A Spork in the Road

Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality; this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I’m rereading The Writing Life, which profoundly affected me when I first read it almost a decade ago, and which is affecting me even more profoundly this time around.

I have a motto: “To go faster, slow down.” This applies in coding software, and in typing, and in making sandwiches, and in learning a language. And in writing.

Dillard is reminding me of this. I’ve been trying to write my novel too fast; I’ve been aiming for the goal of Having a Novel. But it doesn’t matter if I have a novel if it’s not a novel worth having.

I have a lot of writing to do, and I think it will go better if I accept–right now–that much if not all of what I’m writing this year will eventually get thrown away.

Sometimes the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling again the blessed relief that exalted him when the words first appeared–relief that he was writing anything at all.

Writers worry. We worry about what we’re going to write, what we just wrote, what we wish we had written. We worry we’ll write badly; we worry more that we won’t write at all.

As in everything, worry is the ego’s most effective method of preventing us from actually doing anything.

As in everything, the trick is to accept the worry and then duck past it and write anyway. Let the worry sit and vibrate in its corner. Feed it peanuts and then ignore it for an hour while you get some writing done.