Chicken

Because not all posts are publication-worthy. Not all ideas are fully baked, not all words are written, yet all trash should be put on the internet.

I just spent ten minutes trying to get an image asset on hugo to add the image I wanted. It’s pretty annoying, I think blogging with hugo could be done better, I usually write on Dropbox Paper and export it to markdown, which takes care of annoying things for me.

But that alone - failing to put an image onto hugo, then quitting to do something else, is what chicken scratch is about. Writing well, writing forcefully, writing intentionally is all-consuming. I like writing high quality blog posts, but they take so much time and energy, even one a month is a struggle. It has to be about a topic I deeply care about, where I’m willing to read, do research, work on something for many sessions.

That’s a high bar to reach - what about the rest? What about the half-finished blog posts, the tirades, psychobabbles, the threads that will never see the light of day? I propose adding a chicken-scratch section to your blog; a place where you openly admit the signal-to-noise ratio is low, utility is low, but grammer mistakes and unfulfilled inspiration are high.

I’ve tried to write on and off for years on my blog, and given up each time. Having the ideas of eyes, even phantom eyes, reading your poetry is paralyzing enough to not start, or actually quite useful to force you to produce only the best. The activation energy to write, to share, to put ideas into words is quite high, but can be lowered. But it’s worth it - they say if you can’t put down your thoughts and ideas into pen or into code, you don’t have any.

It’s a bit underwhelming to say this, but written text is the greatest invention to people-kind. The internet is too young to be a contender.

This also aligns with my thoughts about writing projects: they are iterations that evolve. When you lower the constraints to start, you have words, ideas, no matter how bad. You have something. And when one day, more likely than not, that thing becomes relevant again, you don’t start from scratch. You start from chicken scratch.

Chicken scratch: a title becomes a sentence, a sentence a paragraph, a paragraph… by induction, a blog post. And who knows what a blog post will become?

Some advantages:

• Citing yourself
• Committing to writing more garbage