Yesterday I posed a question: does my continuing struggle to publish reflect a flaw in my approach, or is it instead my ego feeling threatened by the prospect of expansion and change?
It didn't take a lot of pondering to realize that the answer is probably both. The flaw is clear enough: having flipped again and again through all those printed pages of zero drafts, trying to find pieces that can be teased out from among them, I've earned the right to say that the technique is not leading me effectively to the goal of finding publishable pieces. Too much of what's there has met me with a shrug: "Dude, I don't know what you should do with me." The gap between the zero draft and even the seed for a publishable piece is substantial enough that the struggle of bridging that gap is becoming an energy drain.
But earlier today I reframed the question by asking, "What exactly is my current writing practice?" and from that perspective, I could clearly see the threat to my ego. There are two parts to my current practice: I am zero-drafting daily and I am publishing daily (the latter containing within it an editing and rewriting practice as well). I'm comfortable with zero-drafting; getting my weekly 5000 is pretty easy. And once I find the proper seed for a piece, I'm comfortable editing and rewriting; in many ways it's more directly satisfying than the initial drafting itself. But the actual act of publishing, of putting something out there every day no matter what--I can feel the discomfort in my body. Give that feeling voice and it speaks like this: "Ohmygod what if somebody reads it and hates it and says I'm a fraud and tells me what a horrible person I am and ohmygod what if they're right..."
But that self-talk isn't the threat to my ego's relaxed repose in my current patterns. I'm an expert in that kind of self-talk. I'm the gold medalist in the Olympics of Self-Diminishing Self-Talk. No, the threat to my ego is that, by publishing every day, I am hearing that whining, wheedling little voice and telling it: NO.