If there was a sport made out of the act of writing, its rules would probably require one to be able to not delete anything. Everything that one writes, has to be a stream, without the possibility of edits. You might be asking, without the perspective of writing-as-a-performance art, why make it hard for ourselves? Because editing is not writing, to a degree. Editing is its own activity, separate from the act of writing. But anyone who tried to write without editing, would know, it is incredibly difficult. Eventually, you start editing in your mind. But is it still editing if the words are not on a page? We edit ourselves all the time, as humans, we edit and curate a version of ourselves that is acceptable to a given audience, the people around us. Writing is not that different, one is writing for an audience, even if it for one's future self.
I want to argue that editing is a fundamentally more powerful tool, even more important than writing. The stream of word can be quite endless, if one tries; the problem of not being able to write, is in the fact that we edit before we write. Is this thought worth writing about is already a question a lot of folks I know would ask before writing a single word. And no one wants to produce sloppy work for everyone to see; typos are my personal source of shame for example. I never thought I would believe this, but editing is probably where most of my conscious time should go to; while my mind ceaselessly spew out garbage. Raw creation is a tiny part of any process, in my opinion. The hard work is in editing and polishing. And reducing. Reducing one's work through the act of editing is probably the key to saving ourselves and our minds.
Yesterday, when I said doing less is probably the key, I was referring to the act of editing one's life. Not in a way a self-help Guru would preach to drop "everything unimportant" from our lives, I think that is dangerous and pompous. But editing our lives in a way that only the most important part remains. Doing less is not about doing little, but identifying the most important bits by doing almost nothing. In an age where basic survival is not a problem, it is too easy to give in to the endless stream of things, that spews out garbage. The easiest way I try to achieve this is by quite literally spending most of my time editing. If I have a project that I want to work on, I will maybe work on it one day a week, but the other six days, I let the project sit until the most important bits floats up to the surface. Like Igor Stravinsky said,
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
It is almost counterintuitive to think that working on something less, is more freeing. But the older I get, the more it becomes clearer that precision of execution is refreshing in an world full of garbage1.
- AI slop. ↩︎