The Ten Post Experiment

Back in April, I started a simple experiment at the urging of my friend Diana: each week, I would write and publish a piece on Medium; she would edit, get me unstuck, and help me promote the pieces. We would try it for ten weeks, and decide afterward whether to renew the commitment. It sounds simple, but I’m a fussy writer who hadn’t written a single long-form piece since turning in my college thesis in 2009. At the time, it felt like a promise made to be broken.

Yet here we are: the tenth post, even if it’s a few weeks late. Like a first-time marathon runner stumbling across the finish line at the back of the pack, I’m mostly just relieved that I made it.

There are no secrets to be learned by writing ten posts. I haven’t figured out some expeditious system for getting thoughts out in a reliable way; I don’t even think I’m necessarily a better writer now than I was back in April. How people like Laura and Anil manage to churn out multiple incredible long-form pieces a week is still a total mystery to me. Maybe that secret takes 100 posts to find. Maybe those people are very chill aliens.

But one thing I did pick up along the way is that writing is an excellent way to process what I’ve learned. Before this experience fades and I move fully onto the next project, I’m writing this last post as a way to remind myself of what I learned during this experiment.

1. Writing is always hard.

During the first hour of working on a piece, an irrational but overwhelming feeling often creeps up on me: everything I’m saying is obvious, incoherent, and/or worthless. Learning how to ignore this voice and keep working is maybe the most valuable thing I picked up during this experiment.

The act of writing is that of pinning a living, breathing, amorphous set of thoughts in your brain into a fixed, shareable form. In my head, the ideas for a piece dart around like hummingbirds, moving too quickly for me to easily assess their flaws. As I write, the ideas calcify into words; their gaping holes, logical fallacies, and lack of examples become increasingly evident. The dissonance between my vision and the broken paragraphs I manage to capture makes me want to immediately open a new tab and watch YouTube forever.

In such moments, nothing is more appealing than giving up on a piece entirely and reaching for a different one instead. Sometimes, that’s the right move. More frequently, though, it’s simply a mirage: most ideas look easy from afar, but the approach almost always reveals a bramble of challenges. The sooner I give up on the notion of a piece springing from my head fully clothed and armored, the more effective I am at actually doing the hard work of writing.

Looking back, the best hack Diana and I found for managing this was for her to force me to pick — and commit! — to an idea before writing even began. When we stuck to that, revelations and redirections still shifted the end product some distance from the initial vision. But an externally-enforced commitment at least quashed the urge to work on a different idea as soon as the writing got tough. It meant that the only way out was through.

2. Future Me is the best person I can write for.

After my third post found a modicum of unexpected success, daydreaming about how trendy a piece could be became an unavoidable factor when deciding on a topic. Even for people with good sense and other sources of love and validation, the siren song of metrics is difficult to resist.

Here’s the cold truth of those metrics: my most-read piece during this experiment racked up over 21,000 views, but its appeal (to others, and to me) dwindled quickly over time. It was thrilling to put out a piece of writing that lots of strangers read and shared, but nothing terribly useful came out of it. On the other hand, the pieces I wrote for myself have become a foundation that I can build on, introduce myself through, refer back to. I may not have gotten as much attention for them, but the conversations I did have around them were more substantive and fruitful.

I know that it’s possible to optimize for “success” on the internet, but ultimately it just isn’t a game worth playing for me. I now consider, instead: what pieces do I want to be able to link to? What pieces explain a fundamental idea that I could then build upon? What pieces, in other words, will I thank my past self for?

3. Writing takes all kinds of time.

I miraculously published seven of the ten posts I’d committed to “on time,” meaning within a week or so of the previous post. Hitting my deadlines required writing single-mindedly, as if it were my job. Most importantly, I got over the idea that I had to be in a certain mood to write and learned, instead, that different types of writing used different types of free time and attention.

I had the extreme luxury of being able to spend at least two days a week focused primarily on writing, thanks to an intentionally lackadaisical freelance schedule. These large blocks of time were crucial for rendering my thought fragments and ideas into coherent drafts. But the 20 minutes spent holding my phone with one hand on the subway were important, too — for brainstorming stories and metaphors and titles, remembering the big picture, and working through specific narrative knots. The pieces that I worked on relentlessly using different types of attention and effort turned out much better than the ones I tried to summon only in moments of absolute focus.

That said, I still found writing time hard to schedule, mainly because it was vehemently unpredictable. Whether scheduling in a rewrite of existing material or blocking out a totally new piece, I was absolutely wrong, every time, about how long anything would take to write. Some posts flowed out in one continuous stream; others had heaps of raw material and countless outlines but still never quite took form.

