I want to think out loud about writing for a second before I go into proper weekend mode, so if you hate that and find it self-indulgent or whatever, this is your warning. (I think feeling weird about feeling weird about writing is what keeps people from writing, and I don’t think gatekeeping about it is anything but an unproductive and ego-protective bummer, myself, but that’s just me.)
I’m in permanent awe of people who can think and write with clarity and depth *and speed* about crunchy things, but I also try to remember that it’s is a lot like muscle training. I am trying all the time for clarity (for various readerships, differing by piece) and depth, but I am not fast.
I draft quickly! I write hundreds of thousands of words a year, most of which get scrapped. Getting all the elements built and lined up right for anything complex takes me months, which is very annoying.
And I have health constraints and family commitments and non-writing work, so it is discouraging when my bits of writing time add up so slowly. But! Just continuing to draft and read and edit down and talk to friends and edit down and read another thing and edit down does eventually get somewhere.
(And fwiw, the pace and depth of the best fedi interactions have been really generative and supportive of that snail-pace grind, much more so than faster networks.)
relating to personal experience, writing
@kissane I recognize a lot of this from the way I write; often when I finally write an article, it's the result of discussing a topic with people for years, to a level of depth that approximates writing ad-hoc articles each time. It takes forever!
I've been experimenting a bit lately with reviewing and editing less before publishing an article, and I've found that it doesn't seem to matter much for how much people appreciate the end result, and how effective it is. At least for me, it seems that the slowness of writing has been mostly to satisfy my own standards rather than that of anyone else, and at least some part of the lengthy process has been a matter of diminishing returns.
