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Earlier this week I ran a writing seminar with a small class of fourth-year university students who are working on research theses—the focus was on navigating the middle part of a project.

The aim of the seminar was to squarely address the following point: writing projects involve a kind of managerial balancing act, in which it is easy to conflate management of the product (e.g. the students’ research theses) with management of the person authoring that product.

The person is full of thoughts and feelings in a way that the product usually isn’t. Knowing how to put together a text (an essay, a book, a song, a letter, etc.) is not the same as knowing how to be during that process. Part of the challenge is knowing how to improve the work, the other part is knowing how to relate to the work as a creative person.

When we are in the middle of a project, part of the job involves making some sort of judgment about what we have produced so far. Because we can only do this in real time, our capacity to notice relevant details is quite important. The important detail, it seems to me, is this: When we appraise a piece of work, there is not an equal chance of any thought occurring, so at least part of the challenge is stacking the deck* (aka life experience) in advance. This isn’t really something that can be effectively crammed in the short term, but it can certainly be cultivated over time, since our intuition is always looking for things to remember.

Since intuition is an unavoidable conduit for the sorts of judgment we apply when revising work, it seems worthwhile to think through the quality of intuition we bring to the revisionary table. I’m usually mystified when people talk about ‘trying too hard’, but in this case I think it is a useful turn of phrase. Finding a way to achieve a passive focus during revision seems useful for engaging with technical issues without needing to have an exact technical remedy in the moment. I suspect that this explains the circling and underlining and bracketing that seems to happen organically when we work with pen and paper. These markings prime intuition in a very useful way, by flagging relevant details without putting the burden of expectation of an immediate, precise solution.

The last step is to review the marked up document, and the same passive-presence-of-mind trick can work here too. If environmental distractions can be avoided (smart phones, etc.), just sitting with a marked up set of revisionary inklings and blank piece of paper can yield bizarrely effortless results.

*Natalie Goldberg calls this composting (see Writing Down the Bones)

Several times in the last few weeks I’ve found myself arguing the need for a low-brow, mundane, ‘everyday’ impression of creativity. The reason is this: Almost everything people do moment-to-moment involves a degree of freedom in the way these doings are expressed. Most of these doings involve putting actions together through time, toward some purpose, and so involve creating in a very literal sense.

This is true of many things that are apparently repetitive; making coffee, writing emails, walking the dog, driving to work, walking into the office, sitting down at the desk, booting up Zoom, and so forth. Even when the broad strokes appear similar, the minutiae are likely to differ for reasons that are sometimes unconscious (perhaps it might have to do with how we slept the night before), and sometimes a little clearer (perhaps the coffee machine is out of order and we prepare tea instead). The main point is that there is almost always an opportunity for agency in some measure.

This is a much less exciting interpretation than what the word creativity popularly evokes. It positions creativity as a very basic quality of humans’ involvement in the world around them, rather than as a special state enjoyed from time to time by artists and children. Importantly (to my mind at least), an everyday notion of creativity affords an opportunity to reframe things a little. Rather than perceiving creativity as an outcome to be achieved, it can be viewed as a normal process; something to be participated in with a degree of consciousness.

The main piece below is about drafting, but first another brief update: Over the last two weeks I’ve been seeding a new online notebook with notes from my offline archive. The basic idea is to do a portion of my conceptual work in the open, to make this thinking available to anyone who might be interested, and potentially to generate some useful feedback along the way. To that end, I’ll be gradually growing the notebook over time. Andy Matuschak’s approach is a direct inspiration for this (check that out here), and so far I’ve emulated his model very closely

Some thoughts on drafting

Process is a common theme in conversations with students and friends (mostly musicians, academics, and authors) about writing. Whether the aim is to write a story, an academic paper, a poem, or to make some other sort of compositional artefact, figuring out how to get the thing done seems to be a perpetually interesting topic. I’ve benefited from thinking explicitly about drafting as a cornerstone of creative process, and what follows are a few observations that have had staying power in my own way of doing things.

I suspect that the idea of drafting work doesn’t really mean the same thing that it did a few decades ago. In contrast to a historical emphasis on production of sequential physically separate drafts of work in progress, the editable nature of digital files means that a sequential approach to drafting sometimes gives way to a kind of constant tinkering that lacks the clear milestones built into traditional drafting (draft 1, draft 2, etc.). Digital authorship can benefit from the traditional approach simply by committing to the periodic saving of fresh copies. On the surface, this seems like a trivial point, but taking active steps to draft rather than tinker goes a long way in providing implicit permission to make meaningful changes between drafts. People tend to fret about deleting work (the what-if-I-need-that-thing-I-wrote effect), and this approach seems to do a good job of allaying those fears.

