When Commitments Lose Steam & Other Stories
This is draft #6: the creative mind enters the Groan Zone.
The same questions visit me later, and later during the week. We now work past our deadlines, the story we drag to form, still half-formed. The questions remain, the blank sheet still invites something between an overwhelming scatter of possibilities, and an emptying trove of fast discarded ideas.
It is difficult to focus attention on a topic at the last minute. And sometimes a week to lock down 20 minutes of writing buries plan after plan to write something of a red herring, something “good”, an oracle of our high priestess Self-Criticism.
My maverick ways of turning out a piece of thought at right angles to the last is showing signs of weariness. Strangely, this project is my tired partner: the inertia of inhaling the new is fading away, but like a faithful keeper, it stays with me through the varied studies, work, people, occasions of the past six weeks. The way a picket fence lines in even brackets, steady to keep measure and bound the time of life’s erratic streamers of activity. The Shitty First Draft is a strange metronome, a timepost for events.
I end this draft with thoughts which refuse silence:
- How is it that when given more, it deepens our wants?
- There seems to be three dimensions of determining what we can know about ourselves: the one we decide within ourselves, the relative (and varied) value we derive from the opinion of others, and the absolute (sometimes elusive, controversial) standard which belong to tradition(s).
- How early on in life should we learn to give names to complex emotions and experiences?
- The analytical mind applied to human relationships is like money to man: a useful servant, but tyrannical master.
