Each Day, Each Word

As I whittle away at the words I haven't written, I find a curiously familiar phenomenon developing. As I click each letter down, or scribble it in my knuckle-wearing longhand, as my spelling errors and plot variables increase, as this story begins to say something, I find that I am asking what I loved about it in the first place.

And the answer is nuance, essence, the joy of using words to mean something vague and specific, probably not really to anyone else but myself. But, most good things are slaughtered in their making, art included, and writing included in that. We are bound to read only the hilarious ghost of the original idea. And then, of course, to re-translate it into our minds into another fully fleshed idea maybe capable of existing on the same plane as the first.

So, while my word count increases, I must confess to a sin - the sin of losing sight of the journey.

I understand that this writing challenge exists almost expressly for that purpose – to whip a bunch of pansy day dreamers into shape and stop them from griping about how haaard it is to walk the trail (are we there yet??). I certainly am not going to drop my daily word count just so I can sip tea and visualize one scene for three hours before meticulously crafting a few paragraphs that I am really happy with.

But what I have written I already look forward to revising. When? When I have time. When I have time to bravely type or delete what I am in too much of a hurry for now. Ah. Of course. That time. The revision.

In writing more so than in life we can count on editing. Maybe that makes it addictive. And maybe, as in life, that is neither true nor false, vice or virtue. I believe that each word, each day, each step are remarkably similar. It is not content or form. It is not journey or destination. It is all, and it is all art.

So far, writing this month has improved my opinion of all books, and of all of us.

Word Count: 22,533