Ideas traffic jam

9 October 2007 by Jennifer

You know those comedy scenes where ten people all try to get through a door at once? Starting to write for this blog feels rather like that at the moment. I’m full of ideas, but if I wrote 20 posts on, say, time and logistics and creativity, not one of them wouldn’t link to another somehow. So whichever one I start with, I seem to want to be linking to posts I haven’t written yet. They all want to come through the door at once :-)

Or perhaps it’s more like when you’ve got lots of pieces of string tangled together in a big ball. Quite a lot of loose ends are sticking out, but the challenge is to find one that doesn’t lead right into the middle of the tangle, and can be separated off and wound up by itself.

Or like when you get a load of washing out of the washing machine and go to hang it up, and you find that the long sleeved shirts have tangled their sleeves together. I just want to get one shirt out by itself so I can hang it on the line!

Of course, I can go back to a post later and put in more links. But there’s still the interim challenge of writing the first few posts so they make sense without those links.

I don’t think the problem originates from the nature of blogging (e.g. how long to make the posts). There is an element of that, but actually I think writing a book would be similar. I think part of its underlying source is the problem of communicating a 3-dimensional landscape in a linear medium – the landscape being the metaphorical one of how I map things when I think. In my mind, it’s all integrated, but I can’t transmit the entire map in one go. I’ve got to start somewhere :-)