On long, self-sufficient posts
An example of failure to write coherent instructive prose, with analysis
Once again, my attention fell on my many undermaintained projects like this one. So I decided to write out a little about my understanding of what’s going on.
When I try to write on a topic I’d wish to share, I face a choice which wasn’t really a choice for most of my blogged existence (which almost nobody thankfully will know about, haha). The choice: do I write a sequence of posts or try to bit a large chunk in the hope. Because I know I’m prone to forgetting, to falling out of love, to having too much on my plate, to starting only to find it’s awful and that it’s such a pity I just can’t when I wished to.
There’s some ableism deep inside, which makes for a hard brand of perfectionism when you don’t feel you’re trying to achieve too much yet you still effectively do, but you also don’t know what exactly it is you want. The end result just should be good enough, because, for one, I sorta hate editing after posting, thrice or ten times because I didn’t saw everything at the first glance. Or, then, editing just even once: you have to jump through so many actions which can feel or be forecasted as utterly unberable, so the only reasonable action is to cancel. Welcome to untreated, only recently self-diagnosed AuDHD, I guess.
Other problems with serial posting is my usual lack of a vision solid enough to be sure I’ll have to write just N posts about A, B, C and D, maybe with a couple extras, instead of being completely lost because I failed to foresee that something just doesn’t work at all, and that it should exist and be working. My brain also likes to learn on various mishaps and collect them all and present them to me as a big jumble of indecipherability, so I often don’t even know why I’m opposed to something, but in retrospect, if it worries me too much, I usually sus that out. Only to forget that symbolic knowledge after some time, because I always do. So, no vision1 and no particular wish to do unknown amount of planning to make the work a more lucky brain will do on its own, just to make people know about a particular firefly that caught my attention (maybe again, maybe just for right now). It’d be work. An unknown amount of work that often disregulates my self-maintenance and leaves me yet again surprised where the hours went.
Now back to the choice. Fortunately I came to not recognize typos and small problems as critical flaws and a pain to have been emitted them, but picking this cherry leaves most of the cake still unapprehended. So. When I try to write something one-off and self-contained to try minimizing problems from dropping a series or something, it again faces the same: I fail to account to everything that was needed, and compact it all (I mean, all I remembered) and this becomes quite unreadable on top of my usual parentheses.
One way to make less of a jumble would be to set prerequisite topics for the reader. You guess that: I’m not that cognizant of how to extract them out of my head, and managing references is likewise a terra incognita. Even when I can remember a reference, I’m usually not very sure it’s a good one to place.
Fortunately, some kind of a partial solution to all of this mess is already in place in my head for some time now: I seem to work better when I don’t consider my output to be anything of any finality in itself, a milestone that I need to be in decent quality all on its own. Instead I try to converse with concrete people or very narrow gestalts of groups of people that form on their own in my head. What I’m used to be doing is telling bit by bit in an interactive fashion, whichever asks for more spotlight. If it does.
There is another problem: I don’t have a person available to speak on every conceivable topic to get a feeling about what would—in an unidentifiable future—be able to repackage itself into a post or a sequence which was already walked to the end and so is simpler to write out than just from walking into the void.
And another problem: when I already showed somebody a thing, it’s not usually for long I’ll be able to think about repeating it somewhere else. Often that just leads to frustration.
So that’s why that’s a partial solution and you don’t see much here. Even if I shoehorn myself into some kind of social media where small and disarrayed posts look like the norm, I remind myself that I was never prolific in circumstances like those: I had my presence on social media and yet I wasn’t somebody who even my friends would read, additionally because I had no idea what to write there if I already got most of what I wanted to say elsewhere.
Now, if somebody stumbles on this post and has comments on any of this, that’d be nice. I don’t expect magical advice that’ll change things, because what I also understand is that I probably underpracticed to feel at home writing non-fiction stuff2 which will leave myself pleased. But do I want to practice just for the sake of it? There’s to much to be done untangled from.
(Also known as “leave a comment to have me noticing it after a month or a year and being misplacedly glad and unable to concentrate on a then current activity!”)
What’s more, I’m a proud owner of almost total visual aphantasia, so that’s not even just allegory. As far I’ve read, it’s indeed often connected to a hard time planning and choosing between similar options, and I do have all of that.
Fiction is another story. Don’t think I have some unimaginative success there, but I can say it’s often quite pleasing to make. But almost always it’s short to very short—go figure.