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Spent 10h writing an essay in a single sitting yesterday. Despite good ergonomics and stuff (timer to get up and move around every 25 minutes, outdoor and distance-viewing breaks) I’m still kinda wiped out today. Used to do this 2, even 3 times a week until 2y ago ☹️
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0 to 4865 words and done in a single day. Stupid way, but It’s basically how I’ve written 90% of everything I’ve written in the last 15y. A handful have taken 2-3 days due to sheer word count (~ 5k is my physical limit, so a 7k article takes 2 days and my longest, 14k, took 3)
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Left to myself,I almost never write in more structured ways unless it’s a commission or collaboration. By which I mean with organized notes, planning, outlining/structuring, and writing section by section and doing multiple rewrites and pure editing passes.
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It’s basically a stream of consciousness first-dump = published style, but with continuous rewrites all through. It feels like combing long tangled hair. You keep restarting from top and combing through tangles and tangle shrinks and moves lower with each combing till cleared.
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People who don’t write much think writing can be broken relatively cleanly into chunks and worked on in parts/subsystems like engineering work. Kinda true of “professional” vocational writing but not at all true for at least my kind of general writing.
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This means writing time is most effective in long unbroken stretches for me. 8h in one day is better than 2x 4h or 4x 2h. Because it takes ~30-60min to get to situation awareness, and there are often no obvious 2/4h chunkings unless you force arbitrary ones.
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I’ve worked with a pro editor for maybe 5-6 of the 100s I’ve written, and that changes nothing in the process really. It just feels like writing 2-3 articles for an audience of 1, each with the same stream of consciousness big-ball-of-mud approach. laputan.org/mud/
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Back in the day a segment if readers used to routinely comment (esp in aggregator forums), “this guy really needs an editor” 🤣 Those people have all fallen away… only a shrinking group of big-ball-of-mud readers remain in my middle age.
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This is the essay I’m talking about. Bog-standard writing-process-wise, though I think it turned out good, but it exhausted me physically way more than a similar thing would have 10 years ago.
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New free studio post. Derangements: studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/derangements
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So not for clarity or readability, but for sheer physical limits reasons, I need to either figure out a chunkable stream-of-consciousness approach or write less. Blogchains (which I’ve been using on the blog but not in the newsletter) are a partial solution but not good enough.
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