Today I did things a little differently. I was facing the usual blank buffer, watching the cursor in the upper-left blink blink blink. I knew what I was going to write about, but how was I going to start? Could I do this with less struggle than usual? How was I going to handle the moment of transition?
This is always the hardest moment: facing that blank page. How do you make that first mark? Everything follows from there, doesn't it, and so you have to make a decision and start, and if you start wrong...
...but that's the thing. I was going to zero-draft. So there was no wrong. So then...
So I wrote as my first paragraph, "Today I am going to write about today. About the deep insomnia of last night and what that tells me. How my energy has been today. How I cleaned up a little clutter, and why that mattered. About strapping the guitar on, YES YES YES." And then I went from there. 1000+ words fell out with no trouble.
Publishable? Not immediately, that's for sure. But by experimenting with handling the transition by simply telling myself what I was going to write, I found myself paying more attention than usual. How did it feel? It felt like a very crude zero draft. How am I going to make this into something publishable? I don't know. But there were a few moments--individual sentences--when what I was saying and how I was saying it seemed to come together such that I would be able to pull those pieces out and run from there. Here are the seeds. That's how it felt.
Will it actually work that way? I don't know. This was an experiment, and I won't know how well it worked until I go through more of the process of editing, of trying to make the thing into an actual piece.
But that transition worked well. I was writing.
During drafting this afternoon I wrote this as my final paragraph:
It's Friday afternoon and there's a quality to the noise here in the coffee shop. The weather is threatening thunderstorm and you never know how much of what you're experiencing comes from your environment (some, probably) but at the same time I am not the only one counting down the minutes until the workweek is done. That's what I think I hear in the tenor of the buzz of conversation. Louder than usual, more jagged than usual. We are all of us tired, perhaps.
Tired oh yes I'm tired. It is now early Friday evening and once I click "Publish," I get to transition into my weekend. I have no plans, no responsibilities, and no one to answer to: Introvert Heaven.