Free Refills

Regarding actually finally figuring out what I’ve been building at Free Refills, rather than just talking about it.

The obvious answers are these: Read everything I’ve published. Because I never really did anything useful with categories, use tags liberally to try to discover patterns. Once I’ve read everything published, go back and explore all the zero drafts. From there, start grouping pieces thematically and chronologically.

But the “figure out how to get very clear” from Wednesday exists, I think, because I want to allow the means to achieve clarity to be non-obvious, though hopefully not in the way that what I’ve been building here remains non-obvious (in that I’m nearly three years in and still don’t know exactly what it is).

I think my current frustration with my writing work and the role Free Refills plays in it stems substantially from essentially forgetting that at the start of this project, I gave myself full permission to not know what I was doing and, through that, welcome the possibility of happy accidents and surprise discoveries.

That I haven’t figured it out, that I’m struggling to maintain momentum, that I treat the writing like a job but don’t get paid for it–all of these have had me pretty down on myself. But I am right here going to suggest that maybe that’s not fair to me. Because irrespective of the ultimate success or failure of this endeavor, I believed the project contained within it the seeds of insight, and I have been a stubborn motherfucker and I have simply never given up.

Sure, it’s possible I’ve just been wrong and have refused to accept it. But I did–and do–feel like I went out on a limb with this project, and I’ve stuck with that belief, and so here I want to go against my usual self-excoriating tendencies and give myself a little high-five for being brave. I set out to battle giants. If they turned out to be nothing more than windmills, well, so be it. Call me a fool. But I also want to say this: there remains something brave and beautiful about refusing to simply see the world as everyone else declares it to be, and instead seeking something new.

Regarding this sentence from yesterday’s piece:

Time to figure out how to get very clear on what exactly that [what I am/have been building at Free Refills] has been.

Every time I’ve read it, part of me has rebelled. That “how to get very clear” part initially feels weaselly. I nearly changed it in every single draft I wrote. Isn’t it enough to say, “Time to figure out what exactly that has been?” But every time I go to change it, another part of me asserts that there’s actually a point that apparently obfuscating verbiage.

I did some exploring in a zero draft earlier this evening, and the zero draft has me pretty convinced there’s actually a reason for those words. I’ll make my way through the zero draft tomorrow and share what I learn.

“So what exactly do you write about?” seems like it should be a fairly easy question to answer. That I would struggle to come up with a simple answer and probably find it impossible to come up with a complete one suggests a fairly obvious place to start with respect to yesterday’s “Time to make some changes” statement. I said from the very start of Free Refills that I was building something here. Time to figure out how to get very clear on what exactly that has been.

So when I say to myself, “Did I actually publish the thing about how maybe I don’t realize I make choices from patterns of habitual unhappiness, or did I just zero-draft it? Did I maybe not finish the zero-draft? I can’t remember,” it kind of hints at a need to make some changes in how I structure my work.

A piece like that–about the way our habits can define us, and the challenge of changing them–is supposed to be a major piece, and I can’t remember if it’s done, in process, or barely even started.

Time to make some changes.

I had an interesting experience this evening. I was flipping through the pages of print-outs of my zero drafts from late summer through the fall, and I found a lot of interesting stuff that never made it to publication. I found myself marveling at where my head was back then–and that’s not that long ago.

The impending spring equinox, now about seven weeks away, marks the three-year anniversary of the first publication of the Free Refills project, as well as the initial public declaration of my 5,000-words-per-week quota. If we include everything I wrote during the winter of 2015 leading up to the start of my publishing practice, we’re probably talking about somewhere around 800,000 words of zero drafts.

I’ve gone through pretty much the entire FR project to this point flying by the seat of my pants. How much quality writing exists in the zero drafts that not only never made it to publication, but also has been completely forgotten?

A sad thing happened. And as I often do, I went to the writing to try to process. I got to a stopping point, and I checked in with myself, and I found that I didn’t feel better. “I guess I didn’t process,” I said.

Except.

It is natural that we don’t like to feel challenging emotions like sadness and anger and fear. They don’t feel good. Being happy is just so much more fun.

Usually, when we say, “I feel better,” we mean better as an adjective that modifies I: you’ve replaced the challenging emotion with one that’s more welcome. You’ve moved from angry towards calm, fearful towards safe, sad towards happy.

But it’s also possible to say, “I feel better,” and mean better as an adverb, modifying feel. You have moved away from numbness, and you are now more fully feeling what is there to be felt.

From that perspective, I realized that I did in fact feel better. Before I sat down to write, I had a sense that I felt sad. Afterwards, a gray, fatiguing sadness weighed me down. I may not have liked the feeling. But a sad thing happened, and after exploring it in the writing, I felt sad.

Trust the zero drafts and they will point you towards the truth.

Yesterday I wrote a piece entitled On Trusting the Zero Drafts, in which I spoke about … my publishing practice.

I seem to have been asserting, without noticing it, that because it has been made clear, again and again, that I simply need to trust what the zero drafts tell me, how they guide me, that somehow it also follows that I need to trust my publishing practice. But these are two different practices. The latter does not follow from the former.

A couple of ways I could keep my publishing promises when (a) I have no piece already scheduled and (b) the recent zero drafts are either pointing to finished pieces that are more expansive than I initially considered, or else I’m working on something that, by design, is more ambitious (e.g. writing for one of the books):

1. Blog (that hated word, but here apropos) about the daily process. This is essentially what I’ve done the last three days.

2. Publish directly from the zero drafts. I did this a couple of times earlier this year. I admit, I didn’t really love it.

I’m pretty sure I’ve published pieces in the past exploring each of these possibilities. I’m writing them out here again to see if any kind of different feeling arises around them.

What I’ve noticed so far is that the first option actually feels pretty expansive. Reflecting on the process as it happens seems to give me a nice boost of self-esteem (I feel like I’m saying to myself, “I’m doing good work”) and also offers me the feeling of generosity that arises when I’m writing and hope to have something to present to the world. (“Hey, there’s this cool thing I’m working on and I’d like you to see it.”)

The second option is a bit trickier. Just publishing from the zero drafts feels like an okay stop-gap. (“Hey, here’s tidbit from what I’m working on.”) But I have a vision that really gets my juices flowing. I imagine creating a process in which that the daily publishing offers some kind of “Here’s what I’m doing right now,” but at the same time I’m little-by-little assembling the finished piece elsewhere on the site. Were I doing that, then the the daily publishing would become something of a play-by-play of the piece under construction. I envision that this approach could be deeply elucidating to someone trying to create a more flowing technique to their own writing.