I’ve tried to keep myself thinking about how I want to write and create things on this website and elsewhere in the future, and how it would/should/could affect the way I design the building and reading experience here on the site.
I wrote a little thread on this over at Mastodon but then I remembered that I actually want to make use of my own site more than before. So now I’m writing here, as it should be.
The way I understand the problem is that we often see things as complete products of some process or action. We often only see the completed blog posts on peoples’ websites. We only see the published book from the author we like. We only see the complete conference talk from an expert we follow. We only see the fine-tuned and most engaging version of a tweet/toot/reel/whatever.
What I want to push myself to do more is to be fine with posting incomplete things. And with “incomplete” I don’t mean shoddy drafts or unreadable garbage. I mean ideas that have not been completely formed. Essays that are bubbling under. Posts that are a skeleton of a whole for me to work on incrementally. Good writing quality, but only as pieces of a larger puzzle in the works.
The words I keep using myself in this is “a thought” and “a think”. We have fleeting thoughts and sometimes we think about those thoughts. Maybe we have a few thinks about those thoughts over time.
With enough thinking, we conjure up something more elaborate and understandable from those random thoughts. Sometimes we can leave it at that. A 200 word elaboration of a thought. A think.
Sometimes we might like to think more about something. We might work on a bunch of thoughts and thinks for longer, ending up with a longer essay. A book even. But even then we might want to have an out of sorts:
This is not finished. It is usable and entertaining and valuable, but there are things I don’t know about or things I can’t be arsed to write down right this instant.
We treat many things as finishable. Formally publishing a book is a big thing. Once it hits the printing press, you’re done. The process of amendments, fixes, and other alterations is pretty heavy, but you can release editions. Blog posts are easier to amend, but often we treat those with the same protective care as a book or a film: “I need to get it 100% done, then publish it, and then it must be left untouched, unless I find some typos or comparable.”
The commodification of content online has squeezed us into a mold where we think that if we put out incomplete thinkpieces out for everyone to see, we risk being seen as lazy or incompetent or shoddy or something like that. As opposed to us having the option of being more public about the way we each personally think about writing and producing things.
Many platforms also prevent us from having space to do incomplete things in the open. Social networks, blogging software, and more are mostly hardwired for cranking out reverse chronological atomic posts. Once something is posted, it is there. Done. Finished. Now get on with the next one!
Even if you want to post an incomplete post, the systems often push you into releasing them once, and then you have to do a whole new release for each iteration of your thinking and writing. Twitter and comparable even technically prevent you from editing things you write. RSS and similar feeds by default are quite locked into the world of reverse chronological posting.
I want to build an online presence where I can do the old school blogging and status updating thing if I need to, but in addition to that I want to be able to think with my content on the fly, and let it become something bigger organically.
I like the way Maggie Appleton talks about digital gardening, and as a software professional I’ve always been a fan of how Martin Fowler builds their content as a mix of a blog and a wiki, a bliki. These ideas both (and others too) have been a source for some of my thinking on this topic. I love the analogy of “growing and pruning content”. I also understand the hard fact that blogs as is are fleeting posts, but wikis as is are ripe for creating a situation where you feel like you have to go deep when writing each page.
But yeah, things will change here. Right now my site is set up to act as a basic blog. Gladly I’m not too deep in yet, so I can quite easily go and build an experience that supports my needs.
Over at Mastodon I said that I will not probably use the terms “thought” and “think” on the site as is to convey the ideas to my readers, but we’ll see. Maybe it makes sense in some way.