Writing comes in bursts of anxiety, like those pangs of mortality that strike us every time someone known to us dies. What if it is me the next time? Gee I’d better write it all down for my progeny before its too late. But the images and experiences that accumulate and get stored in this hard drive I call my consciousness is a vast territory to be mined. I am not sure I can write it all down, at least not in this lifetime. That is why “writer’s block” doesn’t mean much to me. Writer’s block occurs when the writer and the editor start off on the same foot at the same time (this will be the subject of one of my later posts).
The rush to write creates its own excellence ( by page six I am on a roll) and its own garbage ( by page 10, its pretty much a regurgitation of an old tape somewhere; the cliches abound and the drama sags). I don’t think I will ever enter a 3•day novel writing contest for that reason.
My hope is that one day (before that mortality thing comes up with my number) I will be able to collect these anxious bursts of writing and sift through them to leave behind a few gems from amidst the flotsam of my life’s experiences.