I’ve started this post four different times and each time, I deleted everything I wrote. Nothing got far, only three or so paragraphs each time, but start after start after start just wasn’t working. They were attempts at putting together a moment from my day into a Concept that included a Story and hit at an Idea. Those things are all well and good, and great writing needs all of that. I’ve taken the courses, I’ve read the textbooks, I learned how to put together a good piece.
To sit and write a Concept that follows a Story that hits on a central Idea just doesn’t feel like what I’m going for on this blog. Not on the whole. They don’t seem to flow as well for me as these short ramblings do. They don’t feel as fun, either. I like rambling into the void, taking the writing energy for whatever it is day-to-day. I like seeing what comes from each day. It makes these feel more authentic to me, even if they don’t say much.
I spent a lot of years feeling like the things I wrote down needed to be perfect. That impression is hard to shake, even still. I do want to write well, I do want to write things I am proud of. But, I also want to write things that are real. There is a balance to strike in all of that. It’s part of the craft, and is one of the more exciting parts of the craft, in my opinion.
Right now, that balance looks like putting effort into other projects. I focus on making those good—a novel I am working on, and the beginning stages of a memoir, mostly. I care a lot about those projects and that care looks like intentional and careful work.
I care about this project, too, but in a different way. The way to make it good enough, for me, is to make it real. I don’t need this blog to have readers, I don’t need to be writing the best content on the internet, I just need to be writing consistently. I need to be practicing putting sentences together and doing so regularly. I want to practice taking a seedling of an idea and turning it into something with at least some semblance of Direction and some amount of a Point. I want to practice writing without the pressure to think hard on every word.
The monthly series are the most success I’ve had with this. I write a lot here about what I’m learning about how I work. This blog has been instrumental in helping me uncover a lot of that. They’ve also helped me to dust off some of the cobwebs from my brain and allow myself to learn to tap into a “writing zone”. When I open the page to write these, I let myself turn off my brain a little bit and just see what comes from it. I’ve found an ease in writing these that I haven’t had in writing anything in a long time. I think it’s a little bit because I’m writing absolutley whatever, with no pressure for it to be grandiose, or specific, or detailed, or perfect, or comprehensive.
Often, I writ something built from a single thought I had for half a second during the day. These posts are not comprehensive overviews of what my days and weeks and months look like. They focus on whatever thought interested me most in that moment, whatever threat popped out that I felt compelled to follow. It feels so fun, it feels so easy, and it makes me feel like my writing life has a lot of good things in store.