I came up the hill at Walnut Creek this morning and saw this hawk, perfectly indifferent to humans, dogs, and bicycles alike.
Working with the garage door open
Once upon a time in Austin, Texas, you could walk around in the evening and see people tinkering in their garages, working with the garage door open.
Robin Sloan says that’s how we all should be working:
This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page.
Rather, I believe it’s a time to explain as you go. Our “work”, in an important sense, is to get into each other’s heads; to blast out cosmic rays that might give rise, in other minds, to new ideas.
In other words: Show Your Work!
Signs of compost
Keeping in mind Ann Patchett’s “I am a compost heap,” every time I pass the local community garden, I feel like the signs on the compost heap could stand in for various stages of the book-writing process.
Two quotes
At this risk of this blog just being a back-and-forth with Alan: I love his “twoquotes” tag on his blog, where he simply juxtaposes one quote with another.
I’m coming up on the second anniversary of keeping my commonplace diary, and all year I’ve been putting one quote beneath another quote, letting them talk to each other:
Sometimes I am intentional with the juxtaposition, saving a quote for the right day, but the really fun juxtapositions are the random ones when the meaning reveals itself only after the ink is dry.
Heading into my third year, it’ll be interesting to see if this still works with three, then four, then five…
And then what?
Here is a lifted type collage, inspired by this Alan Jacobs post, a sermon I desperately needed (which he told me he wrote, like almost all sermons, for himself) about outsourcing research, letting AI do your writing, watching YouTube videos at 2x speed, etc.
My question about all this is: And then? You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing.
But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you?
The whole attitude seems to be: Let me get through this thing I don’t especially enjoy so I can do another thing just like it, which I won’t enjoy either….
I say: If you’re trying to get through your work as quickly as you can, then maybe you should see if you can find a different line of work.
Amen!
Whenever I see a video of some expert telling me I should outsource anything that can be done for less than my hourly rate, I think of the painter Grant Wood, who said, “All the good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.”
I think of Mary Ruefle on wasting time.
I think of film editor Walter Murch, who wrote in his book, In The Blink of an Eye, “The real issue with speed is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”
* * *
Update (12/25/2022) – Alan had the collage blown up as a print. I really need to get the print shop up in 2023…
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