In praise of soft edged ideas
Better off writing something fluffy, than nothing at all
For as long as I can remember, I’ve experienced how the act of writing things down is fundamental to crystallising ideas and formulating thoughts. Things which seem fuzzy in your mind are forced to take on new order when they hit the page; the same too when you say them out loud, although we permit ourselves in conversation to drift and obfuscate and interrupt in a way that you just can't get away with in written sentences.
expresses this beautifully. “Forcing the diffuse ideas and impressions in your head into a definite statement is an art form. You have to grab hold of what is floating and make it rigid and sharp.” It's a practice which requires discipline, care and focus, and reaps multiple rewards, in making you a clearer thinker and better critic (of both yourself and others).And yet - how I’ve struggled! For years I've started and paused in trying to commit ideas to a page. I have a google drive, which I can barely bring myself to look at, littered with half drafts of things that I've tried to express and then never finished.
What seems to happen is an initial burst of curiosity, inspiration, and a desire to work through something that occurs to me; an energetic dump of ideas and thoughts; and then just as I reach a point of committing to a perspective or really crystallising it, something stops. The energy disappears, replaced by a paralysing cocktail of pressure, anxiety and perfectionism, and it remains unfinished (and forever associated with a faint sense of failure).
In fact, the only occasions where I've really managed to commit to and publish anything has typically been when I have some kind of external force propelling me. Usually there’s a deadline, and it typically involves a colleague, professor, or editor who can exert their authority over my internal wavering.
On one memorable occasion, the hard copy of a report that was due to be published the next morning, covered in my scribbled edits, had to be forcibly pulled out of my hands at 7pm by the editor. She refused to accept any more amends and instead insisted that this was it so that she could go home and go to bed. (She was, obviously, being far too soft on me - she probably should have done this 8 hours earlier.)
Of course when it was published the next day I cringed at places where I could have phrased something better - but despite the crippling perfectionism, it still represented a decently coherent and sharp perspective on the subject. Better than it existed in the world than not at all?
Where I've managed it, this level of commitment to sharp edged ideas is undoubtedly invaluable, and has meant that I've been able to make some positive contribution to the worlds of urban policy and research that I orbit around. And yet that seems like a high bar to reach, at least for me, and without that external pressure, what about those other ideas that have been relegated to the half-finished drafts folder?
I certainly value those sharp edged ideas, but I also greatly value in others an ability to explore ideas openly as they are being formed. Greater openness, less fear, and a sense of curiosity can permit someone to think things through out in the world. Even if it doesn't reach a solid conclusion, the action of writing helps the crystallisation occur; and where those edges are soft, or still in formation, it acts as a prompt for others to respond to. As a reader and a listener, I even prefer to engage with something that doesn't offer a final answer, rather than to come up against a hard-edged idea that requires a similarly hard-edged response. In the best form, those softer forms allow for dialogue rather than debate.
It's thanks to
and her recent article on showing up that I've managed to write anything at all today. She reflects exactly these tensions about the writing process - and her response is, rather than giving up, to instead pay attention to that sense of tension, and to write about that instead. Once that's cleared out the way, you then have the mental space to go back to whatever you might have been thinking about originally.Add to that, my own ideas and thoughts often feel to me like they extend across a broad and erratic set of themes. I can see how people might want to read a blog about urbanism (which is, I suppose, my topic of expertise, if you were to force me to commit to one, and if it wasn't allowed to be the Harry Potter books).
But to me this feels overly arbitrarily and limiting. Yes, sometimes I want to write about city-making, but I feel uncomfortably constrained by this: and every time I start writing something, I get distracted by the absence of all those other things that I think are important. My desire to present a coherent narrative of the world means that any individual thread of that becomes all-too conspicuous in its failure to reflect the complexity of everything else.
So how do I get over this? Again, I think, it's to let go. Perhaps to let some of those things make their way into the world, even half-formed, and see if a pattern emerges over time, without putting too much pressure on any of those individual threads to represent the full extent of the idea.
When I was younger I wrote a lot of music, and after a particularly productive stretch, I remember talking to a friend about my concern that I had written an incoherent album of no discernible genre, including everything from cheery folk pop to ethereal ambient dreamscapes.
Her response to me was that this was an unsurprising failure of my own lack of perspective. To anyone looking externally, there was a clear thread of commonality in the sound. That was, of course, the only thing I wasn't looking at, because it was all I saw all the time. I focussed on the differences and the inconsistencies, while being able to take a step back showed the real internal logic of what was happening both in my life, and therefore in my music too.
Yes, sometimes what happens in my mind is about urbanism, but it's also about all the other interconnected parts of the world which don't fit neatly into that paradigm. I suspect that that adds up to an unwieldy patchwork of urbanism, places, people, music, governance, the public sector, politics, psychology, meditation, the nature of knowledge, problem solving, economics, community, trauma, and knitting. And maybe not any of those, or perhaps something else. But I also trust that there are unbreakable threads that link all those ideas, which without being able to observe it from a distance, remain obscured.
So here I am, braving it for once, and hopefully committing to putting something out into the world, however soft-edged it is, and with some trust that the coherence will appear in time.