Work with the garage door up

One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette. Anti-marketing, after Michael Nielsen.

The prospect of this terrifies me, but in a way that clearly signals the direction in which I've long understood I needed to grow. I love talking to people in person about what I'm working on, in a setting where I can watch their reactions and take my feedback from it. But listening like this, live, to someone explaining somehting complex to you, is exhausting. When I read, I go back and forth; I branch off to look up tangential things; I return, over and over, to the text of a thing that fucked me up the first time around. Reading, like all communication, changed you. But the crystallized form of it changes you a lot.

When I work, I externalize a lot of what I think onto the screen. I read and read and read, the screen refreshes over and over; like a prospector panning for gold, I retain a fraction of what I look at that I know I want to play with more. The play transforms the text on the page a great deal as well.

I enjoy the ephemerality of internet text. Through sheer volume, inadequate indexing, and the fabulous dispersion of control, the internet offers the shakiest of guarantees that anything you like in it will stick around.

That means that if I leave my notes public, but review and revise them as I see fir, when I see fit, the chances that anyone sees and knows any given version of any note are vanishingly low, and strongly correlated with somebody caring enough about me and what I'm talking about, specifically, to be looking in the first place. In other words, the garage door is open because everybody walking by is definitionally part of ym neighbourhood.

So it's a good kind of terror really. A manageable amount, with enough risk that you can feel it but not so much it's likely to cause harm. A thrill.