[AE.NiNoBilMa] A NiNoBilMa check-in of sorts.
So, when I posted off the NiNoBilMa project for this month, I said I would be following it up with some notes about my thoughts and intentions regarding the project going forward, ideally by the end of last week and necessarily before the start of March.
I've at least nailed the fallback position of that, and I'm also on a streak of consecutive workday newsletters that I feel very satisfied about.
The origin of this newsletter entry is the cruft I cut from the initial February NiNo post, in the course of curtailing the tendency towards excessive explanation I referenced in a letter earlier this week. I wrote it in three distinct phases -- as part of the February NiNo post, as an attempt at a standalone post last week, and updated again now today -- and while I've tried to clean up the tense agreement and the timeline so that it makes sense as something coming out now, the possibility exists that some chronological chaos escaped my detection.
Anyway. The explanations spiralled out of me in my initial NiNoBilMa draft mainly because I felt I would be remiss in not noting that it was the second month in a row (out of two months total) where I didn't manage to start the process on the first Monday as planned.
I very nearly managed the second Monday, which would have been halfway through a very short month, and even then it took me a couple more days to figure out how to explain what I was doing in a way that was concise and made sense.
I found that a lot of the psychological momentum for a year-long self-administered crash course was blunted when I started January ill and exhausted, and a lot of the parameters and particulars of the project that were so clear in my head at that point vanished into the fog of those first days of 2022.
Enthusiasm, I suppose, is the word for that... but I feel like the inertial aspect of it is worth noting as this strikes me as a matter of internal logistics as much as it's one of emotions. Though maybe that's what emotions are, albeit that we often experience them with too much visceral, biochemical immediacy to process them a such.
It also felt like outside interest in participating in this endeavor peaked in the test/preview month of December. This isn't a complaint or accusation leveled at anyone; to the extent that at any moment I am excited and invested in this project, the thought of other people getting anything from it is a bonus and not something I need, and to the extent that I'm not enthusiastic, I certainly can't expect anyone else to be so.
I've not found myself ready to pull the plug entirely, but it has hit me so many times in the early weeks of February that it would be easy to let it die a quiet death and just move on with other things.
And while I dithered on that... well, I hadn't been writing other newsletters on any topic, as any time I thought about doing so, I found myself unable to get past the fact that I'm behind on my NiNoBilMa post for the month.
And whenever I asked myself, "Well, why don't I just sit down and write that?", I was struck by a lack of conviction as to what I should be setting as this month's program. December's little nonsense, no-expectation exercises had fired my imagination more than January's exercises in fitting thoughts into an outline had, but there are limits to what month after month of "No rules, just write!" can teach a person, and in any event, making that simple maxim work for me had required more work in terms of creating prompts and structures to work within than I had anticipated or could sustain.
Ultimately, I stuck with my general plan of having February build on the foundation established by January in a very literal and straightforward way. I did this suspecting that I would not find it particularly rewarding, as it was essentially more of the same.
Then, the day after I sent out the newsletter outlining the exercises I'd be doing, I did it for the first time, and... well, this is notes from my journal directly after I finished.
"The goal here is not to grade myself on my writing, but I look at what I've written there and it jumps out at me how much better I could make my points if I wasn't trying to fit this format. I feel like I nailed the exercise but the things I'm trying to articulate are a bit lost. That might not be apparent to anybody reading it, of course, who won't be judging the words against any internal model of intention behind them, but it's very obvious to me.
But that heartens and maybe even actually excites me a little, as it suggests to me that this experiment is working. More so than I felt at any point in December or January, I feel like I'm running into a challenge deeper than "set aside time, sit down, follow instructions until done"... which isn't always necessarily the easiest thing in the world, but the muscles that it exercises aren't specifically writing muscles.
When I was a child being formally taught basic writing skills, my reaction to any structure that chafed me was to reject it as unnecessary. If I thought I could write something better without it, I would do so, and then either turn it in and count on my high skills in general English language aptitude to get me a passing grade, or start pruning it like a piece of topiary until it suggested enough of the approximate shape it was meant to be that I could be given the benefit of the doubt.
These methods were often enough to get me a markedly better than passing grade, but they didn't teach me how to actually structure my writing. It's too early to say if holding myself to these exercises will do so, but it's certainly worth trying."
To make a long story short (TOO LATE!)... I have found myself challenged in a way I wasn't expecting, and that has rekindled my interest in this project as an ongoing thing.
And that, coupled with my observation about my weaknesses when it comes to explaining things, has helped me to refine what it is I'm doing here. "Working to acquire the skills I'm missing" is a uselessly broad notion if I don't know more about what I don't know.
With that in mind, I've got much clearer ideas for March and April than I had for January or February until well into those months. The progression will be less purely linear from here on out and more rooted in my own weak points and frustrations than any general concept of basic writing skills. I might keep using the outline format I've been practicing as a starting point, but it's not going to be "the point" of what I'm doing.
This decision leaves me less sure than ever that my own exercises are a useful example for others, but the idea from the beginning was that I am not a teacher here but one student among many... and if the only thing anyone else learns from this experiment is that it can be useful to go back to basics, shake loose preconceptions, and tackle the things that challenge us... well, that's a lot more than nothing, isn't it?