Navigating a major transition earlier this year, I set a goal of writing and releasing one essay per week. A simple, self serving distraction to help reengage myself in a creative process I had lost somewhere during my most recent years chasing scale.
In the age of the endless scroll, powered by furry microphones and cringy short form parody, I’ve found it deeply rewarding to disappear into my own head and try to find a voice where fewer people are paying attention.
It’s been fun, challenging, and more than anything, therapeutic. Fortunately, I’ve also received a slew of positive feedback, which admittedly feels good.
Yes, I too like personal acknowledgement. Sue me.
Turns out, some people seem to enjoy these rants and/or my unorthodox writing style. The secret I want to share with my supporters, and frankly the less enthused, is that the writing process has never been easy for me.
I believe I’m a decent storyteller and have a knack for organizing random and copious amounts of information into a thesis that supports my position or bias. But the whole “writing like an actual professional” idea is completely foreign to me. Nothing specific to the art of writing comes naturally to me.
I have no classical training. I write like I speak. My grammar is terrible and my sentence structure can be unfamiliar. But I’ve become increasingly confident in the process behind it.
For me, writing is really an exercise in synthesis. Taking a ridiculous amount of seemingly unrelated information, observations, experiences, and opinions and trying to figure out what, if anything, connects them.
My writing doesn’t arrive with a fully formed thesis. I prefer to argue my way toward one.
This week, that process was more mentally cumbersome than usual. We had just gotten back from vacation, my parents were in town visiting, my two sons both celebrated birthdays, 11 and 14, and my oldest, Grayson, unfortunately suffered a horrific knee injury at his football game Tuesday night.
Between the post vacation blues, catching up on life, Mum, Dad, family commitments, birthdays, ER visits, MRIs, and follow ups, my brain feels like a can of smashed assholes.
All that to say, organizing half baked thoughts and bringing a central idea, argument, or point of view to life through a supported thesis proved extremely difficult this week.
As a respectable cop out to my promise of a weekly essay, I thought it could be fun, or at least interesting, to share my creative writing process. Or, as I like to call it, my creative ranting process. A non traditional, reverse engineered approach that helps bring my weekly brain dumps to life.
I typically get my best ideas in three places. In the shower, in the car, or in the gym.
So here’s how my process typically flows. I pick a hot button topic, or simply a topic important to me, once a week. The initial ranting begins about a week before the essay actually drops. Meaning, this week, I’m developing ideas for next week’s essay while fine tuning and finalizing this week’s post.
It usually starts with me under the influence of the mind altering hot water of my shower, inspired by music and lyrics in my car, or pushing my physical boundaries at the gym. In all three scenarios, at least for me, my brain runs wild when given permission to wander.
Because of this, I keep my phone close by with my Notes app open, ready to listen.
Then, as the ideas flood in, I begin an intense debate with myself, recording these random thoughts and arguments through my Notes app. I give an opinion, challenge generic positions or societal norms, and then poke holes in my own argument. It all comes out raw, unedited, and most importantly, in my own voice.
After multiple rants from multiple venues, the shower, the car, the gym, themes begin to take shape. Eventually, I sit down in front of my laptop, Notes app locked and loaded, and begin organizing those scattered thoughts into something resembling a structure.
From there, natural headings emerge with complementary bullet points. Then fragmented paragraphs start to form.
Next comes creating some sort of sequence. It typically starts with a hook, followed by an observation. Maybe a question worth exploring. Eventually, I stumble into a thesis, challenge that thesis, find some resolution, and hopefully finish with a callback that brings the entire piece full circle.
When I’m happy with the flow of the initial draft, I run it through an intentionally curated ChatGPT thread designed to edit for clarity and grammar while maintaining my voice. Once I receive the edit, I go back into the essay and rework it further in my own voice. This is probably the most important step and involves more subtraction than addition.
To summarize:
Rant — Pick a weekly topic and sound off into the Notes app.
Organize — Group random thoughts into themes.
Sequence — Arrange those themes until an argument starts to emerge.
Write — Turn the scattered thoughts into headings, sentences, and
paragraphs.
Rinse — Run the rough draft through GPT for clarity and grammar while maintaining my voice.
Rework — Tighten the draft, focusing more on subtraction than addition.
Repeat — Return to any step as needed.
Now that you know my process, I want to bring you into this week’s can of smashed assholes.
What follows are a few of the themes, arguments, and half baked statements I’ve been working through but, up to this point, haven’t been able to bring together into a cohesive argument.
Some are contradictory. Some overlap. Some aren’t fully developed. That’s the point.
My gut tells me there’s an essay buried somewhere in here. That many of these seemingly related ideas are saying the same thing in different ways. I just haven’t figured out exactly what that thing is yet.
Fear not, next week you can expect the finished product, as promised, in your inbox at 6:03 AM Friday morning Eastern.
Until then, here’s where I left off this week.
There’s Nothing Chic About Kinda Chic
Another regurgitated buzz phrase repackaged as original.
Another boring carbon copy of whatever the algorithm is telling everyone to do.
Kinda chic pretends to stand against something. In reality, it stands for nothing.
Kinda chic pretends to stand against something, but in reality, it’s typical.
The Grunge Revival
Less pretense. More substance.
The 80s celebrated aspiration and success.
Grunge gave voice to skepticism, anxiety, and frustration.
Generation X is a generation that, in many ways, looks a lot like Gen Z today.
Grunge wasn’t simply a new genre of music. It was a cultural correction.
A classic case of cause and effect.
Taste vs Trends
Everyone keeps saying taste is the future.
So one could argue this idea of “taste” is kinda “trending.”
But isn’t good taste almost the exact opposite of being trendy?
If an algorithm is constantly telling you what’s cool, how much of that is actually your taste?
Taste, at least to me, is a rejection of today’s algorithmic menu or color palette.
Taste, at least to me, is a search for raw uniqueness, experience, and a point of view.
Are we actually discovering our own taste anymore, or are we just consuming someone else’s?
Taste vs Status
Status has become an algorithmic checklist of things to own, restaurants to visit, and trips to book.
Taste was once something you discovered. Now it is something you’re sold.
Today, you are “tasting” someone else’s feed, convincing yourself it’s your own.
School Kids & Style
2026 = Walking clones with the same freshly teased Broccoli Crop.
2026 = The uniform, a textured fringe and a pair of grey sweatpants.
1996 = Clear silos of individual taste representing a way to express yourself.
1996 = You could tell what music someone listened to by what they were wearing.
The Anti-Trend Movement
Anti-Trend isn’t about saying you are different. It’s about actually living differently.
Anti-Trend is now trending. Feels weird.
The rebellion itself has become the trend.
Standalone Boom Statements w/ No Home
Kinda Chic vs Kinda’ Punk Rock (could be fun to argue)
Beige is the new black!
Beige is much easier to scale.
The problem with taste is that it is difficult to scale.
Same shoes, same pants, but different people.
Everyone looks somewhat trendy but oddly identical.
I feel like there’s an essay here. Fuck it, I know there is.
The ranting is done. Now comes the organizing, sequencing, writing, rinsing, and reworking. Somewhere along the way, I’ll find a thesis, challenge that thesis, poke holes in my own bias, and hopefully find my way to some sort of conclusion.
That’s the part of this process I enjoy and have become increasingly confident in. I don’t need to know exactly where an idea is going when I start. I just need to trust there’s something worth exploring and give myself enough time to argue my way toward it.
So, back to the shower. Back to the car. Back to the gym.
Phone close by, Notes app open, curious, and ready to listen.
I know these things are related.
I just haven’t figured out why yet.
Brandon Cullen
In search of life’s [im]perfect soundtrack ...