Via Tom Crichlow's post about digital gardens, I recently stumbled upon Robin Sloan’s idea of stock and flow in writing:
/ Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
/ Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
Flow is the incessant rush of social media posts, likes, and comments, and it’s much too easy to get caught up in it. Stock is the body of work that you invest in over time, that doesn’t deliver that much in the moment, but produces a long tail of views and influence over time (also see the concept of stock and flow in economics).
Robin continues:
Flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but I think we neglect stock at our peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.
I’m not saying you should ignore flow! This is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after years with your work in hand. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisite opus is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (get ready for it!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find those fans all over again next time you emerge from your cave.
Like almost everyone, I spend too much time on social media. Although I don’t bare my soul on Facebook the way many people do, I still spend way too much time going over every single like and comment in great detail. It provides a great hit at any time of the day whether positive or negative, and the addictive cycle is especially rewarding at times of great stress, as in the last two months.
But I miss the longer, quieter hours spent crafting blog posts, whether long or short. It seems that blog writing is one of the most fragile activities I engage in, and the times I’m able to get in a solid writing flow are the times that are the most susceptible to being cut out of my schedule by any sort of upheaval or change. Notice the lack of posts in the entire month of April.
A quick look at the top-performing blog posts both here and in the Collaborative Piano Blog shows that it’s not just the most recent posts that perform well, but stuff that I wrote a long time ago that people find useful time and again, such last year’s post on how I use My Music Staff with The Archive to write lesson notes.
On the Collaborative Piano Blog, this month’s most popular articles are ones I would consider to be out of date, but which are still bookmarked, linked, and served up by search engines:
10 Things You Need to Know About the 2015 Royal Conservatory Celebration Series and Syllabus (2015)
7 Free Faber Piano Adventures Resources (2007) [NB: Not one link on that article still works, which shows you the ephemeral nature of many resource locations on the web.]
Two Tenors Talk About Jackie Evancho, Amira Willighagen, and the Child Singer Pheonomenon (2014) [NB: And there’s still a steady flow of very strongly felt comments on that post, both positive and negative]
The Definitive Guide to Building and Maintaining a Repertoire List (2010)
Of the most-viewed Collaborative Piano Blog articles, only some of them were intended to become longstanding resources. The others were written on the spur of the moment.
We’re not entirely in control regarding which of our previous work becomes the most viewed or influential. But having a stock body of work and a place for others to find it can increase our ability to reach people for years after we create something.
(Image by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash)