Thinking In Public
When initially thinking about Skriptble Press and my writing, there were three things that came to mind: thinking, learning, and teaching. I wanted to combine these things, not only for myself but also to help others. As I've written before, so many writers don't show their process to the world. There are many reasons for this, but as someone who thinks externally, there is little reason to not publish my thinking.
As I developed the concepts, I settled on having an encompassing theme of "Thinking In Public". Thinking would be broken into two components: learning and teaching. Both of these done in public and both represented by their own publications. The Shaded Garden would be for learning in public and Shaded Nuance would be for teaching in public. This felt like the right path, it felt like things fit together. However, there was something that bothered me from the beginning.
Thinking felt like its own distinct entity, not something composed of learning and teaching. If this were true, however, I would need another publication, and attempting to launch three publications at once seemed daunting and impractical, so I shelved that idea and I began writing. What I discovered, however, is that attempting to think through learning doesn't actually work. At least not in the way that I wanted to be doing learning in public.
A core problem was that of rigor. With learning one would expect lots of citations. If I'm actually learning something then I should be able to point to a place from which I learned it. Teaching takes that to another level, where ideally the articles would have references to many different sources. But thinking doesn't require citations or sources. Thinking just happens.
This reached a critical point when I drafted an entry for The Shaded Garden that didn't feel like learning. The feedback I received helped me recognize that this piece wasn't researched and it certainly wasn't teaching. It was a form of raw thinking. Were the conclusions I made in that entry correct? I have no idea. That's the point of thinking in public, though. You write thoughts on the page, publish those pages, and then refine those thoughts.
I had gotten the two publications correct, but I was missing the crucial initial publication, the one where I didn't need to rely on sources and research but could just think. The flow would then go from this initial publication, through The Shaded Garden as I attempted to find knowledge that could either refute or substantiate the thoughts. Finally, once I felt like I had done enough research, answered enough questions, and learned something deeply enough, I would write an article for Shaded Nuance, providing a way to teach others what I had learned.
That first publication would be a space where thoughts could grow. Where I could just think and not worry about whether what I was thinking was strictly correct or could be backed up with research. Quashing my thoughts before I've even thunk them only leads to frustration. For someone who thinks on the page, that means that, almost by definition, my thoughts cannot be well researched. That comes later, along with broader scrutiny. The thoughts need to be had freely. They need to be able to intersect with each other. Eventually, after enough thinking, learning can be done. Similarly, after enough learning, teaching can be done. It all starts with unencumbered thinking.
That's what this publication is. A greenhouse cultivates plants; The Shaded Greenhouse cultivates thoughts.