Midweek Muse: All that remains

I have a confession to make: I have not written in a while. Well, sure, I have put words down and moved them around. But I haven’t done the kind of writing that is only writing, without thinking, without editing, with permission to just go.

There has been too much lately of managing the words already written, from editing to posting to publishing to marketing. Too much explaining what my words mean. Too much of reading other peoples’ words.

And it’s all good, really. It’s all words, and that’s what I do. But it doesn’t feel like it is all creating. I don’t feel that I am tapping the untapped well. I don’t have that genuine sense of true creative work.

Lately it’s more like an endless pushing around of concepts. I suppose I am a bully of sorts, bullying words into submission; manipulating sentences into meaning; stubbornly refusing to come to a full stop.

But in that sentence I do stop and realize: this, too, is a kind of creativity. The stubborn will to keep on may not be so much of a “just go” as a “don’t stop.” And when I look back in a year’s time (or three months, or next week) on what I produced, I will not be looking at how I felt while writing.

I will look at all that remains: the words. So this too – this unstoppable stubborn word wrangling – is creative work.

I give myself that much. This too is writing. I will not allow how I feel in the moment to say otherwise.

Full stop.

 

Related Links:

• Enemies of the Art Part 8–Being a Starter Not a Finisher (Kristen Lamb)
• Actually, it goes the other way (Seth Godin)