For nearly 25 years, my career has revolved around magazine writing. Editing too, but that’s a harder thing to describe to people, mostly because it involves so many things: overseeing a section, working on a special package, editing a feature story, even nudging a piece that’s already been edited. It’s easiest to just use “journalist” rather than either word.

Working in magazines for 25 years, though, has done some weird things to my brain. Well, that’s not quite true. What it’s actually done, I think, is create conditions that hyperdevelop certain aspects of creativity, while ignoring other aspects. It’s like the guy who spends every day in the gym working his upper body but has never done a squat or deadlift in his life, so he waddles around on chicken legs looking like Johnny Bravo. But, you know, the brain version. As a result, despite doing creative work for my entire adult life, I’ve become creatively imbalanced¹.

Here’s what I mean. Creating inside the confines of a publication or some other existing apparatus? No problem. Give me a container and some rules² and I’m good to go.

Seeing my own ideas through to completion, though? Very much problem. And for very many reasons. So many reasons! The ideas themselves. The getting started. The discipline. Overthinking. Underthinking.

Meanwhile, the larger shape of my day-to-day work is less about writing than it’s ever been—so much so that I no longer think of myself as a journalist, or even a writer. I agonized about that for a while (which is a subject for another time), but it’s starting to look more and more like an opportunity.

Hence, this post. This blog, even. (Which, I’d like to point out, is not a newsletter. It can be! You can sign up to have posts arrive in your inbox. But it’s also something that I own, that looks the way I want it to, and that isn’t a social network in disguise.) The last time I wrote online with any consistency—meaning outside an Official Outlet—was probably the year 2000³. But I want to start doing it again for a few reasons.

1. To address the creative imbalance I mentioned, and to do so through writing as a practice. Inspiration is a rare thing; everyone from Mark Twain to Charles Schulz to Chuck Close has said something to the effect that you’ll never get anything done if you wait for it. (Close’s version, that “inspiration is for amateurs,” has been butchered, attributed to other people, and by now probably appears on a meme of Jesus or Einstein or something.) But to go back to the Johnny Bravo example, creative improvement depends on creative exercise. For me, that means sitting in what my wife calls “the messy part” of creativity. Uncertainty. Disappointment. False starts. Muddling toward clarity. That’s my weakest muscle, and the most painful one to work on.
2. To learn to create authentically. My career has made me into a chameleon of sorts. Writing for Wired is different than writing for GQ or Glamour or XXL or Longreads or Complex or anything else, and I’ve always calibrated my voice to the needs of the publication⁴. It’s still me, and still sounds like me—I’ve got strong enough tells and tendencies, for better or worse—it’s just a version of me. When I’m writing in open space, though, that adaptability turns into uncertainty. I start thinking about who’s reading, which part of me I’m turning up, which part I’m turning down. And before you can say “fractured sense of self,” I look down and my feet are stuck in quick-drying self-consciousness. So I’m also writing to undo that tendency, and to find comfort in my multitudes rather than trying to titrate an ideal version out of them⁵.
3. To open up a little bit. A colleague teased me the other day that I’d finally shared a personal story more than three years after we started working together. Writing as yourself means writing about yourself, and while I’ve published no shortage of essays and stories that I’m a part of, that’s always been a heavily … curated process. (Also: see #2.)
4. Finally, to re-paraphrase an idea that seems to have come from Robin Sloan, I want to start working with the garage door open. I’m fascinated by (and envious of) folks who create like no one is watching, even when everyone can see. It strips away the illusions that creativity is some magical flow state and lays the artistic process bare. It brings people along with you, and helps forge community from creativity. Most importantly, it’s (hopefully) useful to other people, particularly when working across multiple projects or even multiple media.⁶ I work for a company that’s built on the principles of open source—why shouldn’t creativity work the same way?

So that’s the plan. Will it be smooth? Almost definitely not. But considering what I’m trying to do here, that’s a feature, not a bug. Let’s see where it goes.

---

Tenous thematic tie: Beenie Man, “Foundation Badman”

In 2006/7, producers Sly and Robbie released the Taxi riddim, a new version of a riddim that had been floating around since 1973. This one, though, became an all-time favorite; it’s got a lovely vintage feel, but meshes well with modern styles. No shortage of massive tunes on it, particularly Buju Banton’s “Driver,” but this Beenie selection is the obvious draw for today. (If you listen to the lyrics, aimed squarely at relative newcomer Mavado, you’ll see why it was originally called “Mi Dis Movado.”)

---

1. I should probably acknowledge here that this creative imbalance could easily be nature rather than nurture. Maybe it’s not that my brain spent 25 years thinking in wordplay and punchlines, and so its arms are huge but it can’t climb up stairs. Maybe it’s that I’ve just steered in that direction and away from other directions because I’m not particularly suited to those directions. Either way, though, I’m in the same position. ↩︎
2. The conventions of magazines have given rise to a whole taxonomy of writing considerations: form, length, purpose, tone, etc. ↩︎
3. One short-lived but probably ripe-for-resuscitation newsletter notwithstanding. ↩︎
4. Is this related to code-switching? Oh, very much so. Which is a whole other conversation. ↩︎
5. This is also deeply wrapped up in the phenomenon known as “caring what people think,” which frankly I’m too goddamned old for. ↩︎
6. For whatever reason, I find this much more common among folks who write as an outlet, rather than as a career—particularly people in science and technology fields. Maggie Appleton is a great example. ↩︎