I am having trouble even getting this thought off the ground without using language that assumes away the point I want to make...
I was about to write: "Any time you plan to start something new..."
But, the default use of language in that sentence assumes "you plan to start". This is the point I want to address.
Many people do in fact plan to start. In Myers-Briggs personality terms, I suspect this approach works for those people who tend towards the Sensing (rather than Intuition) and Judging (rather than Perceiving) ends of the spectrum. A quick survey of google results indicates the following population distributions estimates:
70% Sensing / 30% Intuition
58% Judging / 42% Perceiving
So it's no surprise that phrases like "plan to start" become idiomatic, given that they apply literally for a majority of the population.
For the rest of us though, the conventional wisdom simply does not apply to the way we think. I am finding it increasingly important to recognize these distinctions...to recognize the subtle indicators that a given bit of wisdom does not apply to my work process.
Working Backwards
Planning to start indicates a process of working forward. You decide what you want to do and then you design a linear march from here to there. My writing almost never works that way. My writing process looks something like this:
- Several ideas spontaneously converge in an exciting way
- I sketch out several pages of implications
- I try to create an elegant model that intuitively captures the interplay between these ideas
- I begin writing in sentence/paragraph form
- I slam into a wall
That wall is a pang of realization...that I have no idea what I am doing. I start asking myself questions like:
Why did I think this was interesting? What is the point? Why would anyone else care about the random collision of these thoughts in my head?
This is more than simple self-doubt. They are questions that need to be answered in order for the final product to be worth reading, and generally I have not considered them up to this point in the process.
Most of the advice out there (written by SJs) will tell me I am doing it all wrong. I should start by determining what problem I want to solve, defining a target market, blah blah blah. You have heard me bitch about this stuff before so I won't belabor the point. The thing is, that advice would apply if slamming into the wall was the end of the process, or if I continued on without ever considering these questions. But that isn't what happens...
The reality is that I work backwards. The majority of the time - I hit that wall, step away from the screen, question myself, rephrase the questions from several different angles...and eventually I find that I had good reasons for thinking the inititial intuition was interesting and worthy of further elaboration. I just wasn't consciously aware of those good reasons until I forced myself to explicate them.
Occasionally I end up where I was last week, feeling like I've gone down too many rabbit holes that failed to tie into relevant themes, but that is the exception that proves the rule. If I tried to work forward I would quickly encounter impenetrable walls everywhere. The good ideas simply don't reveal themselves when I have already decided where I want to go.
