Improving process

I recently started publishing a small essay every day, but missed a day after only five because of travel, which made me rethink my process so I could improve it and never miss again.

I don’t think travel can be used as an excuse not to write. Yes, travel can make you busy and exhausted, but it also provides so many random triggers, so many new ideas and observations, and these positives far outweigh the negatives, so I expected my writing to be boosted by travel, not hindered by it, so I broke down my process, which is usually pretty quick and has three parts: the observing, the writing, and the editing. The first two parts I love, the third part I find a little annoying.

First, the observing. What I try to do is go out and experience my day in the most me way possible: following where my eye leads, taking too long with my curiosities, doing what the hunch says even if it’s weird af. I know that having the time to even follow your curiosities is a luxury for most, but I believe even in our ridiculously busy lives we can always find moments to look at the world with eyes that are looking for that spark, and I’m not yet brave enough to do it all the time, but I try to be. Travel greatly helps with this part, giving so many ideas throughout the day when you travel through places, have to interact with people, and have to see so many new things.

Then comes the writing, which people assume would take too long because writing itself is a slow, thoughtful and methodical process, but I try not to make it so grand. All I do is, at the end of the day, I find some quiet time without distractions, without screens, and take a pen and paper and write down the simplest thing I remember about the day. Then the next one, then, because I am me, one of those simple things will strike a chord in my deepest roots and light up the fairy lights inside my brain, because what is writing if not taking the outside and using it as a lens to zoom into my insides? In a way writing is quite easy, or maybe I should say I have found a way to make writing easy for me, a process I have reached through my own observations and learnings, by tweaking it every day for years. I would say travel even helps with this part, because you get long lapses of time on a slow bus or sleeping alone in a hostel.

Now comes the annoying part: the editing, which I have struggled with quite a lot. Because editing is where reality comes in: that you are a chaotic mess and none of your thoughts connect with each other and what you wrote is pure garbage but what you want to be is a Mozart of words or something, and the distance between the two is too massive to fill, so I have to accept that what I publish is not going to be perfect, and that is okay. It just has to represent the one idea I want to say in a clear enough voice, and that is it.

I’ve broken my editing down into three steps. First, I find the one idea I want to write about, what Invisible Ink calls the armature. I tend to present this idea as an essay in a single sentence, a philosophy I have developed and found pretty helpful. Second, I structure the essay so it starts with what triggered the thought, something real that happened in my life, then connects it with something inside me (the chord it struck), and in the end finishes the loop by connecting back to that outside thing. Whatever I write I try to fit into that structure, and whatever doesn’t fit gets cut. This is where the major edits happen. Third, I cut the unnecessary things, reduce vagueness, and generally improve grammar.

But editing is the part travel does not help with much, because editing is an iterative process and this is where the busy and exhausted part of travel catches up with you, so I have taken a few steps to remedy that.

First, whenever I observe something and have a few thoughts going in my mind, I write the armature of the idea in my notes as that single sentence, so when I am ready to put my thoughts on paper and I look at my notes, I immediately know what I had already decided to write about.

Second, I have made my website a dynamic blog. So when I publish an essay and then reread it from time to time, which is what I like to do just as a hobby, I of course spot many inconsistencies, so I go back and fix them later, which gives me relief, because now I don’t have to worry about being perfect. And the thing is, I haven’t really shared the link with anybody or told anybody that I write there every day, so it’s very easy for me to change what I already wrote, and I can make many edits over time and don’t have to hold myself back from publishing a half-finished piece.

I think this is one danger of social media, or of posting publicly, that we become too self-conscious while creating, because we know we are going to be judged, we are going to be liked or ignored, and the silence is always a little heavier than the likes, because there are always going to be a lot more people who will see us and ignore us.

These two steps have already made editing way easier, and I feel a lot less daunted by it, but it’s still a work in progress. It seems to be working so far, because on the same trip where I missed a day, I have now picked that discipline back up, and I am writing this from the hotel bed.