A Story in Six Drafts and Six Bottles of Ink

It started out so well.

When I restarted my website last month, I imagined the stories pouring out of me – a steady stream, each one meaningful and thought-provoking and worth your time to read. No little fluff posts. I wanted the pieces to be longer in form and more insightful than some of the posts that I’d done in my website’s previous incarnation. This version of the site would feature pieces that were authentic and substantive – stories that others would want to read, and that I would feel proud to write.

When I published the first pieces for the relaunched site, I was really proud of them. First I wrote an update on the state of my life, with an emphasis on last year's health struggles, and how well I’d rebounded. It felt good to share what I’d been through, and the improved health that I'm enjoying. I hope that if you read it, you felt more connected to me.

Then I wrote a piece about loneliness, and how participating in book clubs was helping me cultivate friendships, both old and new. That one was harder for me to write, because I was revealing things I’d never put into words before, much less shared with anybody – not my wife, not my family, no one. I hadn't even realized I was feeling that way until I'd started writing. I poured myself into that confessional, and I felt good when I put it out into the world. It was genuine. It came from the heart. The reception from people who commented on it was really positive, and that was rewarding. There’s a high that you get when you pour yourself into something that resonates.

Filling The Wastebasket

After that, I tried to figure out what else I could write that would meet the same (or at least similar) levels of authentic emotion, that would be appreciated by readers, that I would feel proud to have written and published.

And that’s been a struggle. As I’ve approached new ideas, I kept finding that they weren’t worth sharing. The drafts weren’t interesting to me as I’d be writing, which means they definitely wouldn’t be interesting to anyone else. The drafts had no spirit, no soul, no punch, no gravitas. I was building elaborate houses that were made of straw – one huff and one puff, and the whole thing would blow down. If these drafts were screenplays, they’d have at most one solid act, maybe a few scenes for a second act, the closing credits... but not a whiff of a third act.

Each effort fizzled out and still sits in my drafts folder. Maybe someday there will be something I can salvage from these stalled attempts, when I can dust off the ideas and drop them into another essay.

I've been frustrated, not being able to write something that's even halfway decent.

Look, I have no aspirations to write professionally. I don’t have the next great American novel inside of me, just waiting to be put on the page. I wish I did. I stare at the bookshelves that surround me, filled with novels waiting to be read, by authors whose stories were begging to be written. I’m not one of those authors. And that’s okay, I’m not trying to be.

But I still felt stuck.

Speak It Into Existence

I talked with April about how I was feeling while we were driving somewhere last weekend. She asked me what I had been trying to write about, and I told her about the most recent attempt. "Yeah, that's boring", she confirmed. I went on to tell her why I'd been trying to write that piece in particular, how I'd wanted the story to go, what feelings I was trying (and failing) to express. I talked out loud for several miles of highway. I had something there, but I couldn't transfer it to the page.

I put it all on the shelf for another week.

Finally, Friday night, I decided to try speaking it out loud again. I opened up the Voice Memo app on my iPhone... and the words burst out of me. That audio file lasted 18 minutes, 50 seconds. Clearly, I had things to say. Now I could craft my thoughts into a piece.

I fed the audio file into an AI transcription service, Sonix.ai. I took the Sonix output and fed that into ChatGPT, with the prompt:

I recorded a voice memo and then fed the memo into Sonix.ai for transcription. I'm going to give you the PDF of the transcription. Review it for me, and clean it up so that it reads like I wrote it instead of dictated it.

Not surprisingly, ChatGPT produced something that didn't sound like me. It sounded like something that, well, an AI wrote while trying to sound human. I gave a follow-up prompt:

No, step back. Take the original transcript, and clean it up so that it's in coherent sentences, but otherwise don't put any more polish on it. It should be raw, in need of lots of editing, because it was raw emotions that I was speaking aloud. I need to find what will be useful from there, and not rely on you to find it for me.

That gave me what I needed, paired with the original Sonix transcription to make sure I didn't let ChatGPT put its thumb on the scale anywhere. I crafted a second draft out of that jumbled set of thoughts. Next, I let ChatGPT do some copy-editing for me, having it spit out the third draft. I edited it and refined it further, toiling away to get it resembling something I was proud to write. I let it sit overnight, then printed out a copy of the fourth draft. I marked up the paper, finding plenty of revisions that needed to be made, then updated the doc into the fifth draft. Then one final read through, tweaking it until the copy is just so.

Spoiler alert: You’re reading the sixth and final draft of a piece that I was proud to write.

Pivot To Video

While I was ruminating on what turned out to be that first draft, when the words weren’t flowing smoothly,  I took a detour and worked on a different piece of content, in a completely separate medium.

Back in December, I started a new hobby: fountain pens. The hobby grabbed hold of me, and it shows no sign of letting go. 

I dove deep down the rabbit hole. I started watching YouTube videos about fountain pens, inks, stationery, journaling, notebook systems, and analog life. Most of the videos that I’m watching are by regular people, fellow hobbyists. They share the pens they have and what they like about them; the inks that fill the pens; the paper where the ink is spilled; and what they’re creating on the paper. I look at these videos, and I think, “I want to do that. I can do that.”

This is a visual hobby. Still photos can't do fountain pens justice. You need to see how a pen looks from different angles and under different lights. You need to see the weight of the pen in the hand, how your fingers will fit the grip. You need to see how the ink flows from the nib, how the nib glides across the page. You need to see how the ink behaves as it dries, how the choice of paper brings out different characteristics in the ink.

I'd done some trial videos that will never see the light of day, staging my desk for a recording configuration, testing out software apps for multi-cam recording, and learning just enough to get by with rudimentary editing.

Now I was ready to make my first video that I'd be willing to publish.

The fountain pen hobby has a niche and enthusiastic audience. It’s a hobby that inspires passion and obsession about these tools that craft our art, while also being pieces of art. So when the pen community is interested in something new, we're hungry for content about it when we can't get our ink-stained hands on the new shiny object.

In the community Slack that’s sprung up around The Pen Addict website and podcast, there had been a lot of talk recently about a new ink bundle from the Birmingham Pen Company. I bought the ink bundle, and it arrived on Friday. Since I seemed to be the first one in the Slack to get my hands on these inks, I’d told some folks that I’d take photos, to help others see how the inks looked outside of marketing photos.

I decided that this was the video opportunity I was waiting for, so I recorded the ink-swatching process. I'm no expert on inks, far from it, but I can point my iPhone at the desk to film myself dipping Q-Tips into ink bottles.

I recorded a video in one take, then did a rudimentary edit. I posted the video to YouTube, and shared the link to the community. The video is nothing special, and it's not even particularly good. But it’s me, on camera, talking about something I enjoy.

If the video convinces one person to buy ink from Birmingham Pen Company, it was worth sharing – they make good products. There are no affiliate links, there's no promotional consideration, nothing like that.

If the video convinces one person to learn more about the fountain pen hobby, or it gets you to subscribe to my YouTube channel, or it just makes my mother happy to see my face on video – Hi Mom! – then it was worth sharing.

I hope you enjoy the video, and maybe find some value in it.

If this piece resonated with you, even better.

Most of all, I hope you find value in something you create, and then share it with the world.