The more I write, the less I find myself writing true things. It should be the other way around -- that experience and practice of craft makes honesty flow more easily, and provides an varnished surface on which to place the singular moments brightening an otherwise murky reality.
But it doesn't seem to work that way.
When I write, the less I feel the terror of exposure, because it is something I do all the time. And more often than not, it turns out relatively well -- or at least not awful.
And that adequacy just engenders within me a sense of empowerment, but also apathy, because today offers no real exceptional reason to do my utmost, to prove that I am better than mediocre treatises on what I did yesterday.
I think this is to some degree -- or perhaps exactly -- how I, and I suspect most of us, live our lives. Without the assurance that I got through yesterday reasonably well, or at least survived it, I would likely find myself in perpetual anguish, like the tottering teen literally doing everything for the first time, and therefore pulling all my limited willpower into getting up that next day.
Oh god, that explains so much.
But I am always surprised when I can somehow pull out of me something good, something worth reading. And usually more surprised that on those exceptional occasions, I am writing something true.
But it doesn't seem to work that way.
When I write, the less I feel the terror of exposure, because it is something I do all the time. And more often than not, it turns out relatively well -- or at least not awful.
And that adequacy just engenders within me a sense of empowerment, but also apathy, because today offers no real exceptional reason to do my utmost, to prove that I am better than mediocre treatises on what I did yesterday.
I think this is to some degree -- or perhaps exactly -- how I, and I suspect most of us, live our lives. Without the assurance that I got through yesterday reasonably well, or at least survived it, I would likely find myself in perpetual anguish, like the tottering teen literally doing everything for the first time, and therefore pulling all my limited willpower into getting up that next day.
Oh god, that explains so much.
But I am always surprised when I can somehow pull out of me something good, something worth reading. And usually more surprised that on those exceptional occasions, I am writing something true.
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