My writing life exists on a loop.

  • “I should write more.”
  • “I’ll relaunch my website to publish there.”
  • “To build my audience, I’ll need to publish on a schedule, write pieces that can go viral, develop a monetization strategy, track conversion rates...”
  • “Huh. Weird. I’ve stopped writing.”
  • “I should write more.”

It’s classic Constellation Effect (¶2.4): a plan killed through well-intentioned but inessential goals. Because I assumed that I needed an audience and could only use the dominant publishing models, I asked more of myself than I wanted to give. The idea of writing grew alienated from what I actually love.

Every artistic act sits somewhere on a spectrum of motivations. To one side are those with no expectation, or even desire, for an audience. The most romantic are discovered postmortem: your Gerard Manley Hopkins or Vivian Maier. On the other side are those for whom the audience forms most of the fun. I’m smack in the middle. A great private collector of unique words and concepts, without some salon in which they can be arrayed, I'll rarely give them a second look.

That’s a problem, because the kind of writing (and reading) I most enjoy results from polishing a thought over and over again until it takes a shine. Half the fun is finding others who’ll appreciate/critique/rework the results. Robert Paul Wolff once described his vocation in this way:

If I were pressed to say what it is that I imagine myself to be doing as a Professor of Philosophy, I would reply that I grapple with deep, powerful, beautiful ideas and turn them over in my head until they are transparently clear to me, at which point I show them to others, either in a lecture or in print, so that they too can see how beautiful they are.

For many of us, as for Wolff, the payoff comes with the sharing. “Look at this! Just look at it!” It may not be beautiful. It’s almost certainly unfinished. But it offers the chance to see something new, together.

Here's the bind. Without a good outlet for sharing, I stop the upstream work of improving my thoughts. And without that effort—the hard labor of creating clear prose—I have fewer things I need to say.

Writing less means thinking less; less thinking needs less writing.

If you’re one of the lucky ones who can’t relate to any of this, then it’s likely that you’ve found the mental and technological fixes that I’ve lacked.

The first will be familiar to anyone who’s attempted the Sisyphean task of learning to find more joy in the process than in the result. Wolff's story leaves out the extrinsic motivations that keep us—in our characteristic phrase—“results-oriented”, and tend to loom larger than the pure delights of communion. At a mundane level, being a Professor of Philosophy also involves making sure that one’s work is well-received in the right journals by the right people with the right pedigrees. It requires student evals stating that those lectures are up to snuff. Etc. More to the point, when you're a eighth-degree black belt in vainglory (¶3.1), you don’t want merely to produce good work. You want to be praised for it, adored for it, received by the audience as the genius you know you are.

So much for amour-propre. The second problem comes down to code.

In prose, as in most other things, I’m drawn to minimalism. The aphorism, the anecdote, the bon mot. (Give me Lichtenberg’s Waste Books over any of his prolix Prussian contemporaries.) Today’s publishing platforms are poorly suited to all this. Social media encourages (too-)quick responses and rage mongering. Substack has built a new economy for medium- and long-form prose and, Nazis aside, we’re better for it, but the email-centricity pushes against occasional notes and commentary. And all these platforms align incentives toward immediacy, being first, being loudest, and producing more.

I want the opposite.

I'm old enough to remember the original blogging tech stack, and this came closest to how I think and write: RSS distribution prevented worries about whether a post was too scant for an inbox; backlinks fostered genuine connection.[1] But the ephemerality of most blogs—the model centered around the timeline of takes—also never quite fit, cutting against my desire to revisit and rework. I want more stock, less flow. I want work that can last.

We might call the solution “noting as a practice”: thinking in public, with a flexible format, toward the aim of refining one's mind.

The concept isn’t new. Montaigne had much the same thing in mind:

This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one. I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory.... If I had written to seek the world's favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice.... I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject. So farewell. [Frame Translation]

I don’t know how to write long-form without seeking favor. Truth told, I’m not sure Montaigne did either. But shorter entries, written mainly for myself, feel manageable. They'll work as a mental model for now.

This approach also presents openings for practice. Practice at the craft, of course, but also a practice of reflection and inner ordering. I have in mind something akin to what Pierre Hadot called “spiritual exercises”:

Hadot gives different definitions of ‘spiritual exercises’ across different texts, and Foucault in his wake proposes a variant term, ‘technologies of (the) self’ (Foucault, 2005). In each case, what is at issue is a cognitive, mnemonic, imaginative, rhetorical or physical exercise consciously chosen and undertaken by an agent with a view to the transformative effects the undertaking of this exercise will have upon the practitioner’s way of experiencing, desiring, emoting, or thinking. [Ure and Sharpe 2021, Introduction]

The decision to open these notes to the public gives me the opportunity to ask with each paragraph: What are my intentions? How will these words affect others? How are they affecting me?

In the end, because I wanted both easy sharing and evergreen entries, I needed my own approach. I’ve watched with interest recent experiments in the evergreen mode, notetaking "with the garage door up” as Andy Matuschak puts it. But these mostly use custom-written platforms, and they lack the usual social features: comments, email subscriptions, and so on. The open-source Ghost platform that I've adapted here makes these easy.

And yet The Novice remains more notebook than newsletter.[2] Entries will lack any semblance of a schedule; will avoid current events at every turn; and will be revised time and again.[3] Posts will be free forever. Notes fall under three headings: [Omnium] houses mostly personal and practical reflections. [Theory Notes] draw on my research in the human sciences. [Practice Notes] catalog what I learn from various contemplative traditions. Taking a cue from the Zettelkasten, I’ll number entries sequentially for easy reference and to track how my thinking evolves across time. This also allows for tidy cross-referencing (e.g. ¶2.2).

Comments are open across the site. You can follow along via email, through RSS, or on your preferred open platform.

Join the conversation, won’t you?

Finally, some gratitude. Conversations with the cultural theorist (and my friend) Aaron Ross Powell are reflected throughout. He’s been thinking about related questions for a long time. Eric Schliesser’s years of “digressions and impressions” helped me see the immense value in sharing scholarship in progress. I’m conceptually indebted to all the recent experiments in “tools for thought”: from Andy Matuschak’s Evergreen Notes to Maggie Appleton’s Digital Garden. And of course to Niklas Luhmann, for teaching us to look differently at notes.

  1. All this exists now only in memory and the odd dinosaur CMS. The AdSense harvest has all but passed. Blogging, as it existed, was economically viable only between the death of print media and the birth of its digital successors. This explains why it's been replaced by newsletters. ↩︎

  2. Partly that’s because I hate the phonemes “blog” just slightly less than “podcast” or “webinar”. ↩︎

  3. Every digital platform should include public version history. ↩︎