CeleryKills

A Personal Approach to Prompts, Practice, and Creative Discipline

I didn’t start out planning a 180‑day writing challenge. I started out annoyed at myself.

I write science, atheism, politics, philosophy, history, and whatever personal obsessions happen to be in range that week, and I publish it all for free. No paywall. No Patreon guilt. Just the work. At some point I realized I had a pattern. Bursts of productivity followed by silence. Long stretches of thinking that felt like writing, but weren’t. So I set a constraint that felt unreasonable enough to force change. Write and publish every day for 180 days.

About ten days in, I hit the wall.

Not the “no ideas” wall. The worse one. Too many ideas, too much emotional charge, too much pressure to be coherent every single day. I could feel myself starting to perform rather than think. That’s when I realized I needed tactics, not motivation.

I was lucky. I’d already been bullet journaling and art journaling for years, mostly as background noise to technical work. I’d also played with free writing on and off, usually when stuck on client projects or emergent tech research. What changed was realizing these weren’t separate practices. They were parts of a system, and I hadn’t been using them together.

Free writing became the intake valve. No audience. No thesis. Just raw momentum. Ten minutes, sometimes twenty, dumping half‑formed arguments, irritation, stray questions, and sentences that would never survive editing. When I’m writing about evolution or theology or politics, the emotional load is real. Free writing lets that energy burn off without contaminating the finished work. Anne Lamott calls this “shitty first drafts,” and she’s right for reasons that have nothing to do with craft and everything to do with psychological pressure (Lamott, Bird by Bird, 1994).

Free writing, in practice, looks messier than people expect. When I started working on Why Twain’s Warning About Cowardice Still Fits Today, the first page wasn’t about Twain at all. It was a half‑angry sprawl that read something like:

“Everyone wants to be brave until there’s a social cost. We talk about courage like it’s loud, but most of it is just quiet refusal. Twain knew this. Or maybe he just hated crowds. Is cowardice just conformity with better PR?”

None of that survived intact. What it did was surface the emotional charge and the vague question underneath. Why does moral cowardice feel normal when it’s shared? Once that was out of my system, I could go back, reread Twain, and notice the specific move he was making. The essay that emerged wasn’t a rant. It was an analysis of social pressure and silence, shaped by the raw material but not contaminated by it.

Theoria followed a similar path, but with more conceptual debris. Early free writing for What Theoria Has to Do With Scientific Theory was basically me arguing with myself.

“Why do people think theory means guess? Is this a language failure or an education failure? Aristotle didn’t mean ‘speculation,’ he meant disciplined seeing. We lost that. Or maybe we buried it under lab coats.”

I don’t use physical paper much anymore, but instead use OneNote and Word, but the virtual pages still act the same. In this case the virtual page was full of crossed‑out sentences, arrows, and notes like “check Plato” and “don’t get preachy.” Free writing let me misuse the word theory until I understood why the misuse mattered. By the time the essay took shape, the anger had been replaced with structure. The finished piece doesn’t read like frustration. It reads like clarification. But that clarity only arrived because the confusion was allowed to exist first, unfiltered.

That’s the hinge between free writing and bullet journaling. Free writing gives you the raw ore. Bullet journaling lets you see, over days and weeks, which fragments are worth refining and which were just emotional exhaust. Without that handoff, the writing either stays raw or never starts.

Bullet journaling became the spine. Not as a productivity fetish, but as a way to see time. Each day got a dot. Each post got a title stub. Ideas that surfaced during free writing got captured as fragments, not commitments. I could see patterns forming across weeks. Which topics returned. Which ones drained me. Which ones exploded into three essays when I thought they’d be throwaways. Ryder Carroll talks about bullet journaling as intentionality, but for me it’s more about friction. It slows impulse just enough to make it visible (Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method, 2018).

In practice, bullet journaling looks less like planning and more like catching sparks before they burn out. When I started Was There a Global Flood?, the page in my notebook didn’t look like an outline at all. It looked like this:

• flood ≠ one event, more like category of stories
• geology hates single global layer claims
• why does “global” matter so much to people
• ark logistics = distraction, not evidence
• check ice cores again
• people want catastrophe, not sediment

None of that was a commitment. It was inventory. Over a week, those fragments kept reappearing. Every time I free‑wrote about something else, “global” circled back. That repetition mattered. By the time the article took shape, the focus had narrowed naturally. Not “did a flood happen,” but “what does the evidence actually say about scale and mechanism.” The finished piece reads cleanly because the mess happened earlier, offstage.

The same thing happened with Why Primates Kept Teeth Instead of Going Full Beak, but the bullets were different:

• beaks are great but limit manipulation
• teeth = versatility over efficiency
• jaw muscles + brain size correlation?
• humans trade specialization for flexibility
• evolution favors “good enough” tools
• stop calling teeth primitive

That page sat there for days, growing sideways. Some bullets died. Some merged. One split into three paragraphs I hadn’t planned. Bullet journaling made it obvious which ideas were feeding the work and which were just noise. By the time I wrote the article, the argument felt discovered rather than imposed. That’s the quiet power of this step. It turns raw writing into visible structure without forcing premature decisions.

