Greeting, writers—
In my ongoing battle against the quicksand, muck, etc. of literary production, there are good days and there are bad days. Yesterday: good. Today: wretched. Not only can I not write, I can barely even type. You should’ve seen how many times it took me to get the word “pseudonymously” right in the really long Substack I wrote—and then, after rereading, totally scrapped due to the wispy ghost of a decade-old NDA. All that backspacing for nothing!
But! Onwards, upwards, blah blah blah.
I found this quote from Aimee Bender, with which I agree wholeheartedly:
If I write something that I’m happy about, it means the language is clicking in some way that will sustain me for weeks. Sometimes, one good paragraph can keep me going through weeks of bad paragraphs, all the writing that feels like walking through sludge.
Okay, not entirely wholeheartedly, because I’m not going to be sustained for weeks. But a day or two, sure.
“Write a little bit every day, without hope and without despair,” says Isak Dinesen, which is abostely (leaving that there as an example of how badly I’m tyrping typing today) absolutely excellent advice if you can manage to take it.
The problem is that when the writing is going really well, it’s impossible not to hope, desperately, that it might continue.
Every once in while, a writer will have an hour, a day, even an entire week (lucky soul!) in which ideas and images come with such ease and frequency it feels like there’s a direct line from their puny human fingers right up to the endless, astonishing cosmos. There’s no need to think, or dither, or decide; there is only the job of typing.
Is what they’re writing actually good? It doesn’t even matter. It’s coming from a place of wonder and awe, and it feels great.
That’s what sustains me, actually—not the “one good paragraph,” but that particular experience, which I’ve had many times by now, even though it makes up approximately %.001 percent of time I spend writing. I chase it like my uncle used to chase tornadoes on the plains of Iowa: with hope and fear and awe.
Of course, unlike with a tornado, there’s no advance warning for that otherworldly creative force. You just have to show up and hope you get knocked sideways.
Emily
Oh... I can SO relate to this! One day work mentally and physically flows, the next.... not.