When I’m writing, I constantly struggle to hit the publish button.

Sometimes my writing never feels polished enough and I get stuck in a loop of infinite editing. Other times my writing doesn’t feel complete enough and I get stuck in a loop of infinitely increasing scope. In either case, I fail to complete even small projects and I miss out on the feeling of accomplishment that comes with taking a project from concept to completion.

Intermediate Forms

This week I was surprised to find helpful inspiration for writing from the unlikely subject of biology. I’ve been reading the book Life On A Young Planet by Andrew H. Knoll about the origins and early evolution of life. So far its content has stretched from the alien Archaean period, when oxygen was scarce and the Earth was dominated by single-celled bacteria and archaea four billion years ago, to the Cambrian explosion of complex aerobic life around 540 million years ago.

One particular passage about the nature of evolution led to a moment of sudden realization for me. Each step along life’s evolutionary path is represented by a complete organism. Or, as the author puts it, “…natural selection can fashion complexity from simplicity as long as all intermediates are functional.” This may seem obvious, but it’s useful to consider that modern complex life didn’t emerge from a single-step process. Instead, it resulted from the gradual accretion of immediately useful functions on top of intermediate forms that were already functional.

This realization should have come to me more quickly. I already use this idea daily in my work as a software engineer. A common pitfall in large software projects is an investment in “big design up front”. It’s natural to plan a project before you start working, but for large and complex projects it’s notoriously difficult to judge the amount of work required. It’s even more difficult to accurately identify your future needs in advance. For many years I’ve found success on software projects by taking the evolutionary approach.

When I join a software project as the architect, most seem to imagine that I’ll be preparing a large and wishful design up front for others to unquestioningly follow. Instead, I start by looking for the smallest and most fundamental piece of the project that can provide immediate value, and I plan to build that. The result is a small but useful chunk of code, like a single-celled organism, that can stand on its own. Each small delivery feels like a win.

After getting it into the hands of users as quickly as possible and gathering feedback, I’ll plan another small chunk of work that slightly improves the product. Over time the slow accumulation of small features and fixes leads to evolution. Like a multi-cellular organism, a more complex and useful software system emerges.

Evolutionary Writing

Today I’m excited to attempt evolutionary writing for the first time. Rather than aiming to write a complete review of Life On A Young Planet, or writing a long-form essay on improving your writing, I’ve limited the scope of this blog post to the one connection I found between writing, software, and evolution. Somehow I’ve already written more than 500 words for a prompt that I compressed into a single bullet point:

  • Evolutionary architecture is useful in biology and software, so it’s probably also useful in writing.

So far so good! My plan for this post, and future posts, is to start small. As soon as I come up with what seems like a small idea for a blog post, I’ll try to cut that idea into eights, or even sixteenths. Just like when I’m building software, the prompt should be the smallest and most fundamental subject possible. Once I’ve found a topic I’ll explore it quickly, getting a single-celled blog post into the hands of readers as fast as possible.

After celebrating the success of publishing a blog post, I’ll have no shortage of topics to write about. I’ll have necessarily cut 15/16ths of my original idea, each of which might be distilled into a prompt and explored next. In the future, I can either accumulate new ideas into existing blog posts or create entirely new posts from them. The result will be a rich and multi-cellular tapestry of published blogs that give me the ability to express myself and a sense of accomplishment more frequently.

I’d love to know if you try out this idea for yourself! Feel free to reach out and let me know how it goes for you.