The Quantified Writer: Buster Benson on Writing as Thinking

Sometimes, success can be measured, and tracking our progress can hold us accountable to our goals. We interviewed NaNoWriMo board member and founder of 750words.com, Buster Benson, to learn about writing journeys and personal growth: 

You worked at Twitter for a good while. What genre of writing do you think best translates into 140 characters?

After using Twitter for almost ten years, I think it’s most important as a tool to express what’s really going on in your head. It’s a running autobiography drawn with only a few lines. 

I generally try to find parts of my own thought patterns and experiences that are least likely to already be represented in the world somewhere. Rather than writing what everyone else is writing, find the small things that are true to you that nobody else is writing about.

You founded 750 Words, which is a site that helps people to free-write 750 words, or three pages, daily. Do word-count goals really help to promote productivity?

Absolutely. The toughest thing about productivity is often finding the insight in a tangled, complicated problem. That’s rarely accomplished with the first words that come to mind. 

A word count helps you keep digging until the right words, the right perspective, and the previously unseen insight are found. There’s a bit of luck in there as well.

I really appreciate 750 Words’ sensitivity to privacy. Are there creative benefits to keeping some of one’s writing thoughts concealed from the world at large?

No question about it! Writing is an amazing tool for thinking. However, most of our communication with words is shared immediately, without thought. Or even worse, we filter out thoughts that aren’t sharable, and hide them, even from ourselves. 

Creating a safe place to express feelings, thoughts, doubts, insecurities, frustrations, and any number of other emotions that might not otherwise be shared publicly allows us to process them and understand ourselves better.

After brain-dumping about a complicated, emotion-filled topic privately to myself, I have a much better idea about what I’m trying to say and why, and sharing that is then so much more rewarding.

750 Words tracks recurring emotions that arise in one’s writing. What was the inspiration behind this? Can being aware of these themes affect your writing?

I’m inspired by how technology has attempted to analyze and understand words over the last 100 years. It seems so easy to us humans, but computers have a much harder time with it—though it’s starting to get better. 

Sometimes, we’re the last person to see something about ourselves that is obvious to everyone else. One purpose of private journaling is to learn about ourselves, and if a private journal is truly unfiltered, it provides really rich fodder for textual analysis. 

The way that 750 Words analyzes text isn’t perfect, but it gives us a chance to see ourselves through a mirror; an even if that mirror is bumpy and imperfect, sometimes it will help us catch a glimpse of something about ourselves that we hadn’t seen before.

Were you always so disciplined about self-tracking? What instigated the impulse? 

I’ve wondered that myself over the years. I’ve always been curious about how the brain works, how people interact, and how we design and live our lives.

Tracking things was something I picked up after college when I was explicitly trying to figure out why I behaved the way I did. And to better understand if things like sleep, caffeine, alcohol, etc really did impact my happiness. I tracked things like that for several years and tried to find patterns that were statistically significant, but never did. 

And yet, we all jump to conclusions about cause and effect every day. We’re creatures that are deeply wired to find patterns in the world, but those pattern-matching systems are far from perfect much of the time. Similarly, our ideas of our selves are often flawed as well. Tracking behaviors, analyzing words, etc., are just strategies for finding ways of getting around those problems. And even though I’m still very far from finding real answers about any of that, it continues to fascinate me.

As a word-count aficionado, what do you think are the benefits of NaNoWriMo’s word-count tracking and goals?

Fifty thousand words is a lot. Seen as a single number, it can be rather daunting. But if you break it down to a day, it’s not nearly as scary. I think NaNoWriMo’s word-count tracking and goal tools are great ways to make a big task less scary, and to also show how small progress consistently applied can get you to a big impressive goal.

What’s the weirdest thing or habit you’ve decided to track?

For a while I tracked how often I complained. I let everyone around me know that I’d pay them a dollar every time I complained. And I ended up paying a lot of people. It helped me get a better understanding of a mental habit that I had, and also led to a lot of interesting conversations about what qualifies as a complaint. 

Eventually, it turned something subconscious into something that was a bit more conscious, and now I am a bit better at offering constructive criticism whenever I would have normally just complained about something uselessly.

Buster Benson is the founder of 750words.com and has participated in and completed NaNoWriMo twice. One year’s manuscript was self-published and is available on Amazon under the title Man Versus Himself. During the day, Buster builds products for tech platforms that encourage writing (currently at Slack, previously at Twitter), advises a number of startups, and documents his life and beliefs at busterbenson.com.

Interview conducted by Madeleine Flamiano.

Top Photo by Flickr user  tellafotomedia .