Angus Forrest

Bad Writing

467 words 3 min read

I’m a bad writer11 Citation needed..

At the moment, I don’t care whether my prose are polished, whether I have an audience that I’m writing for, or whether someone will care about what I write. Whether my writing is perceived as good is also secondary to my main goal of writing.

My main goal for writing at the moment is to build the foundation to be prolific. I want to be able to write many thousands upon thousands of words throughout my lifetime. The vast majority of my writing should be considered bad writing if the shear scale of it is such a vast prospect. Hence why should I care about the quality of my writing now? I’ve barely started, have infinitely many flaws, and I am writing in one accursed language at the moment22 Woe the day I start writing in 普通话..

I love the statistic that the most amount of free throw misses in the NBA is made by the same player that has the most three pointer scores. It is just the nature of sheer volume that there will be bad writing. There will be bad everything if you are trying to be productive and prolific.

It has been a struggle this week to write each day. Some of my daily writings can barely be considered a paragraph33 Looking at you “I voted”.. I think the difficulty of being honest with one self, outside any extrinsic motivation is the excruciating distraction available at all times. I could starve myself on short form content, or long form insightful videos, everything I ever wanted in the form of entertainment and knowledge is at my fingertips. What separates the person I am and the person I want to be is the quality of what I produce, what I can think and what I can commit to. Personally I’m excited where my ability to write will take me, but it will be a slow process. But that also excites me, this is a project that will last me a lifetime and I will still be found wanting.

This is in stark contrast to some other things I’ve blown enormous amounts of time on, like video games. The amount of time I’ve spent on DOTA 2 is astronomical, on the order of 5000 hours. The payoff for all of that time is the ability to watch and understand MOBAs, understand RTS games, and understand team building in a high stake environment. The last one is probably an sizeable positive, but that wasn’t the goal of the 5000 hours and clearly an auxiliary benefit to the focus on the game. In comparison, skills like writing, cooking, programming and mathematics are infinitely deep, allow connection and are all acts of producing.

This year for me has been a really eye opening experience, and has shown me the power of commitment. Showing up is half the battle.

Footnotes

  1. Citation needed. ↩

  2. Woe the day I start writing in 普通话. ↩

  3. Looking at you “I voted”. ↩

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