Have you ever reread your emails over and over, filled with anxiety that you are about to send out something embarrassing?
It sounds like a universal experience to me. And yet some people seem to simply bang out an email as quickly as possible, with no care to spelling, grammar, accuracy of the information therein, or the value of the thing.
But for me, sending an email is publishing a piece of writing. That email could be forwarded. It could go all the way up, to the tippy tippy top, and the VIPs could see it. It is also a waste of time to anxiously reread emails that are probably good enough.
I have always kept a journal. Journaling is great. It’s healthy, it’s powerful. This is not my journal. The point of this project is to write something as quickly as I can while maintaining a publishable quality. I don’t spend a lot of time editing. I try to pause very briefly when collecting my thoughts. The goal is to go, and to flow into a work that makes sense and is theoretically readable. I always try to hit the word count of at least 750 words. Why not 1000? Why not 500? Because 750 words is what the website 750Words uses as a benchmark, and that’s the website I use.
When I started using that site, I would try to work on stories. Fictional stories that ended up being invariably boring. Characters spinning in circles, plots that went no where, I couldn’t make it work. Then they became journal entries. Journaling may be healthy, but it is often emotive and annoying. Not the kind of thing I want to read back typically. Intended for no one, an audience of zero.
So then the project became essays. A quick research essay. But a quick research essay becomes not so quick when the topic is bigger than you thought. Suddenly you find yourself working on a dissertation that will take you another year. That is too long.
So now, there is no research. The essay is whatever I can produce with the knowledge that I already have. And I publish one a day, which makes speed a factor. Also I don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time on these.
Are these essays high quality? Not really. Would anyone publish them? No, that’s why they are published here and not the NYT op-ed section. But are they making me a better writer?
That is the question.
Rules:
- No research
- Must be publishable (grammar/spelling)
- Deadline: due once per day
Every essay gets a serial number instead of a title as well. This is part of a greater organizational theory I am working on. But the number is randomly generated. For now, they are placed in numerical order in the directory, but the order does not matter. The numbers are meaningless except for referencing the page.
The directory page as of now has the links to the pages. While it does in fact “direct” you, it may as well be random. Because there is no other organization. There is no other context. But if the materials are actually high quality enough, the directory of links and numbers could be used to construct a more in depth codex. And the codex would actually serve information in a useful way.
Because a website is a living resource, the essays can all be continuously improved upon. They are not static. Good essays can be made better. Bad essays can be purged. Curation is only relevant if there’s actual material in the archive. Things don’t have to be immediately perfect. They need to be approaching perfection. Get them to that phase 1 publishable quality, and then fine tune going forward.
When people use the internet today, the two most consistent sources of information are: Wikipedia and Reddit. The reason those two sites work is because these websites are alive. Wikipedia is constantly being tinkered on. And Reddit has the communities and encourages that peer-to-peer engagement. They are different, but they are the same. And there is room for more web pages like that, that may not be perfect, but are alive. Hopefully, I can avoid the descent into disordered thought. Timecube was not a helpful website. The goal is to write better, not reinvent physics. When it comes time to write something that actually is consequential, by then hopefully I will have the actual skill to create something worthy.
