As I've published bits and pieces from my old zero drafts, and especially as I put up the excerpts from that old notebook over the past four days, I feel that in those older drafts I am seeing higher quality writing than what I've been doing recently.
In order to not make myself crazy, I need to treat this as a testable proposition and keep reading over the zero drafts and see what I think as I approach the present day.
So has my technique actually degraded over these past three years? This prospect genuinely scares me, for obvious reasons. But if that's the case, then what do I do about it? Because I have experienced, again and again, the value of trusting the zero drafts.
What occurs to me is that, if there has been a degradation of technique, it's not the fault of the zero draft process. It's that, because of my deadlines, I have tended to z.d. with most of my attention toward getting a piece out quickly rather than doing a pure zero draft. That is, all the zero drafts are to a certain extent first drafts, and first drafts and zero drafts are meant to do different things.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the course of the next several months as I deepen my primary focus toward larger-scale writing.