Permission to publish rough work
Rough #1
Written: 2020-09-22
Published: 2021-04-29
From my journal: 22 September 2020 (Tuesday)
Could I take what I just wrote, [Time (gratitude and greed)] which is rough but not bad, and put it up on my website? Could I pull it out, edit it for typos, and post it?
To get to Yes on that, I’d first have to give myself some permissions. I’d have to counteract my inner perfectionist with a new set of rules that apply to posts like this.
Those rules would have to say that I’m allowed to be incomplete, that this post doesn’t have to be comprehensive, it doesn’t have to be universal, it doesn’t have to be my final word on the topic, covering all aspects of it and thinking about all angles. It doesn’t have to be definitive. It’s allowed to be just a single take on a complex topic, my current and partial thoughts on it, subject to future revision, subject to future posts that might completely contradict what this one says. I’d have to give myself permission to think out loud in public, to wonder about things and not have the answers.
I do that all the time in my journal. But to take that public feels like a very different thing. It involves vulnerability, and in general I’m against that for myself. I want the things I share with the outside world to be fully-formed, defensible, complete works that I don’t have to worry about, because I’ve worked with them enough to know that I’ve considered the potential attacks and have an answer to them.
But getting to that point is hard, and on many of the topics that interest me and that I spend time on, it’s impossible. It’s unlikely I will ever get to a definitive essay on the fleeting nature of time. Under my old rules that would make it just as unlikely I’d ever publish my thoughts and observations on the path towards that definitive essay. But if there’s value in those preliminary stages, in the fragments and partials, shouldn’t I be sharing them?
The question of value and whether anything I have to say about anything is worth sharing is another question altogether. But if I’m a writer, or at least if I’m going to be a writer who shares with the outside world, then I have to ignore that question. That question is for you, not for me. My job is to write and to publish, and I can try to anticipate what you might like to read or would benefit from reading, but I have to make the basic and conceited assumption that my thoughts are at least potentially worth sharing. If I can make that assumption, then it becomes wrong of me not to share.
This pathway of rationalization is leading to an answer for the question I started with.
Yes, I could take what I just wrote, tune it up a little bit, and share it on my website. I can allow myself to be incomplete, to publish something that’s not comprehensive or definitive or final, and I can get past the self-deprecation that says it’s presumptuous to think anyone would want to read that kind of incomplete work from me.
Of course the perfectionist censor that lives within me will require a label for them, some visible caveat that says I know they’re rough and incomplete, and I’m putting them up anyway (some writing equivalent to my “friendly” run code that gives me permission to slow down sometimes, to run with a group or pause to take a photo or gaze at a sunset).
But I can do that, and I can start publishing some rough work. It’s my site, so it’s my game and my rules, and people will read it or they won’t. And maybe I’ll contradict myself, or I’ll revise my previous thoughts, or I’ll reference my earlier thoughts in newer, more comprehensive, more definitive work later on.
And that will be alright.