Writing about writing
August 2009 (index)
I got started on this site because my friend Sam reminded me of something I'd told him about some time ago: the website stickk.com. It's a designed to help you avoid bad behaviour such as procrastination. The idea is that you sign up and say you'll do something (get fit, lose weight, learn a new skill, ...) and agree that if you don't do it on schedule then you pay a fine.
I signed up to post twelve articles (6,000+ words total) online within four weeks or else pay $1,000 to a random charity of stickk's choosing. Another option is an "anti-charity" where the money goes to something you don't like: if you're a Spurs fan then the money goes to Arsenal; if you're a Democrat the money goes to the George W Bush presidential library.
Did it work? Well, I've managed to post the twelve articles (and more) and avoid a thousand dollar fine. Before making the deal on stickk I had been planning on writing for some time but somehow never quite got round to it. So it worked for me.
I'm not sure which bit had the desired effect: was it the potential loss of money; or making the committment public (and naming Sam as a referee); or just making the commitment myself?
Writing is good
Having the deadline meant I got things completed (to a point) rather than having lots of odds and ends (as I usually do).
Writing things down helps get my thoughts together, and shows me the gaps in my knowledge. I (re-)discovered that the act of writing things down is helpful, even if nobody else ever reads them.
Writing things down also means I make a list of what to do next. The series of football/ranking/betting articles snowballed from from an initial thought wondering how random sports results were. From maths to data, to scraping websites, to thinking of other things to scrape, to flickr, to other photo projects, to other generated images, ...
I'm pleased the target was 12 articles rather than a bigger number. With a target of 12 I manged to write 24. If I'd set a target of 24 in the first place I think I might have given up after just a few, when I was struggling to get started.
Too much writing is bad
Writing three articles a week feels like a lot. It's certainly possible, particularly if they're all about similar subjects, or if they're exposition of something I already know. But I don't particularly want to write a textbook or encyclopaedia.
I'm more interested in finding out new things than explaining them to other people. So the purpose of (personal, unpaid) writing for me is to help with that. I suspect three or more articles a week would feel like a chore. But writing occasionally for myself still seems worthwhile: to force a deeper understanding, and to keep a record of topics worth pursuing later.
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