I told myself I’d go to the 7.15 gym class, but then I couldn’t wake up at 6, at 6.15 and at 6.30 I made a deal with myself. I told myself that I could go to the 9.15 class which would give me time to get an hour’s writing done before my class.
This, I told myself, would actually set me up for a better writing day. With an hour’s thinking done before I got to class my thoughts would be percolating even as I exercised. A double win.
I have been able to get myself to my desk, but I haven’t been able to settle into my writing task. And as I sat, I suddenly understood something about myself. I thought: I’ve forgotten how to write. By which I meant that I’ve forgotten how to go through the actual physical process of doing the writing.
Then I realised something even more sobering: I haven’t actually taught myself to write. I’ve done a quick look back on the things I’ve finished, a very quick assessment: two novels, six shows, three Christmas letters, some essays, a few newsletters, countless blog posts. And what I see is an utterly scrappy process, and what I remember is my mind constantly berating itself for not doing better, for not having done better, for never truly being in the flow, feeling the words unfold.
As I type that thought, I realise it isn’t strictly true. That there have been moments when I have been in the flow, and those moments were primarily writing blog posts, short intense pieces that felt enormously satisfying in their execution.
The upshot of all this–and why I’m writing this as a blog post now–is that I feel like I have finally arrived at a certain moment I’ve been building to for about eighteen months. After all of the sifting and sorting through thoughts (some written on scraps of paper, some in dropbox folders, some rolling around in my mind); after all of the planning (physical folders with labels; virtual folders with labels; journals; notebooks); after all of the projecting (what if I do this, what happens if I do that); after all of this, I feel an emotional, physical and creative certainty. It is time to sit and write. I finally have a picture of myself in my head, sitting here, leaving here but always returning here to get things written.
And this is probably the only thing I’ve learn about how to write. That sooner or later (apparently later, much, much later in my case) there will be nothing left to do but to sit with a pen, a keyboard, a self-made pad of stapled paper, a document open on the screen, and a bunch of thoughts which require nothing more than to be written one by one, word by word, page by page. Find a thought, start from there and just keep going.