me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I’m back from holiday and looking to get my swing back with writing.

perfect stranger by daniel sandoval

Before the holiday I wanted to write a post on agile software development and risk management, but it seems the dog ate my fieldstones for that, so I’ll write about the risk of not writing instead.

I liked Johanna Rothman’s advice in The Gift of Time

The best way to prevent writers block is to write

For me it seems writing alone is not enough, it is publishing that gives me focus to go for it. A large collection of notes seems to hinder publishing, because it means I have to chose which of the notes to work into a post, which might mean procrastination. Call it publishers’ block instead of writers’ block if you want, but the end result is the same – less interesting things published than possible. I get around to posting event announcements and reports of those events, because there is some time pressure: announcements after the fact don’t make sense, and reports are more interesting for readers during or right after the event.

Even the draft for this post has been laying around since before my holiday and it contained this advice by Mike Cottmeyer :

It took weeks to write a post because I wanted everything to be perfect… I couldn’t let anything go. The guy I was working for at the time gave me the best advice ever… he told me to get over it. That’s easier said that done… but you know what… that is just what I did. I got over it and started writing.

So I’m taking that piece of advice right now, and may take the next one:

Try to limit your writing to two hours. [...]The idea is that you want to set limits and create a little pressure to perform.

I know from my coaching practice that setting defined timeboxes helps, doing it regularly: even better. How that works and to what I’m applying it right now, I’ll write now publish about it later

I’m enjoying the term mythodology – collecting fieldstones for an article, I’m re-reading “Weinberg on Writing – the fieldstone method”

Doing an internet search for mythodology, I found Marco Abis named his website mythodology. As he says on mythodology:

Towards the end of 2005 I found it in the book “Weinberg On Writing” in relation to the (in)famous writer’s block (but interestingly the quote is from Tom Gilb):

‘Writer’s block is not a disorder in you, the writer. It’s a deficiency in your writing methods-the mythology you’ve swallowed about how works get written-what my friend and sometime coauthor Tom Gilb calls your “mythodology.” Fieldstone writers, freed of this mythodology, simply do not experience writer’s block.’

[..]Agile methods are the next (current?) step but are still only scraping the surface of the problem having myths themselves which get in the way of the true Quality.

Hear hear!

As Agile ‘methods’ (I’m still / more and more against methods ) become mainstream oversimplification becomes rampant, as was to be expected.

I am reading Weinberg on writing – the fieldstone method. It’s a combination of tales from Jerry Weinberg’s long writing career and hands-on exercises.

I particularly resonated with the tale he tells in the beginning, about how writing classes in school almost killed his desire to write. It almost did that for me too. Working from an outline doesn’t work for me. I usually wrote my essays the night before, when I was angry enough to start writing. Afterwards my MSc thesis almost did it. I find it hard to write where my energy is not.
But apparently, something draws me towards writing of some sort, even though lately it’s been limited to blog entries, e-mails and instant messages.

I said “I’m reading”, in the first paragraph, because I got somewhat stuck on the first exercise, which is deceptively simple…
It is a test to measure the time it takes for you to start writing down a fieldstone.

I’m Sorry, did I break your concentration?

I thought,

how hard could it be. I’m in my office, I’ve got pens, paper, computer.

I failed this test. It took me longer than five seconds to start writing something down. The five second test showed me I had no index cards present, couldn’t find a pen and it took me much more than five seconds to open firefox, navigate to my wiki (there’s a bookmark in thet toolbar but I don’t see it, apparently), and find a suitable page or make a new one.

Clearly I wasn’t ready to start applying this method…

After this test, I’ve changed a couple of things in my environment. I made sure there was a fresh stack of index cards and some pens beside my bed (The title and introduction of this entry originated there). And I finally got around to make the gnome-blog applet on my computers’ desktop functional. I need something I could just post to, and worry about organizing it later. The wiki is great for writing articles-to-be and relating them, as well as for collecting systems-administration stuff I figured out eventually. Finding a new page in the wiki when I have an interesting link or something pops up is sometimes enough to break my concentration;
I noticed I miss a lot of the interesting links and stuff that come up during chat sessions.

I set up a textpattern instance, specially for collecting fieldstones, and the gnome-blog applet posts to it, and the fieldstone appears directly on the front page. That seems to work very well. The Blog button is always only one click away, since it is on the menu bar of my desktop. I don’t have to start a separate application, and it doesn’t take time to load.

I took a first step. Make it easier to collect fieldstones. The next step would be doing something to organize the fieldstones after I’ve added them. I can search them already, which is good. Now I would like to have something to organize and relate them too.

If you have an interest in writing, want to try another style, or find your fun back doing it, I find Weinberg on Writing worth checking out.