Honeydew
Or, How 3 Biases Derail Remarkable Projects
“I love you,” I said and ended the call. The screen of my phone switched back to the last app I had open. “Oh!” I exclaimed:
HONEYDEW
This is a piece about starting and stopping. It’s about the benefits of diving into the middle when the beginning just isn’t clear. And it’s about rearranging and recontextualizing once the truth of the project at hand is learned.
Most of the work I do that’s not this revolves around coaching, editing, and/or thinking with people who have meaningful ideas they want to better express to the world. In this work, the question I hear most often is about making sense of a complex idea—the kind of idea that contains many smaller, supporting ideas and stories and research. The sort of complex idea best expressed in a lengthy essay, a book, a podcast series, or a documentary.
How does one make a plan for tackling that kind of idea? How does one get started writing or designing that complex idea? How does one keep track of all the bits and bobs that go into a massive project like that?
From my perspective, three biases tend to trip us up when working on a project of this sort. I’ll call them the linearity bias, the stick-with bias, and the waste-not bias. I’ll explain how each gets in the way of big, messy projects—but first, I have to tell you about HONEYDEW.
Honeydew
I’m daily (and obsessive) Spelling Bee player. That’s the New York Times game in which you find as many words as possible using the seven letters provided for the day, including one letter that must be used in every word.
Each puzzle has at least one pangram, which is a word that uses all seven of the day’s letters. A recent puzzle offered the letters H A L E T B I, which has 3 pangrams: BIATHLETE, HABITABLE, HITTABLE.
For the second (maybe third?) day in a row, I’d accomplished the highest level—genius—without finding the pangram. I do not like it when I can’t find the pangram. In fact, I try to find it before I input any other words.
This day—Saturday—I found 49 words (that’s 90% of the possible words) before I found the pangram. I didn’t find them all in one sitting, of course. I play for a bit in the morning, maybe a little when I eat lunch, and during various lulls as the day unfolds. Being the weekend, I had already picked up and put down the game several times—and still, no pangram.
My Spelling Bee gameplay is looking for common pairings of letters and building—BUILDING was one of Tuesday’s pangrams...— as many words as I can off of them before moving on to another pair. For instance, in the puzzle above, I’d use ELT, EA, TH, and ABLE, among others. This is a solid strategy and often leads to fast results.
But when I can’t seem to find the pangram, I know that it probably doesn’t use one of these familiar combinations. The pangram is a weirdo.
So there I was staring at W O D E N H Y and putting together WH, EN, NY, WN, and ND and seeing no way for these seven letters to form a word other than “hoedowny," which, I should note, is not a word.
It wasn’t until I said, “I love you," and ended the call with my husband that it clicked. The Spelling Bee puzzle flashed on the screen before I clicked my phone off—and in that instant, I saw it: HONEYDEW.
Sometimes, compound words are the toughest.
I’d like to avoid a trite transition explaining how HONEYDEW is rather like working on a big, messy project. But I’m not sure that’s going to work out.
TRANSITION is a word, by the way, that could never be a Spelling Bee result despite it comprising only seven unique letters. That’s because S is never included in the puzzle. Can you imagine? Just about every word you could make, you could repeat as plural noun or a singular present tense verb. It’s bad enough when ED and ING are included.
When I start the Spelling Bee puzzle for the day, I have no idea what letters will greet me. I have no way to plan how I’ll complete it. I can’t prep for it outside of playing the previous day’s puzzle, and the one before that, and the one before that...
I just dive in.
Am I diving in at the beginning? No idea. Solving the puzzle doesn’t hinge on the order in which you find the words. Do I need to find all the words as quickly as possible or even in one sitting? Nope. The puzzle isn’t timed (as the crossword is), and it saves your progress for each time you come back to it. Should I avoid guessing? I always feel a little bad about it, but there’s no reason—there is no penalty for trying words that don’t work.
That makes the puzzle pretty remarkable, really. As I mentioned, the crossword is timed—a fact you can happily ignore if you’d like to. But it’s also ordered. You don’t have to complete it in order, but its linearity is right there in the structure—numbered clues, first across, then down. The player isn’t directly penalized for incorrect answers, but one incorrect answer makes the whole thing harder to solve.
Anyhow, back to big, messy projects based on meaningful and complex ideas.
Linearity Bias
Where do we start? I would like to start in 2 places simultaneously. Unfortunately. I have to write in series, whereas the great strength of the brain is parallel processing.
—Jeanette Winterson, 12 Bytes
The tendency I’ve observed in writers, podcasters, and other media makers (including myself) over the years is to avoid starting a project before we know what the beginning is. And to know the beginning, we have to have a plan for the whole thing. And to have a plan for the whole thing, we need a complete accounting of the project’s substance.
This, as far as I can tell, is impossible. A meaningful idea—especially a complex one—is revealed in fits and starts. Certain aspects of it focus and fuse in a flash of insight—as HONEYDEW did for me. Other aspects seep and ooze out of the cracks in our approach. Even when we’ve been working with a meaningful idea for years, even when it feels seared into the meat of our minds—especially then—the idea has no beginning; it has no whole. It has substance but no shape.
What I’m calling our linearity bias is our hesitancy to do work out of order. It’s our proclivity for an orderly, easily managed approach to the work at hand. Linearity bias makes it hard to see how a project can get started if we don’t already know how it will end.
You might have come across the phrase “shitty first draft" before. It’s from Anne Lamott’s lovely book on the craft of writing, Bird by Bird. I wholeheartedly believe in this adage, but it’s not the one from Lamott’s book that I want to surface here. Before the chapter on shitty first drafts, Lamott explains why she has a “one-inch picture frame" on her desk: it’s a reminder of “short assignments."
