense to them, and why I’m trying to message them at all. When I am writing a blog post, part of me is trying to model everyone who is possibly going to read this, and what they will think, and how much I care about what each of these people think, and how best to present info to each of these people, and what context is worth explaining vs assuming, and it’s so damn confusing to know what on earth I’m even trying to do here for all these people.

5. Linearity. I think my brain fundamentally likes thinking about things in a non linear way. Eg. the structure of arguments and counter arguments is fundamentally tree-like (each argument may have many different counter arguments which may each have their own counterarguments). And to write is to compress this all into a linear form, and usually prune a bunch of things I deem less important so it can fit into a nice narrative.

6. I lack conviction. I hold many beliefs lightly, and enjoy slipping in and out of different frames and worldviews during a conversation. When I write something, especially publicly, I am committing to certain beliefs and attitudes I have. I am committing to being a certain kind of person. But I don’t actually know what I believe and I feel far too incoherent and context dependent to want to publicly give the impression I am a particular person.

And maybe it’s now time to justify why I’m here. And why I made a £50 bet to force myself to do this. I’m not quite sure of this either:

1. All of the things mentioned in paragraph 3

2. I would like to be a bit more of a coherent person, to know what I believe in, and to stand for things more strongly.

3. I want to put a bunch of signal out so that people can find me and know who I am.

4. Have a large corpus to train LLMs on my writing. And maybe influence the training data of new models released in my small way. I have not used LLMs at all in the writing of this post, but I think I feel slightly better about writing assistance from models trained on me than producing slop

5. Spite. I have wanted to be good at this for so long yet struggled so much. I’m not yet ready to accept that this was never something for me.

6. I think I have good ideas sometimes and would like the skill to be able to communicate them effectively to large amounts of people.

Two minutes left to publish. I guess I should probably get something to eat and then sleep.