Restarting the writing engine

Writing momentum is real

Hello friends! It’s been too long. My newsletter posts have become too infrequent so I’ve decided to dust off this old machine and once again put fingers to keyboard.

It turns out that it’s easier for me to write this newsletter frequently, than it is for me to write it only once in a while. Thinking, putting words on the page, editing, and hitting send to people around the world – the key pieces of newslettering – are all gears in a process that gets rusty with disuse.

This is counterintuitive to me. Shouldn’t it be easier to just write once a month or once a quarter? Heck, once a year? It’s ultimately less work, and yet, the inertia of moving thoughts-in-head to thoughts-on-paper is real. And like Newton’s laws, a brain in motion can remain in motion while a brain at rest, well, it can stay at rest...

When I first started writing this newsletter in 2021 I wrote almost every week. I was able to do this for a year and half until, after writing 72 posts, I then moved to writing about once a month. Unfortunately, after developing my writing system and finding a cadence, everything suddenly slowed down so that since February, I’ve written only eight posts. More meaningfully, the process that I was using to write has also gotten rusty.

Looking back at when I was most productive, I realize that when I was in a writing mindset I was constantly thinking about what to talk about next; I was observing the world around me and writing thoughts down: quotes from books I was reading, interesting articles, meaningful conversations… When I’m in “writing mode” everything I experience is a thread that can be woven into a future post. But when I’m not in this mode, my thoughts are fleeting. Even if I do write things down I find that my mind fools itself into “big post mode” – a mode where I’m accumulating ideas but mostly daydreaming for a future gap in my schedule that will let me fully capture what I’ve been thinking and write a post that will perfectly explain a “big idea." This perfect time, however, never comes.

Working full-time while being a father to two small children doesn’t leave me with enough space to write the Next Great American Newsletter. Maybe one day. Maybe never… But for now, I want to embrace more simple writing. I miss the routine and the challenge and the thrill. And so I think I will pick it back up…

But why tell you? Why not just write this down in my journal and increase the cadence - “show don’t tell” if you will…

Well, “goals via newsletter” have proven pretty useful to me so far: sending out a pre-commitment to hundreds of friends, family and strangers proves a pretty good form of social pressure to keep me committed. My subconscious seems to care… One example of this is that soon after starting the newsletter I said I wouldn’t drink for 1,000 days. I provided an update 200 days later mentioning how great a change this has been, and now it’s been 759 days and I’m still at it. This was a change I’d wanted to make many times in the past and yet, committing via this newsletter seems to have done the trick.

So in this quick post I pre-commit to the goal: I’m planning to go back to writing semi-weekly from now until the end of December 2024.¹

And with that, I’ll sign off. Until next week. 🙏🏼

David

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Sky and coastline flying south of San Francisco • November 2023

PS - If you subscribed a while back and don’t know what I write about or who I am (hi!) here is a list of some popular past posts.

1. Definite goals with clear end points seem to help my subconscious as well - they feel more tractable than “start writing more.” My subconscious is a weird place/thing/being :)