For a variety of reasons, on Saturday I found myself needing to z.d. more than 2,500 words to reach my 5,000 for the week. I also found myself physically feeling really, really terrible. I recognized it as energetic in cause (I wasn't getting sick), but it hurt no less for that realization. I was in a bad place.
When I'm really struggling while zero-drafting, I just let the negative self-talk flow out of my fingers onto the screen along with everything else I'm writing. What follows here are excerpts of that negativity from Saturday. Since I started this z.d. practice back in the winter, I always said that the express intent was to publish what came out. Well, I never thought I'd follow through to quite this extent, but it emerged as important when I later read over the draft. I'll explain. But first:
I am basically typing here in order to punish myself for this week. Every single thing I write here is clearly getting thrown away. This is bullshit. I should just lie down.
And furthermore, by not doing just lying down, I am condemning my tomorrow to being even worse.
But how about this: if I don't do it, I am going to condemn myself for the failure in that way. Either way I am going to lose.
I cannot even express how much I am trying to run from this process. I'm less than 1000 words so far and I need to get to 2900 for the day and this sucks, it sucks, it sucks. I just want to lie down and escape.
I feel totally and completely physically shitty, just tired and my forearms hurt, and of course the writing is nearly impossible, I'm just typing, basically, in the assumption that failing to get to 5000 for the week is worse than typing utter crap to get there.
Every typo is making me cringe. Or want to bash the fucking computer. I feel tension through my upper body. I keep turning away from the screen, this feels so fucking bad. I keep wanting to run. How much longer before I can take a break?
I don't know, motherfucker. What are you trying to prove by all of this? That I'm a total fuckup? FUCK YOU.
Do you notice how, in this space right now, every annoyance is amplified beyond belief? I am fucking freaking out.
I am going to close this fucking buffer because this is so fucking awful and I am just typing to finish up words.
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME? WHY CAN'T I BE A FUCKING ADULT?
Pulled from their places in the draft and written out one after another, those sentences are awfully hard for me to read. Within the space of the draft itself, I can see that despite those outbursts I both succeeded to a reasonable degree in exploring what I initially set out to write, and also led myself to an important insight into just what was happening to cause the discomfort in the first place.
As I read over the draft now, the anguish of the moment is gone (and thank God for that--it was really unpleasant) and what's left, all things considered, is a piece of surprising quality.
In other words, all that negative talk was simply wrong.
Toward the end of the file, I wrote this:
It is better to do a very bad job than to break the promise to myself. That is much worse.
And that's almost true. The correct sentence should read:
It is better to feel like I'm doing a very bad job than to break the promise to myself. That is much worse.
Startling but inescapable conclusion: how you feel about the work as you're creating it has at most a weak correlation to the actual quality of the work.
So do the fucking work.