It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running.
When I open up Spelling Bee, my goal isn’t to solve the puzzle. It’s simply to find a new word. After I find a new word, my goal is to find another new word. Eventually, I run out of words to find because I’ve solved the puzzle. Solving the puzzle is a by-product of finding one word and then another.
Complex, meaningful ideas are not linear; they’re networks, fractals, and systems.
When I write a long, somewhat braided essay like “Broken Links," I don’t have a finished piece in mind. I write about one idea. And then another. And then another. I don’t care what order I write them in. I just write whatever I can see through that one-inch picture frame. That said, my metaphor of choice is an index card. I only write one index card at a time. When I’m done, it goes on a metaphorical pile with no order or structure because I don’t really know what I’m writing until I’ve filled up a dozen notecards and can survey my own thoughts.
While we must, as Winterson notes, “write in series" because language itself is linear, we do our ideas an injustice when we try to work through them from start to finish. Complex, meaningful ideas are not linear; they’re networks, fractals, and systems.
Stick-with Bias
I’m not sure I’d have ever spotted HONEYDEW without taking a break. Well, several breaks. Even the word HONEY, with its relatively unusual EY ending, was tough for me to spot.
I don’t think breaks are magical. And I don’t want to oversell the benefits of a change of scenery or perspective. I do have a tendency to expect the revelation of a new word when I open Spelling Bee in the middle of the day. But I don’t usually get that kind of HONEYDEW experience.
No, I think the "magic" of taking a break or shifting one’s perspective is actually a willingness to keep coming back to something frustrating or messy.
What I’m calling our stick-with bias is our tendency to prefer sitting down to a project and sticking with it until we either succeed or are convinced of our failure. Together with the linearity bias, the stick-with bias convinces us that the “right" way to complete a project is plugging away hour after hour or day after day, from start to finish.
What the stick-with bias does not impose on us is the inclination to come back to the same section over and over again. The stick-with bias makes us think forging ahead is the only way to make progress. If we can’t forge ahead, likely because something we’ve already written or said or shot isn’t right, then the project is doomed.
In my book, I write about how people always want advice on “sticking with a plan." And my response is always, “Don’t." Adapt, revisit, revise, change course, or abandon because of what you learn at each step of the plan. The stick-with bias makes it difficult to learn from our projects, to notice when they’ve become something altogether different from what we expected, to remain curious about what new questions pop up along the way.
Because meaningful ideas are networks, fractals, or systems, they’re also dynamic.
Because meaningful ideas are networks, fractals, or systems, they’re also dynamic. No static treatment, no amount of sheer will or self-discipline can wrestle them into a solid, unchanging form. So why bother working like that? Pick it up, put it down, ditch half of it, rework it—but don’t try to stick with it until you’ve got it in a chokehold. If you do, it won’t be a meaningful idea anymore.
Waste-Not Bias
As I mentioned earlier, Spelling Bee doesn’t penalize you for guessing nonsense words. That’s good since some real words look like nonsense. It also means that you can play without worrying about making a mistake. You’re free to guess or misspell with impunity.
But when it comes to working on big projects involving meaningful ideas, our waste-not bias often prevents us from experiencing that same freedom. The idea that we might spend an hour carefully crafting a scene or fleshing out an idea just to realize that it doesn’t work, or it’s not right, or it’s just unnecessary is anathema to our efficiency-driven work ethic.
If we’re unwilling to “waste" our words, though, we’ll likely find ourselves unwilling to begin. Insisting that the scene we set or the framework we describe must be the right one makes the first step and the next so much more difficult. What I’ve found is that just letting myself write freely, unencumbered by a fear of waste, allows me to produce higher quality work in the end. Writing freely gives me something to edit, which is what inevitably makes something worth reading or listening or watching.
Editing isn’t just a process of getting rid of what’s unnecessary. It’s a process of figuring out what the necessary bits are—something I don’t think can be done in the midst of creation. Editing requires us to step back and ask, "What am I really trying to say or do here?" And what I end up trying to say or do often differs from what I thought I was saying or doing. What I thought was a vital piece of the intellectual puzzle needs to be scrapped because I realized it detracted from the thesis I was arguing or the question I was trying to answer.
Earlier, I said that I tend to write one index card at a time. Before I edit—really before I can even say that I have a first draft, shitty or otherwise—I have to go through my index cards, formulate a (new) thesis, make a (new) outline, and throw out anything that doesn’t fit. It can feel like a waste of words and time, but it’s not. It’s a vital component of working with a meaningful idea. Without the “waste," I couldn’t communicate what I want to communicate.
Stepping Back
The biases I’ve described here aren’t innate. At least, I don’t think they are. The linearity bias, stick-with bias, and waste-not bias are all products of a culture and work ethic defined by the siren songs of productivity, efficiency, and convenience. In other words, labor under capitalism teaches us to lean into these biases rather than away from them.
If we want to do bold, remarkable work, we have to practice avoiding these biases. We have to gain skill at creating out of order, embracing a change (or many) of plans, and freeing ourselves of the fear of waste. There aren’t any shortcuts—of course. Just a daily practice.
In the words of Natalie Goldberg,
All this requires work, exertion. We each carry an essential life force, but to contact it, to glow with our being free of opinion, philosophy, idea and meet the clear life in others takes tremendous effort.
The good news is that the results, like honeydew, are sweet.
