Recently at a group writing session, I reflected on my struggle to make sense of some classic advice: create for yourself, not the world. Make things for an audience of one. This makes sense to me in creative mediums like music, painting, or ceramics, which feel less deliberately communicative and more like products or objects than messages. It feels hard to follow this advice with writing. I write for myself when journaling or thinking through ideas, but it feels like there's a clear divide between an audience of one and an audience of n. Even if n is a single person.

Of course, writing for an audience can be personally valuable. Writing this newsletter is fulfilling, inspiring, and self-informing. I'm writing for me and for you. The tension between those two seems to produce something better than if I only kept one of us in mind. This seems like a contradiction with the advice above.

After I shared my frustration, another writer suggested that I think of writing or any creative work like an iceberg. There's a deliberate tip of ice that breaks the water, available for the audience to see. That's what you share or publish. But you can't get to that small chunk without the much larger portion beneath the water. It's one connected mass of ice and it would be foolish to imagine the part the world can see without what lies below. This makes sense, especially for writing, where a stew of ideas, rewrites, and edits that never see the light of day are necessary to produce most good writing. But it also applies to all creative work, solving my dilemma. Every medium leaves a lot on its version of the cutting room floor.

I'm trying to think of my writing as creating fully-formed icebergs, rather than just focusing on the part everyone will see. The shapes I share are often ideas I never expected to break the surface. For my recent month-long daily writing challenge, I didn’t pre-write the day before and I tried to avoid thinking about what to write until the day of. This typically meant sitting down without a clue about a subject matter. It was surprising and exciting to see that I had far more ideas than I consciously realized -- they just needed soil and water. And the openness to work on parts that might never see the light of day.

This is because the iceberg metaphor applies beyond conscious, active creativity. I’ve noticed that when editing our podcast, I often listen back to segments that are thematically similar to conversations or writing that happened afterward. I’ve been unconsciously repeating myself.

These ideas weren't cached, and yet I was working with them at multiple isolated points. They were rattling around in my subconscious, available to pull above the surface in different shapes. Ideas move in and out of the active state of mind, but they're still accessible. Writing is particularly helpful in clarifying these semi-conscious thoughts and codifying them into a structured and retrievable form.

The lines between conscious and subconscious are blurrier than I realized. Perhaps it's best to think of all these modalities as interconnected layers that make up the iceberg:

subconscious observations and other mysteries
semi-conscious realizations: a passing thought, an impromptu comment in response to someone else that isn't actively cached
conscious and considered thoughts: the stuff I'm mulling over or returning to, in my head or conversation
structured, creative ideas I form: by writing or other creative acts, but not meant to be shared
fully formed "products" (essays, art, etc): meant to be shared with the world (the tip of the iceberg)

There's probably a lot of fidelity to add to each of these or even between them. And number five has its own spectrum: from incredible, obvious, memetic ideas made to be shared and loved by many to rough stabs at the beginning of fleshing out a concept. Even in the latter case, letting it break the water can be the beginning of seeing its full shape more clearly, especially when others can join you in the process.

Thanks for reading,

Jackson

Ideas and Icebergs