On March 1 this year, I took Tim Ferris’ advice of writing 2 crappy pages a day, and began to do this free-form writing everyday. I’d open a Google doc, and keep writing, something, anything, until I’d filled up 2 pages. I managed to do this for 28 out of 31 days in March, then in
April - 19/30 days
May - 26/31 days
June - 30/30 days
July - 25/25 days
I’ve written over 250,000 words in these 5 months, but published only 1 blog post - much of which is pictures - in this interval.
Somehow, no matter how much I write, nothing quite feels worth publishing. And those 250,000 words are not personal thoughts and feelings. There’s about 20% personal stuff in there, 30% Telborg-related writing, and another 50% that looks like this
There’s just so much of the world that passes through our blind spots. I feel this when I read Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, not only with the objects and processes of nature that he describes, but also with people. “The motivations of love are chiefly subjective”. So true. People seem to fall in love with people in specific situations. They see a portion of the person in that situation. And there’s something about the time and the situation that feels magical. You read books like these and you realise that all of this was already there in front of your eyes, but you weren’t observing, you weren’t seeing. And what sets people apart is the ability to see what’s in other people’s blindspots - what is called a ‘different perspective’, I don’t know if it’s different, it’s probably just better resolution (I’m trying to think of what that actually means, it’s a fancy metaphor, but maybe the person with the different perspective is able to discern more features of the rock, the differences in texture and colour, how light falls around the curves, better than the person with an ordinary perspective.)
and this
There’s an excitement in reading Angle of Attack, about how Harrison Storms and his team and collaborators got the Apollo rockets built. (I wonder if George Lucas got the name ‘Storm Troopers’ from here?) The idea of doing something that’s never been done, on a very very short deadline, with an unfathomable amount of money. Imagine not knowing whether you should do earth orbit rendezvous or lunar orbit rendezvous, imagine debating THAT decision. I’ve never known anything like that.
This is me chasing some interesting path, I happened to discover at some point on that day or the previous day. The 3rd kind is the writing I both most enjoy and most crave, and you don’t quite know when it happens. Of course good inputs - what you’re reading, listening to, watching, who you’re talking to - all of those matter. But despite that, sometimes you get such an unexpected thought in the writing, that you feel like you want to exist more in that moment1. In fact that thought is the sole reason you’re glad for your existence in this world. I’ve tried to look up more words for ‘wanting to exist’ - think of this as the polar opposite of suicide2 - wanting to be here in this moment, simply because this world is awesome. And you’re glad to have seen a pattern that you did not know existed. You do not know if you’re the only one to have seen this pattern, and while many ideas might seem novel even after extensive research, the human imagination is so wild and total human knowledge so vast, you cannot be certain of the novelty of any ideas. But in the moment that you discover something exciting in writing, you do not care about the real-world value of the thought. Just simply having it, just having the thought pass through your mind is the great gift.
And every single day now I return to writing in the hope of again receiving this great gift.
Too much writing has been produced about writing. And too much of it, even from many famous and prolific authors, talks about the hardness of it. How hard good writing is. Except I have never enjoyed that view, and refuse to subscribe to it.
Asimov was a compulsive writer. No matter what was happening in the world, writing was his ‘anodyne’. Tom Hanks mentions how he often lets hours pass by at his typewriter, forgetting to even eat. Nora Ephron could not exist without writing.
Ray Bradbury says write for fun, and if you have a sudden block, then it’s your subconscious telling you you’re writing about the wrong thing, you’re bored of yourself right now, and you should go write about something else. Brie Wolfson in an excellent essay about Kevin Kelly, called this approach the Flounder Mode.
Sometime back, I adapted a Stephen Fry’s quote into a personal mantra - the one at the top of my list3
Follow what lights you up inside
But oh, the many thoughts beginning with ‘but…’ that flood into my brain when I put that line here for all the world to see.
“But are you going to get anywhere doing that?” - Where am I supposed to get to?
“But aren’t you supposed to finish things?” - You don’t have to force yourself to finish what truly interests you. A 5-star book will demand to be read, no matter how many exciting alternatives are sitting on your bookshelf. The project you truly love will keep pulling you no matter how many times you’ve gotten stuck on it.
“But what about success?” - Well, could you define success for me, please?
“But what does that make you? What is your identity?” - I think keeping my identity small is quite alright with me, as long as I’m producing work everyday.
Even as I write this, I can feel the fear of judgement flood my mind. Do I look serious, thinking like this, writing like this? Aren’t we supposed to be focused, one-trick ponies?
So much that is written and created is not shared with the world for fear of judgement. “What will they think?” might be the most insidious thought holding back human progress.
All these months, I’ve been consoling myself - I may not be publishing writing, but at least I’m writing, that is the most important part. Well, it’s important, for one cannot publish without writing, but publishing uses muscles different from those of writing. You must now look over your words, and grammar, and check if you’ve used the same adjective more than once, and try to replace the ‘nice’ and ‘pretty’, and decide if you have too less or too many qualifiers, and if you want to split the sentence with 16 commas. Mostly though, you want to publish today, so it feels a little less difficult to publish tomorrow. I suspect though, that this is only a ruse, what Randy Pausch would call a ‘headfake’. It’s the one I’m giving myself to publish something today. Only because I haven’t hit the button for a week, and once you’ve published a few times, hitting that button here on Substack is as good as having a chilled diet coke (sorry, I don’t do drugs, diet coke is my great joy).
Edit on Aug 16, 2025:
Susan Sontag on being a writer
The writer must be four people:
The nut, the obsédé
The moron
The stylist
The critic
1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence*.
A great writer has all 4 — but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.
via The Marginalian
In his series of interviews with Bill Moyers, titled The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell says
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we are seeking is an experience of being alive, so that the life experiences that we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within those of our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Edit on Aug 1: the idea of wanting to exist, as the polar opposite of suicide - that framing did not come from me, it’s from a tweet I cannot find now.
For the curious, here’s my full list:
1. Don’t think, just start.
2. Follow what lights you up inside.
(Corollary: If you’re bored, RUN, RUN, RUN!)
3. Write compulsively, read obsessively.
4. Your production function is all that matters.
5. Always bet on yourself.
6. Spend time with people who get you madly excited about life.