Conversationalist's block

I find parallels between starting a conversation with someone and starting a blogpost.

“Homies be needing a ‘pretext’ to slide into someone’s DMs”, says a friend on Twitter. The problem for both starting a conversation and writing a blogpost is the abstract outcome orientation: “I want to have developed a connection with this person”; “I want to have developed my skills as a writer”. So you sit down and think: in order to develop a connection, we have to talk. Now I just need something, a topic, a MacGuffin to talk about. In order to develop my writing skills, I have to write. Now I just need something to write about.

So comes the writing block. “TODO: write a blogpost.” I sit down in front of an empty page. Remembering Sasha Chapin’s advice on writer’s block:

You’re always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You have things to write about. What you do is just put the things in your head on the page, in basically the order they naturally occur.

My mind goes blank. When I turn my attention inwards, the judgements and attitudes scatter like cockroaches. This is terrible advice. I rummage through my recent tweets for interesting ideas. Yes, I find some: but what could you possibly say about these in a blogpost?

After some considerable effort, I push out a few hundred words and call it a day. Let’s go through this ordeal again tomorrow. Five posts in, I abandon the blog.

Same story: there’s a cute girl at this party/interesting person at this meetup/“TODO: make friends on Twitter”. The goal is clear, I want to develop a connection. What topic can I use as a seed crystal to start growing this connection on? The mind goes blank. I look around me/rummage through their recent tweets for an idea. There’s nothing to grab onto.

Finally I produce my shitty MacGuffin; I rehearse it; I polish it until it’s shiny. I throw it at them and they give me a polite response. No follow-up. With herculean effort, I pull up another thing to say, and get another polite response. I give up. Let’s try with someone else. Five people in, I become an asocial hermit.

“TODO: learn how to start conversations,” I write down diligently.

But the solution is in approaching this from a completely different angle. It is worthwhile to have friends, and to have writing skills. But these are the kind of goals much better served by pursuing virtue and developing good habits, and reaching the goals as a welcome side-effect.

By virtue and good habits I mean in this case principally the virtue of curiosity, and the habit of gently redirecting this curiosity to particular channels.

Curiosity is honed by noticing it. If you can notice and pull onto a tiny, quiet spark of curiosity about anything, the next time the spark will be bigger. If you keep noticing and pulling on these threads, eventually everything you encounter—a topic, someone’s tweet, a person at a party—will produce endless questions in your mind that your consciousness won’t be able to miss.

You also have to build the habit of redirecting the curiosity to the proper channels. God knows how much time in a day I spend responding to a tweet, a blogpost, a Youtube video, or a podcast episode in my head. When it’s time to produce a topic to write about, the case is long closed and I have nothing else to say. Or I see someone’s tweet, and I reply with a tweet of my own, without thinking whether public or private commentary is more appropriate in this case. Would this 12-tweet reply thread work better as a DM? Or, simply, I deplete my interest in a question by tweeting about it, instead of lingering on it a bit and exploring it in an essay or a journal entry.

The [I have thoughts about this → sit down to write] pipeline can be trained, whether the output ends up going into a blogpost, a Twitter DM, or even your journal.

This is the way: when you have developed curiosity, you sit down to write because you are genuinely curious to explore a particular thought in writing. You approach a person because you are genuinely curious about some aspect of them, or something they said. Or, by God, you just noticed something and you want to say it: “That’s a beautiful dress.” “That tweet made me really happy.”

Suddenly it becomes easy.

You express your curiosity; they give you a polite response. No follow-up. Mission fucking accomplished. You expressed what you wanted to express. If you keep doing this with honesty, eventually some day someone will talk back to you. If you keep blogging with honesty, eventually some day you’ll be a pretty decent writer. You’ll get your original goal as a side-effect.

The tricky thing is that you have to be patient, and you don’t really control the timing. “But I want to have friends now!” “Someone else is going to DM the cute girl first!” “I’ve written three blogposts in three days and I don’t want to lose the streak!”

I guess you should’ve started developing your curiosity a year ago then. You need to give them tomatoes time to grow. You can’t pull them up with your hands. Instead of a writing habit or a DMing habit, you need to develop the habit of noticing your curiosity and expressing it. This is its own reward—it makes you more authentic and alive. Being a good writer and having a social life is a bonus.

Another aspect of timing I’m running into is that you can’t really schedule curiosity, at least not at my level (beginner). This blogpost is based on a spark of curiosity, but I only sat down to write it several hours later, and it was already significantly more difficult to start, and slow to keep writing.

Similarly, sometimes I read a tweet that inspires me to send a DM right when I’m going to bed; I don’t want to keep myself up, so I leave it for the morning. The next day, the spark of inspiration is gone. Or I do send the DM, they reply, I go to sleep. The next day, the conversation furnace has burnt out. There’s no energy left.

Similarly again, when you’re at a party, you know there’s always that one moment where you and the cute girl come across each other and you’re presented a perfect opportunity to say something to her. You have 1.5 seconds—poof, it’s gone.

You can’t store the inspiration for later, you can’t just make notes and then pull them up whenever your to-do list says it’s time to write. I mean—you can, but you’re making it more difficult. Maybe it gets easier as you level up.

Anyway. Conclusion: develop curiosity, and don’t worry so much about writing or talking to people on a schedule, sweet Monk.