Archiving > Planning

“To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill.” —Ray Bradbury

I scribbled the above quote on a post-it and stuck it to the wall behind my desk so I can see it, read it, remind myself each time I sit down to create. I’ve been reading through Zen in the Art of Writing for the first time and, unsurprisingly, I’ve concluded that I should have read this book years ago. I wish I had read this book when I was twenty, just before I began my undergrad studies, as a protection against all the unnecessary propaganda about discipline, logic, excellence, and grammar that warped my neural pathways. I’m grateful for my education, but I would have benefited more had it been bolstered by something more dazzling, more real, more purely joyful and life-giving like Bradbury’s essay collection.

Still, better late than never. I would say that each essay in this book is designed to make you want to write, but I think it’s actually the opposite: these pieces are capsules, snapshots, living symbols of what it is to write without agonizing about structure, outline, argument or presentation beforehand. It’s just writing, writing for the best (the only?) reason: because it’s fun. Reading Bradbury’s writing is fun, the kind of fun that makes you jealous, jealous like you were when you were five and watching the kids in the next pew in church enjoying their snacks, their coloring books, their toys. ‘I should be doing that. Why can’t I do that?’ you think to yourself, feeling your fingers twitch with restlessness.

This is not to say that college stole the joy of writing from me. Far from it: I loved writing essays when the topic was one I cared about, and I loved the opportunities to be praised for my writing abilities. There’s really nothing quite like the rush of seeing an A+ written in red pen on the last page of your essay. My ego is as big and fragile as anyone else’s, and it has led me to do all sorts of dazzlingly impressive and mentally destabilizing things.

If you get an ego hooked on the thrill of academic validation, it works overtime seeking a high: researching, resource guarding, analyzing, planning. Writing in college, for me, was still fun, but fun was not the priority. Good grades were the result of a high level of consistent, well-edited, well-structured production. They were the result of exacting time management that left little room for goofing off with friends. They were the result of outlines: outlines for drawings, for college events, for essays.

God, I hate outlines. I did back then, I do now.

Are they useful for mass-producing structured content under crazy time constraints? Sure. I still remember writing a seven-page essay on T.S. Elliott’s The Wasteland that earned me an A over the course of sixteen hours. The only reason I could accomplish such a feat? I outlined the essay first, and I quite literally didn’t have the time to stray from the outline. What a hit, what a rush. Running on five hours of sleep and a large black cold brew (this was during my intermittent fasting phase), my ego was elated.

Since graduating (and realizing that the intermittent fasting thing was really not healthy), I’ve chilled out a lot. Maybe it’s the absence of copious amounts of black cold brew, but I really don’t have the energy to plan everything out and then stick to said plan. At the end of the day, I can be as fickle as male writers make all women out to be (as if none of them ever hoed around like Zemfira), and I’ve learned that my brain is more flighty and scattered than it is objective and determined. For all my love of planner tour videos on YouTube, my Filofax is largely empty and untouched, with only two months left of 2025.

Rather than fight against this bent of my nature (who has the energy for that anymore, really?), I’ve decided to just work with it. I have no problem coming up with new ideas or catastrophizing and overanalyzing the future. Almost any disaster that arrives (and most of the ones I imagine never do) is probably something I’ve imagined a hundred times before.

I don’t need to outline my life to enjoy it. And if I try to outline my writing, I don’t ever get around to enjoying it because I spend the whole time preparing, strategizing, dreading, convincing myself that the finished product is just not going to be good enough. The argument isn’t sound (yet, because I haven’t written anything), the conclusion will fall flat (haven’t written anything), my research is inadequate (again, still haven’t written anything).

I get more value out of recording things, getting them out of my head and onto paper so that I can tread lightly through my days. The challenge is organizing what I’ve recorded so that I can actually find it again. It’s more a game of remembering and rediscovering, less one of perfectly strategized execution.

Lately, I’ve been trying to think of myself as an archivist, searching for systems that actually fit into the grooves of my brain. I haven’t narrowed down what those systems are quite yet, but it’s nice to leave an old, outgrown directive in the past and replace it with one that actually accounts for the present. One thing that’s been helpful is putting the important things on post-it notes, making sure I can actually see them every day, instead of consigning them to the black hole of my unorganized journal pages or the notes app on my phone. You don’t have to be precious about the idea, analyzing it and recording it in perfect calligraphy on nice paper, putting it in a frame you will never get around to hanging on your wall. Just get it down in such a way that you can’t forget about it, then move on to the next thing.

Image credits: close-up of Anaximander in Raphael’s “The School of Athens”