Concretely, these are the steps that I tend to follow in getting from the start of a piece of work through to the finished version:

• Start with draft 0 (call the file something like my_essay_ver0; thanks to Jodie for putting me onto this idea)
• Each time a major change appears on the horizon, a new copy of the work is saved (borrowing from the software development playbook, I add decimal points to the file name, v0.1, v0.2, etc.)
• When a version that holds together from start to finish emerges, this is labelled draft 1—the usual litmus test for ‘holds together’ is that there are no comments or questions embedded in the document, and that it can be read from start to finish
• Show draft 1 to someone for feedback
• From that point onwards, successive drafts are labelled using whole numbers
• After 1–3 iterations of the preceding two points, submit the work for final publication (note that what ‘submit’ means depends on the context—it is the step that gets the thing into the world)

The specific terminology matters less than the underlying premise of the system, which is this: drafting processes have beginnings, middles, and ends, and what matters to the completion of those stages isn’t necessarily the same. At the beginning (for me, between draft 0 and draft 1), the aim of the game is to generate a full draft, mostly regardless of quality. In the middle, between drafts 1 and the final version, the aim is to refine the quality of the work. The main difference between these two phases is the degree of importance accorded analysis and revision of the work—this is much more important in the middle phase than at the beginning.

Anecdotally, I feel there is some agreement in the creative community that composing and editing at the same time (what I’ve called tinkering) is a difficult way to go about composition when the aim is to eventually publish. In digital environments, it is easy to fall into unproductive tinkering, because the tools available seriously reduce the practical distance between creating and editing separate drafts. Accordingly, the backspace key is, in my view, the special enemy of the early creative phase, and should be treated with suspicion. Composing work that will eventually land in front of a potentially critical reader can be confronting, and the backspace key can easily assume the role of a Faustian devil, constantly reminding us that there might be a slightly better way of saying ‘that thing’, though unable to explain quite what said solution might be. Concerns about quality make sense in the bigger picture, but are frequently unhelpful during the initial part of the compositional process. Having a personal theory of drafting is a helpful way to deal with the temptation to tinker, since it can provide separate places for for both unfettered making and for the analytical aspect of revision.

As a first post, this piece is probably meant to try doubly hard to draw you in and subscribe and all the rest of it, but at time of writing it’s 6:37pm, the office is messy (see the pic below), this web interface is prompting me to put subscription buttons and pictures everywhere, etc. etc. Here’s a bit of information about where things are headed. If you want to know more about me, here’s some extra info.

What it’s about

I’ve wanted to have some version of a newsletter (/space to share things) for a while now—I had a soft crack at blogging earlier in the year, and after a bit of testing this (Substack) seems like a good option for sharing work going forward.

The appeal of a newsletter is in the opportunity to write longer pieces that develop ideas. The point of this one is to write about creative practice—that is, to explore what is in the doing and making of creative things.

I’ll note that I tend to exercise a fairly liberal interpretation of the term creative: The basic premise is to take a view of creative work as regular rather than rare. This opens up a rich menu of possibilities for exploring how things are made, performances rendered, and work done. That’s the business of this newsletter.

As a complement to this newsletter I’m also launching a notebook that approaches the same territory in a different way (more on that soon). The focus for now is on writing (if you came looking for music, you’ll usually find me doing that with Jo Davie). Depending on how things go, I might move into other territory later.

Who’s it for?

This newsletter is for anyone interested in creating or making things, and how creative acts work. It’s not exactly going to be a casual read, but if you’re here that might not bother you anyway.

At the time of writing I myself enamoured with the essay genre, I think because essays thread something of a line between the academic and the practical. The writing I do here will, I hope, follow a similar trajectory.

How sharing work helps, and the point of the paywall

Having an opportunity to share formative work with a community is exceptionally helpful in developing and honing new ideas. It’s also an important opportunity to share potentially useful things that would otherwise gather digital dust on a hard drive.

Some of the material in this newsletter will be free, and some of it will require a subscription. Subscriptions and other forms of patronage are amazingly valuable to those of us working on things outside of the mainstream, since they support creative autonomy. If you find some value in these pieces or in other work that I do, I hope you’ll consider subscribing, to help it continue. If you want to know more about the ways in which I plan to use subscription revenue, you can read about that here.