This morning I woke up at 5:45 and worked from 6 until about 8:45.
It was another good morning. I stopped when it got hard. But the work itself was very manual. It was craftsmanship—revising and cutting two sections into something good enough. When I finished the first section, I realized it fit better at the end of the chapter, so I moved it to the unwritten conclusion.
Then I turned to revising the second section, which I’d written three times in four rambling paragraphs. I cut it down to two, half the words, and nothing repeated.
Tomorrow I will move on to the next section of the chapter. Again, I will rewrite, combine, shorten, and polish. Later I’ll worry about its order and structure.
The work felt like knitting sentences or manual labor. I didn’t use tools. Just the keyboard.
Does it work? No. Change it. Is it better? Maybe. Keep going.
Changes so fast they’re almost automatic, made with hands on the keyboard. I write until I’m tired, and a piece feels finished. It is temporarily done, but only until the next time. Tomorrow, I will rework something else.
There was a moment that I felt overwhelmed. I had started a new piece, but didn’t know where it was going. I kept cutting, revising, deleting, adjusting, and fiddling. I fiddled with the text, and as I fiddled, I found my point and finished the edits.
Writing can sometimes just be the accumulation of words and slight changes, repeated, over and over.
If you asked me today and yesterday where I was going, what my point was, I couldn’t tell you. If you asked me today, I still couldn’t. But I know I’m closer. I know that by the end of this morning, I will have arrived somewhere. A place from which I can start again tomorrow.
The work is craft work. Detailed work. Steady work.…