Prompt‑based journaling did the heavy lifting when I didn’t trust myself. On days when I was tired or irritated or too deep in one topic, prompts forced lateral movement. Not inspirational prompts. Analytical ones. “What assumption am I making here?” “What would someone who disagrees actually say?” “What would count as evidence against this?” Those prompts show up all over my site, whether explicitly or not. They’re the reason pieces like Why the Evolution Debate Is a One‑Sided Spectacle or What Theists Keep Asking About Atheism don’t collapse into venting (celerykills.com, 2026).

Art journaling surprised me the most. I don’t mean pretty sketchbook spreads for Instagram. I mean diagrams, arrows, half‑legible words, and ugly visual thinking. When I’m working through something like abiogenesis or historical bias, words alone can lie to you. Drawing forces structure. It externalizes confusion. Julia Cameron talks about this as accessing a different cognitive channel, but I think of it more bluntly. If you can’t draw the relationship, you probably don’t understand it yet (Cameron, The Artist’s Way, 1992).

What made this work wasn’t any one technique. It was the way they fed each other. Free writing generated noise. Bullet journaling filtered signal. Prompts redirected focus. Art journaling stabilized complex ideas. Together, they made it possible to write about charged subjects every day without burning out or becoming repetitive.

Another example, this time with all journaling methods, is A Chalkboard, A Cup of Coffee, and the Fourth Dimension: My Accidental Journey Into Explaining Gravity. That essay on gravity didn’t begin with gravity at all. It began with confusion. The free writing was a mess of half‑remembered physics, irritation at bad analogies, and a recurring image of a chalkboard that wouldn’t stay clean. The bullet journal page that followed looked something like this:

• people say “gravity pulls” and stop thinking
• space‑time curvature explanation loses people immediately
• why does “down” feel intuitive but fail in orbit
• chalkboard metaphor might work, coffee as time?
• don’t mention equations, mention reference frames
• connect to density/buoyancy arguments

Alongside that list was a sketch. A warped grid. A coffee cup pressing into it. Arrows pointing sideways, then downward, then looping back with “observer?” written in the margin. That drawing did more work than three paragraphs of prose. It made the relationship visible. Free writing dumped the frustration. Bullet journaling stabilized the fragments. Art journaling forced me to commit to a spatial explanation that actually made sense.

The prompts came last, and they were surgical. “What does the reader already believe about gravity?” “Where do common explanations fail without being wrong?” “What would still be true if the word ‘gravity’ disappeared entirely?” Those questions stripped away the urge to teach and replaced it with the obligation to clarify. The finished essay doesn’t read like a lecture. It reads like a walk from a chalkboard to a coffee cup and back again, because that’s how it was built. The system didn’t just prevent burnout. It prevented me from publishing something that felt correct but wasn’t coherent. Without all four pieces working together, that article would have either stayed in my notebook or gone live half‑formed.

This wasn’t new to me, really. It mapped cleanly onto how I used to handle technical writing. Reading widely outside the immediate problem space. Tracking client constraints. Staying aware of emergent technology so I didn’t get trapped defending yesterday’s assumptions. The difference is that now the client is the public, the constraints are ethical and epistemic, and the deliverable is clarity rather than compliance.

There’s also a humility baked into this system that I didn’t expect. Writing every day exposes how often you’re wrong, how often an idea collapses on contact with itself. These tools make that visible early, when it’s cheap to correct. By the time something hits the site, it’s been argued with, drawn out, reframed, and sometimes abandoned. That’s why I can publish daily without feeling like I’m spraying nonsense into the world.

If you’re thinking about trying something like this, here’s my challenge. Don’t copy the schedule. Copy the ecosystem. Pick one intake practice, one organizing practice, one destabilizing practice, and one clarifying practice. See how they interact. Notice where they fail. Adjust.

Also, try new tools. I use Canva, One Note, and Word (and occasionally my whiteboard). That gives me art, bullet, free writing, and a place to put it together and polish. Some people would suggest ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for prompts, but I would be very cautious and aware they are very generic. PrompHero also works, it’s an actual library of prompts by category, so it’s less generic. For serious prompting, there’s Elicit, SciSpace, Paperpal, anc Consensus. These also serve as far more reliable research assistants than generic AI.

Try it the next time you get into an argument online and feel your blood pressure rise. Try it when a Threads post makes you want to reply immediately. Try it when you’re sitting in a coffee shop, notebook open, pretending to work. Armenian coffee helps, by the way. It’s strong enough to slow time. Miss Café in Seattle does it right. If you can’t get there, many a shop does a good Americano.

And if you’ve been doing something similar, I want to hear about it. What actually improved your quality and frequency. Where the methods broke down. What constraints you ran into. Writing every day isn’t heroic. It’s logistical. The trick isn’t discipline. It’s designing a system that makes thinking unavoidable and publishing survivable.

References

• Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. 1994.
• Carroll, Ryder. The Bullet Journal Method. 2018.
• Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way. 1992.
• celerykills.com. Selected essays, 2026.
• Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. 1986.
• King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. 2000.
• Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. 1973.
• Kleon, Austin. Steal Like an Artist. 2012.
• Kleon, Austin. Keep Going. 2019.
• Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art. 2002.
• Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit. 2012.
• Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. 2009.
• Zinsser, William. On Writing Well. 1976.
• Didion, Joan. “Why I Write.” 1976.