DRMacIver's Notebook
Drawing on resources
Drawing on resources
Complementary to the capacities view of things, another useful broad label is “resources”. Resources are essentially anything you can draw on to do stuff. Possibly, though not necessarily, in a consumable way.
There’s some overlap between the two concepts of course, in that every resource implies a capacity of stuff you can do by drawing on that resource. e.g. I talked about money as a capacity, and money is obviously also a resource.
One of the places I find this view most useful is creativity in general, and writing in particular. When you are writing, you have essentially all of your existing pool of experiences and knowledge as a resource to draw on. All of the e.g. conversations you’ve had, books you’ve read, idle thoughts you’ve had, things you’ve done, previous material you’ve written, sit together in your head as a kind of pool of inadequately articulated material that you can pull on and refine out into something that you write about.
I’m a big fan of the view that creativity isn’t really something you generate, but is instead a (skilled and difficult!) exploration of the adjacent possible. The resources available to you define your adjacent possible because you draw on them to elaborate and combine them into new material.
One thing that seems to be common with creative resources is that they become stale. You see this with some authors who, for example, draw on their professional experience and produce really good work, but the more they become writers and the further divorced they are from that professional experience, the more shallow their writing becomes. I liked Lethain’s writers who operate as an expression of this problem. This was definitely part of my concern with my consulting business too - I was a bit too far removed from the professional experiences I was drawing on, and as a result I’m appreciating going back into more senior IC level work. It definitely feels like I have a much richer set of renewing experiences to draw on now.
You also see this thing in fiction. For example, hypothetically, you might have a science fiction writer who is clearly drawing on his experience as a software developer who has dealt with a lot of office bullshit, but the longer he’s a science fiction writer the less relevant any of that experience becomes. Hypothetically.
This also came up during the pandemic I think. I don’t know if you noticed, but it feels like a lot of material that was written in 2020-2021 is a bit… flat. As if the day to day experience people were drawing on as stimulus for their writing was no longer there. I might be imagining this - it’s certainly at least partly a reflection of my mood during those times as anyone else’s.
One general strategy that I think is worth doing is to seek out activities that cause you to generate new resources. For example, it’s good to have regular conversations with people about the sorts of things you might like to write about.A non-trivial number of my posts in general are sparked by conversations on discord. I also use journaling as a place to generate half formed thoughts for drawing on.