The best approach I could come up with, though not actually adopt as well as I would have liked, was to work in iterative sprints. For example: to write this piece, I set aside two days to write; at the end of each, I had to send out a draft regardless of where it landed. Time-boxing an otherwise endless endeavor gives me the opportunity to make hard decisions about what to jettison and how to scope a piece to fit within the time I have.

4. I need to draft back and forth, forever.

By my second post, it had become clear to me that I write in layers like a painter lays down colors, needing distance and feedback between each coat of words. Early on each week, Diana often received extremely incomplete drafts riddled with placeholders and questions and — if I was lucky — a single fleshed-out anecdote. Even without an editor, these drafts allowed me to be in controlled dialogue with my thoughts. Each subsequent writing session, I’d have something new to look back at and build upon instead of an intimidating blank page.

That said, having someone to send the drafts to made the experience infinitely better for me. Not only was it a light form of accountability to ensure progress between the deadlines, but I also needed the validation and external perspective to figure out what parts of a piece I needed to expand on or cut. A great editor is intrusive: she gains entry to the dark, unorganized recesses of the brain and tidies up. An incredible editor, like Diana, is one who also understands how to life-coach — when to push because I’m stuck in a whirlpool of my own bullshit and when to let my “process” run its course.

5. Use “I” instead of “you.”

During the first week of this experiment, Diana sent over a piece of advice I’ve been struggling to follow ever since: stop hiding my points in abstract, second-person generalizations and actually share my own story.

To drive home the point, she included this quote from Playing Big, which sums it up far better than I ever could:

Playing bigger always includes, in some way, coming forward to tell our own tales; voice our own questions; and share our bare, simple truths…“My slice of the truth to tell” is an important phrase in our journeys to playing bigger. Can we resist the fear-based tendency to make our work abstract or overly complex and instead trust that our lived experiences, insights, and natural ideas are enough to bring to the table? Often, that kind of authenticity and vulnerability is what is needed to move hearts and create change.

I still tend to hide in my first drafts, but now I’ve learned to be cautious of “you,” too.

6. Make someone else toot your horn.

After struggling with a piece for days, I lose sight of how it actually appears to other people. By the end, all I can see in my writing is a gaping mess of compromises and sentiments I could not fully realize. This means that hitting the “Publish” button on a post makes me want to immediately close my laptop and, if possible, throw it into a black hole.

Needless to say, this means that I am not the best at promoting my own work.

This is another area in which Diana was a lifesaver: I’d publish a piece, send her a hasty message about having done so, and then go to lunch. By the time I was ready to face my writing again, she would have already shared it with the world, usually highlighting what she loved about the piece while doing so. Through her gaze, I also finally manage to summon up a fresh perspective to look at — and enjoy — my own work.

7. Writing regularly inspires other projects, too.

Like taxidermy or drawing or compression, writing is an act that requires ruthless decision-making: what is preserved of the original idea, and what is abstracted away? Getting better at making these decisions is useful for writing, but also for executing every other kind of creative project. For more on how this works, read Nicole Fenton’s amazing Words as Material.

The same week I started this writing exercise, I also started trying to answer a question posed by my fellow Orbital member Edlyn — “What is the thing you want to see in the world?” Eight weeks later, I began working in earnest on designing and planning for Multi Entry, a collection of essays and media I’ll be putting together during a two month trip to China.

The idea for Multi Entry grew out of this writing experiment, but the act of announcing and launching Multi Entry all but consumed it. And that’s okay. I started the writing experiment not knowing if I could write consistently or what I wanted to say. Now I know the answers: I can, and I do.

This post marks the end of Chrysaora Weekly — for now. Instead of renewing my commitment to this vessel, I’m channeling my efforts toward the core interests I’ve uncovered: deep translations of culture, demanding respect for the youthful vernacular, and marveling at how people, communities, and technologies transform each other. These are the topics I’ve always gone on and on about, even when no one was paying attention, but Chrysaora Weekly helped me find more people to share these ideas with. I’m so grateful to all of you for reading, and to Diana for being the perfect collaborator through it all.

If you still care about these topics, please follow my efforts at Multi Entry or my general antics on Twitter. It might be on a different domain, and from a different continent, but I’ll see you again soon.

❤

Christina Xu is an organizational designer, ethnographer, and enabler based in New York. She’s heading to China for two months in the fall. A consummate professional, she has promised the internet that she’ll get a tattoo if her Kickstarter raises enough money.