On Relaunching Creative Efforts
One thing I’ve learned about my own passions is that I have a tendency to get an idea, become particularly excited about it, and then lose steam when I shift to another idea or fail to make the time.
There are two specific instances of this that I’ll be rebooting within the next month:
@NoReferenceWiki, a Twitter account I created dedicated to portions of Wikipedia that contain no citations, whether or not this lack of citations has been addressed by a Wikipedia editor (with a “citation needed” tag)
Needless Words, a blog that I started in late 2020, dedicated to Strunk and White’s famous advice to “omit needless words”
There are few others in the mix, of course, the three novels I’m attempting to work through, a coterie of shorts stories, and the constantly up and down attention I give to What Would Bale Do, the longest standing online creative project I’ve embarked on. Oh, and the trivia website I started, Trivial Review, created to pair with the trivia I host on Wednesday nights at a place called Smile Tea Bar in Hopkins, Minnesota.
What I’ve increasingly come to believe is that it’s better to toss a creative thing out into the world and let it dwell, let it linger, let the weeds grow around it, than it is to not plant that seed in the first place. I can return to these things. They exist.
Anyway, since I started writing this blog post, I decided to breathe life back into @NoReferenceWiki. Here is the latest screenshot I shared on there:
Another one that, while maybe not the most popular tweet of all time, I think nicely captures the spirit of the account:
Anyway, that is my thought for today. Better to start the creative project and abandon it and find yourself compelled to revisit it than never to start at all.