About Tries
An Introduction
About this newsletter
Tries is a newsletter for writers and people interested in the writing process.
It’s not a traditional publication—it’s a meta-layer, on top of my writing in other places. Particularly, my personal blog (BY JWBY) and my new marketing & growth newsletter (Age of Intelligence).
So, why another publication? Because the writing process is weird. As someone who always takes an iterative approach to my work, I often want to come back and revise something after it’s published. Or I just don’t publish things because I don’t think they’re finished. This publication is my way of showing you the process of continual editing. It’s a way for me to share my “WIP” essays—both work-in-progress and writing in public.
Subscribe to get an inside view into the gradual progression and iteration, rather than a final, polished product. You’ll get a very short note whenever I publish or update a new piece: just a paragraph and a link to the essay.
About the name
“Tries” comes from the original meaning of “essay” (from the French essayer, meaning ‘to try, to attempt, to test’) and from my favorite line from TS Eliot:
“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again : and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”— T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets, “East Coker,” V.