Daily Word Counts
One piece of advice I see given to writers is that they must "write every day." Often it suggests you should write for a specific duration or for a specific number of words.
In high school, I did this myself in my creative writing classes although even then I remember wondering why I was writing nonsense instead of thinking of things to write about. We rarely ask why we're writing — only that we are. That’s a mistake. To me, literature begins as the conveyance of ideas. The language must earn its place by serving those ideas or challenging them on purpose. But meaning comes first, even if it's hidden.
As an engineer, I can tell you some horror stories of pointy-haired bosses that believe number of lines of code equates proportionally to productivity or quality. It’s basically a meme at this point. If you start typing before you’ve designed the system, you aren't coding, you're just creating technical debt. You are generating syntax without structure.
Yet strangely this is what we advise writers to do.
In my method, the first step isn't writing. It is “orbiting”.
Orbiting is the practice of holding two distinct, often contradictory concepts in your mind and letting them revolve around each other until gravity smashes them together. You are looking for bisociation — the spark that jumps the gap between two unrelated planes of thought.
If stream-of-consciousness is flood, orbiting is gravitational drift. You wait for collision, not catharsis.
Case Study: The Basketball and the Burger
Last night, I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to force a connection between two random objects: a basketball and a hamburger. The origin doesn’t matter, but for transparency: hamburgers sounded delicious at that moment and I had just seen an advertisement featuring Caitlin Clark. The more you know!
My first thought was a simple visual simile: Dribbling a basketball looks like patting a meat patty into shape. I could have written that down but "A looks like B" is the lowest form of poetic data. It has no tension.
So I stopped looking at the shape and started orbiting the concepts. I call this “zooming out”.
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Suddenly, the orbit decayed and the two concepts collided.
What if the cow could do the calculus? What if the thing we are reducing to meat is smarter than we are?
In that split second, the poem was finished and the system was built. I knew the tragedy (eating a genius), I knew the tone (absurdist horror), and due to some life experience with differential equations, I knew the title ("The Lotka-Volterra Model").
Twenty minutes orbiting gave me a poem. Ten pages of dribbling wouldn’t. I wrote a rough draft this morning and arrived at what I think is the final form about half an hour ago. Since I already knew where I was going it was just writing and I could fully engage on word choices and line breaks without fear of time lost on dramatic revisions.
The Result
The Lotka-Volterra Model
I met Daisy at the fence
where the grass thins out
and the calves learn where the wire is.
She said hello first.
I said sorry. I don’t know why.
She could solve calculus problems
faster than I could write them down.
Differential equations, too—
the kind that describe
how things change when nothing else will.
Sometimes she helped with my life.
She’d tell me which decisions were easy
and which ones just felt important.
She said regret behaves like friction.
You only notice it when you stop.
The neighbors waved when they passed.
The cows were always quiet
except for Daisy.
One afternoon she wasn’t there.
I stood at the fence,
looking out at the pasture,
pondering the definition of the limit.
That night the neighbors
knocked on my door
with a paper-wrapped bundle.
Daisy moved to France, they said.
“To study at the Sorbonne.”
They offered me the bundle.
“It’s too much for our freezer.”
I thanked them.
The steaks were marbled beautifully.
I cooked one rare
and ate it standing at the counter,
listening to the quiet solve for me.