I’ve written before about the struggle of writing about the past, while living in the now.
The person who wrote the first draft of my manuscript is not the same person reviving it today. Time has passed, many events have transpired, and I’ve changed.
I remember reading my manuscript, editing my manuscript, and at times becoming overwhelmed with emotion, and compassion for the me on the page. The me who went through the events in my manuscript. The me who survived those events. The me driven by curiosity.
The me driven by curiosity.
Driven by curiosity
I’ve also written about music, and the role lyrics have played in my life. I embarked in a personal big data project, tracking lyrics that ran through my head every day for a number of months. I find myself thinking of this now, as the lyrics have changed.
There seems to have been a pivot.
The me driven by curiosity is still the me writing this.
The me driven by curiosity in the manuscript saved the me that is writing this.
Strange, how the saying is “curiosity killed the cat” but for me, curiosity saved me. The rabbit holes I fell down to try and understand, find a language I could attach to various experiences in order to process and perhaps understand.
Leveling up with Extreme Programming agile methodology
Reflecting on it, “Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience” by Laurence Gonzales broke things open for me, and perhaps I’ve been on a main quest of understanding ever since. A main quest with many side quests.
I leveled up in my quest through the language of programming, of software development, and the language of agile software development, and the Extreme Programming (XP) method in particular.
Some days I can’t tell if software informs my language, or if my language informs software. The analogies just naturally stack themselves, connect, lock into place.
I apply agile methodologies to my creative writing. Draft, iterate, test. Conduct retros on sections, on the process of drafting a section or a chapter. Conduct retros on docs-as-code. Iterate. Test. Try again.
“You did the best you could with the knowledge you had at the time” is a phrase I often repeat to myself. Reading my manuscript, I remind myself of that. The me on the page is not the me now with knowledge and tools. The me on the page had to learn and acquire knowledge and tools, build the character into the one writing this post.
Sometimes I need to remind myself of time. The decades that me on the page functioned the way I did, and the relatively small period of time the me writing this post has changed, adapted, adjusted, and improved its functionality.
Continuous improvement. Takes continuous work.
And I’m still at it.