Earlier today, I sat down to write a couple of follow-up pieces to the writings I did last week about my experiences with the snowboard certification process. In the first piece, I wanted to talk more about the assertion I made in last Wednesday's piece, that part of the reason the process was more fun this time around was that I was bringing a very different energy to the experience. In the second piece, I wanted to follow up on what I wrote Thursday and Friday, that a substantial reason that the whole group found the experience so demoralizing is that the process itself has struggle built into it.
The first piece seemed simple, maybe three paragraphs at the most. The second seemed a little but not much more involved. I thought I could zero-draft both of them in a short period and quickly get them into revisions and then published.
I'm now 2,200 words into zero-drafting around these ideas, and I'm not quite done with exploring the first, and I'm just starting to really touch on the second.
I notice this: that the conception of the piece and what the piece really wants to be are two different things. Trusting the zero draft means sitting with the process and allowing the second to reveal itself, irrespective of any initial conceptualization.