I want to think out loud about writing for a second before I go into proper weekend mode, so if you hate that and find it self-indulgent or whatever, this is your warning. (I think feeling weird about feeling weird about writing is what keeps people from writing, and I don’t think gatekeeping about it is anything but an unproductive and ego-protective bummer, myself, but that’s just me.)
I’m in permanent awe of people who can think and write with clarity and depth *and speed* about crunchy things, but I also try to remember that it’s is a lot like muscle training. I am trying all the time for clarity (for various readerships, differing by piece) and depth, but I am not fast.
I draft quickly! I write hundreds of thousands of words a year, most of which get scrapped. Getting all the elements built and lined up right for anything complex takes me months, which is very annoying.
And I have health constraints and family commitments and non-writing work, so it is discouraging when my bits of writing time add up so slowly. But! Just continuing to draft and read and edit down and talk to friends and edit down and read another thing and edit down does eventually get somewhere.
(And fwiw, the pace and depth of the best fedi interactions have been really generative and supportive of that snail-pace grind, much more so than faster networks.)
But when I look back ten years or even two years or a year, I can see that I’m able to handle the ideas with a little more skill, and even though many of the things I’m wrestling with are still eluding me, I believe I’ll eventually get it here.
I hate not knowing, to a comical degree! I do not like acts of faith! I sure hate the sense of inadequacy to the task. But as with my stupid physical therapy and my initially terrible cooking and everything else, I think it’s just about practice.
Sensitive content
I recognize a lot of this from the way I write; often when I finally write an article, it's the result of discussing a topic with people for years, to a level of depth that approximates writing ad-hoc articles each time. It takes forever!
I've been experimenting a bit lately with reviewing and editing less before publishing an article, and I've found that it doesn't seem to matter much for how much people appreciate the end result, and how effective it is. At least for me, it seems that the slowness of writing has been mostly to satisfy my own standards rather than that of anyone else, and at least some part of the lengthy process has been a matter of diminishing returns.
"I write hundreds of thousands of words a year, most of which get scrapped."
Just this alone is already very insightful. You'll hear the same from musicians who make a ton of loops and basic outlines of their ideas, just to focus on those few that really work. And I'd imagine this goes for many other creative areas.