The stub problem

I have hundreds of stubs. One or two sentence ideas. Fragments of thoughts.

"Models are maps" "The shape of a thought" "Attention is all you need (in life too)"

They're placeholders. They're the skeleton of an idea, not the flesh.

Some stubs will grow. Some won't. I don't always know which ones will become full pieces. It depends on whether they connect to other ideas — whether Writing is a search procedure can find the path between them.

It depends on whether I keep thinking about it. Whether I can find the right angle. Whether the stub connects to other stubs in interesting ways — like how Notes on attention ties to Why I write.

This is the real work of writing. Not the writing itself. The thinking. The waiting. The connections. The cloud and the basin describes this process perfectly.

The stubs sit there in my notes, waiting. Some for months. Some for years. On clarity and The shape of a thought were both stubs once.

Maybe some are stubs because they're supposed to be stubs. Not everything becomes a tree.

Maybe some ideas are better left as ghosts.