This Builds Character

As the philosopher and writer Paul Valéry explained in 1938, “A poet’s function is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” That is, his job is to produce work.

— Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday

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Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Your other jobs include fixing sentences, killing sentences, and arranging sentences.
If this is the case making, fixing, killing, arranging how can your writing possibly flow?
It can’t.

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

A writer may write painstakingly,
Assembling the work slowly, like a mosaic,
Fitting and refitting sentences and paragraphs over the years.
And yet to the reader the writing may seem to flow.

The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make.
You’re not writing for a reader in the mirror whose psychological state reflects your own.
You have only your own working world to consider.
The reader reads in another world entirely.

— Several Short Sentences about Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg

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One is from my previous career as an electronic musician doing live shows: Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.

So, that is one solution. The other one has something to do with my biggest hobby, cooking. With a ten-course meal, you start somewhere, and you a leave a palate behind in your mouth that wants to go to the next step. The same with wine tasting, where you start with a certain wine, and you build your way up to the bolder ones. That knowledge really comes into play when you want to create an arc over an action score with almost continuous music: In the first twenty minutes, you set a palate.

—Tom Holkenborg (JunkieXL) (interviewed in Blood, Sweat & Chrome, Kyle Buchanan)

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“Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things. Things aren’t difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state to make them.”

— Constantin Brancusi

In the beginning, we believe that there must be someone in order for the breathing to be possible. There must be someone in order for the walking to be possible. But in fact the walking, the breathing is enough. We don’t need a walker; we don’t need a breather. Think of the rain. We’re used to saying, “the rain is falling,” or “the wind is blowing.” But if it’s not falling, it’s not the rain. And if it’s not blowing, it’s not the wind. It is the same with breathing and walking with the Buddha. We begin to touch the reality of no-self. There is only the breathing going on; there’s only the walking going on.

— Breathe, You Are Alive!, Thich Nhat Hanh

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Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work.

Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb). Doing the verb will take you someplace further and far
more interesting.

— Keep Going, Austin Kleon

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Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?

I think you would.

The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

— Atomic Habits, James Clear

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Mastery has no end game, I discovered. It is a goal of coarse. Yet there is no turning point felt and reached. There is no singular moment when something happens and all becomes clear. Of course we who work with our hands consider becoming a master. A master of wood, of clay, or paint. A master of welding or hammering metal into shapes. Mastering the violin, the fiddle, the bow on the saw. However redolent the smell of the goal of mastery may be at the beginning to an acolyte, it doesn’t seem real once you get down to the work of the thing, the practice of it. Then it’s just your striving every day to get better while staying alive.

— Handmade, Gary Rogowski