Every day I sit down with the intention to write something deeply meaningful. Most of the time that intention is well meaning and I really do believe it is going to happen, but disappointment eventually sets in as the spark of creativity is fickle. Part of academic writing is about having the right framework and working thoughts into that style and form factor. Generally speaking after coming up with the idea and starting the process putting those articles together is not as much about chasing the spark of creativity as it is doing the hard part of the workflow. For me editing, finalizing, and refining the project always seems to be the hardest part of the whole endeavor.
My workflow basically consists of sitting down and writing as much prose as I can possibly produce in one shot and then editing it down into pieces and parts. This is not the best method to produce academic content. It really is a rather terrible method to produce academic content. Most of the time my academic efforts are better served by grabbing some paper and working on an outline of what needs to be communicated. That allows me to slowly fill in that outline with blocks of content and work toward a finished product that can be edited and refined. This year is the year that I will block off 1 hour of my time every evening to work on something academic related.
This Sunday started out with episode 34 of Sunday with Ola on YouTube playing in the background. Maybe a year ago I started considering buying a Solar branded guitar in poplar burst matte finish with an evertune bridge.[1] The Solar guitars do look pretty interesting and I do at some point want to have one guitar with an evertune bridge. However, the bolt on roasted maple neck Solar guitars look pretty good. Maybe at some point one of them will have the maple matte finish.
After that episode finished, I watched Rhett Shull talk about being burned out creatively during a decently long rant for what it was on YouTube.[2] One of the things that I used to do some time ago was pick up any topic and write about it to the point of exhaustion. For example, this morning I started to think about the nature of defense within the game of basketball. Years ago this functional journal would have seen page after page of my thoughts on basketball defense. Right now I just did not start rocking and rolling that writing exercise. I can see it within the forwarding looking vision of my headspace, but it is not translating into a writing project. Something happened that separated me from the potential of that writing effort. That something is what I’m curious about. The title of this post is “Oh that intention” and that is the crux of what I’m curious about when it comes to why some things get done and some very obvious things do not get finished.
Footnotes:
[1] https://www.solar-guitars.com/product/s1-6et-ltd-poplar-burst-matte/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viRqgh8T-Bk
