Don't worry about it being perfect

Let your work roam free in the wild

In the early 2010s I was working at a software company. It was there that I learned about ‘agile’ working methods, which in 2023 tends to provoke a fair bit of eye rolling.

Back in 2015 I was still struggling to write in a usefully productive way, always flitting between projects and never finishing anything. That was when I started wondering if some of the methodologies from the tech world might be useful in my creative practice.

A lot of tech industry ‘learnings’ have since ended up being less than desirable. Turns out that ‘move fast and break things’, the unofficial internal motto at Facebook for many years, might be advantageous for software dev but isn’t the best approach when it comes to, you know, democracy, or high quality debate, or nurturing a healthy society. 🙄

Fortunately, I’m not trying to undermine elections. I’m just trying to write fiction at a pace which mean I’ll have more than a half-finished manuscript by the time I’m 90. Borrowing some concepts from the software world has definitely helped: in 2015 I hadn’t written anything of note; as of 2023 I’ve three novels out in the wild and another in progress via this newsletter.

Sprints

Novels are big. Really, really big. How big? This kind of big:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” Douglas Adams

Staring from the foot of a novel to its head is like gazing into the unknowable. It’s a mountain that only you can climb, and you’ve forgotten all of your climbing gear. Plus there are lots of smaller, more fun mountains just over there that you could do instead.