Chains Broken, Chains Built — mnchrm vol. lxiii
Hello friends. The days just keep coming, huh? Some are harder than others, some are easier, but they just keep happening. That’s honestly a comfort.
I’m Ian Battaglia, a writer, photographer, and filmmaker, and this is my newsletter. If you’d like to no longer receive these, just click here. And if you really like these, I’d appreciate if you’d share this or recommend it to a friend.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m a pretty committed advocate of journaling. I’ve filled up more than a handful of Hobonichi Techo notebooks over the years, a page a day. I’ve written about it before, more than once. And recently, I stopped. It’s been a few months since I’ve written an entry. For the most part, “daily” doesn’t feel like a useful segment of time right now. Too small-scale.
On the daily, things are mostly the same. I wake up. In other years, I’ve ran around dawn during the Summer, but this year, it’s rarely gotten below 75F. Instead, I wake up, shower, make coffee, and study Japanese for a bit. Then I might read a book. I start work, and eat breakfast. Eventually, work ends, and I go to make dinner, relax a bit, and go to sleep, all to start again the next day. Of course, this is a generalized snapshot of my days, not all I’m doing or working on, but it gets the gist down. And certainly, there’s things I could write about daily, things I saw or did, or even just what was on my mind at a given time. But the point is, for now, in the moment, we’re in, broader, looser strokes seem to fit me best.
On the weekends, I bake bread, and have been chronicling that process over at Twitter. I continue to run and cycle, but less rigidly scheduled. I mostly go when I feel compelled to. I write, I read, I watch anime, I play video games. I experiment in the kitchen, some projects more successful than others. I take photos. But the days go by, and on the surface, they seem to be about the same.
Anyone else notice a similar perception shift lately? I’m still trying to figure out the implications for it.
Certainly, this is not to undervalue activities done daily. Long have I endeavored to build daily habits, often with little success. Something about trying to do something every single day has just failed to click with me in most cases, despite my desire to build the habit.
And yet, for the past 20+ days, I’ve managed to study Japanese every single day. For me, this means completing a grammar lesson, as well as keeping up with my lessons and reviews of kanji characters and vocabulary. I’m not exactly sure what clicked this time, but it’s been really nice to just do these things near-automatically. And now that I am sort of in a groove with this, it seems a lot easier to add on, expanding my learning, while always having that foundation to lean on.
I definitely think having a schedule, doing the same exercises at roughly the same point in my day (though not at the same exact time every day) has been helpful. It’s also something I know roughly how long it will take just to do what I’ve determined to be the minimum, and that feels like time I am always willing to spend. I think setting a time frame or at least having that frame in mind helps as well. I want to think more about what exactly has been successful here, and how I can replicate it in other areas I’ve struggled to build habits.
I’ve gotten back to posting on Patreon, have you seen? I changed the smartphone and desktop wallpapers I have available for download, wrote a post about the anime from Spring 2020, and just today published a post about the anime I’m looking forward to coming out in Summer 2020. Many of these have started airing now, so check it out if you’re looking for something to watch!
As I’ve been wading back into doing creative work, both writing and photography, it’s been interesting to see that process unfold. It’s not like flipping a switch. While those skills haven’t disappeared, I have to sort of coax them back out, build them up again. When I went to go take photos of the rainbow, I noticed later that the ratio of bad or uninteresting photos to “keepers” was worse than it normally is. I still got photos I’m very proud of, but it took a bit more searching than it usually does.
The same thing with writing. Lately I’ve felt inspired to write, to sit down and actually type, but there are days where the words themselves don’t come to me. This is especially true for fiction, but affects my non-fiction writing (like this!) as well. If I know what it is I want to write, like about anime I’ve seen, it’s very easy for me to sit down and jam out 2k+ quality words in a sitting, do a rough pass editing, and feel good about it. But in fiction, it’s been hard to actually find something I want to explore, or know how to build a narrative around those ideas.
I’m thinking back about my most prolific period of writing, when I tried to add a new story to my blog roughly once a week. Of course, even just the deadline will force you to write something, even if it’s not the best idea, and the deadline is self-imposed. But even beyond that, or after I stopped updating the blog at that frequency, I still carried around a notebook, and filled it with every errant thought that crossed my mind about something interesting. I haven’t been carrying a notebook, because I haven’t been going out, by and large. And I’ve slipped back into the habit or letting ideas come and go, not capturing them to process later.
I’ve started making notes again, teasing ideas out of my mind that I might let slip otherwise. This is a positive feedback loop, as well; the more you take notes about what you’re thinking about, the more you’ll have thoughts to explore later in this way. For now, I’m trying to remember how to record ideas like this, how to structure and build stories, and just getting better as it goes.
Stay strong, fight on.
From Chicago with love.
Your faithful commander,
— I