Free Refills

In the evening--after a pleasant, sunny afternoon and mint juleps and watching the Kentucky Derby (we each picked a horse and let the TV's hype build up our excitement as we took joy in the women's big hats and the men's pastels there at the bar and we cheered for our horses and neither of our horses won) and we had two delicious and one otherworldly beer at a local brewery--the conversation turned to my work, and I said to Dawn, "I don't know if this is clear to other people yet, but I'm building something with this writing."

"Wait," perhaps you are saying. "This guy made up the rules he's chosen to operate under. And now he's saying that he's going to finesse them for a week? He's saying he's going to keep the letter of his laws but, by so saying, is admitting that he's not keeping their spirit?

Well...kinda. I don't like admitting that I've hit an impasse. But without making a shift in my approach, I've hit the limits of what my current technique is going to offer me (and you, Gentle Reader).

And remember that time when I said, "I've chosen to publish the struggle to not attach to the struggle?" Well, here ya go. I need a little space to set up some room to evolve.

In that same piece I said, "By freeing myself to let hard things be hard, I don't have to make them harder." There seems to be some implicit advice to myself in there. It's good advice. I'm going to follow it.

(And in the meantime, don't be so judgmental. I mean, damn.)

I spent the whole weekend considering the implications of Friday's piece. If I'm right that "clutter"--I'm using that word as shorthand for the broadest possible array of things that pile up in our lives--functions as a constant and constantly growing energy block/drain, then dealing with that stuff becomes imperative, doesn't it?

As pertains to the work I'm doing here and with my writing in general, it becomes pretty clear that I need to move toward a more sustainable way of publishing and I need to do it now. As a result, my pieces here this week are going to be shorter than I've tended to publish. I'm going to continue my drafting and publishing schedule, but beyond that, I'm going to make as much room as possible to play with some new techniques and processes this week, in the hopes of being able to roll them out by next week.

Watch this space.

If publishing is something I have struggled to do in the past (and boy that's putting it mildly), then it's no surprise that a publishing practice is going to push me out of my comfort zone. It should. Indeed, it's meant to. When circumstances last summer demanded that I push outside my comfort zone, in all areas of my life, things began rapidly to improve. Not a coincidence.

(Of course, sometimes I felt like my whole identity was dissolving. Not a coincidence, either.)

At the same time, a sustainable practice requires a careful attention to energy flow. In simple terms, if you treat your energy carelessly, you'll burn yourself out.

From that perspective, here's what I notice about my daily writing practice:

I haven't been having any problems getting the drafting done. This week, I finished my 5000 z.d. words by Tuesday. Regarding my daily publishing practice, I haven't missed a day yet, and won't, but it's taking more energy than it should. It's burning me out. I can feel it.

So the move has to be to improving that situation. In short, I need to practice publishing while expending less energy to do so. To that end, it's been a goal of mine for weeks to establish some sort of queuing system. I can't always be flying by the seat of my pants.

A few days ago it occurred to me: maybe I'm having some sort of resistance to that idea. Because not only have I not done any queuing, I haven't gotten anywhere close to doing it.

Remember when I said that the stuck energy of clutter increases over time because the simple awareness of, "Shit, I haven't dealt with that yet," pulls more energy into the stuckness? If I'm aiming to practice a change in my approach to publishing, by not doing so, I am allowing the idea to develop into a kind of mental clutter. On top of that, because I am spending so much effort just getting my daily publishing done, I am also not moving forward with other important projects, which means that they too are piling up.

Therefore every day that I don't move forward on a technique I believe I should be practicing, I am doubly decreasing my potential effectiveness. A certain portion of my daily energy is getting sucked into the mental clutter I'm carrying with me around these various projects. And the ultimate process of dealing with these projects becomes harder because the more energy that gets stuck in those piles, the more energy required to break through the logjam.

And thus the energy leak I'm dealing with becomes clear.

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.

In yesterday's piece I made an assertion that had me tilting my head asking, "Is this true?" By today it was clear that it didn't hold up to scrutiny. I had written, "The daily struggle to publish is getting worse, not better. That's a clear sign that I'm not on the right path."

I can't let myself get away with as lazy a conclusion as that.

If change were as easy as identifying a problem area and setting an intention, everyone would do it. But it's not that easy. Inertia is a bitch. It's well worth remembering that whatever patterns of stuckness we might be struggling under, they arose because in some way they served us. Our patterns speak in tones of calming self-assurance. They say, "Here is a comfortable place for my sense of self to reside."

The choice to make a change threatens parts of our identity.

So I absolutely have to be asking if the struggle to publish reflects a flaw in my approach, as I previously asserted, or if it's my ego feeling threatened by the work I'm doing. #Expansion is all well and good, but if there wasn't some payoff in staying contracted, I wouldn't have done it all these years.

If I'm not writing blogs, what am I writing?

Among the zero drafts I've written since the winter solstice--all written, let's remember, explicitly for eventual publication--there are many thousands of words that I haven't touched for pieces here. Some of those reasons are thematic (just how much am I ready to bare my soul?) but many are formal, and honestly, I think the latter is more critical. (After all, nothing in my rules said, "Hey, keep all your writings to topics x, y and z.") Those unused pieces have tended to be in-depth explorations of complicated forces in my life, and they follow a certain linearity of logic that isn't easily carved down to the two-hundred- to five-hundred-word length piece that my intuition is generally guiding me to publish here on Free Refills.

I think it's clear now that there are some limitations to the experiment as I have conducted it so far. The rules I'm operating under are not leading me in the right direction. The daily struggle to publish is getting worse, not better. That's a clear sign that I'm not on the right path. My daily zero-drafting is guiding me neither to the long-form writing that certain topics require, nor at all comfortably toward the type of piece that feels right to publish here. My zero-drafting technique has me kind of splitting the difference. And I see now that has to change.

I knew I hated the word blog, but I didn't realize I wasn't blogging until I wrote the zero draft that became This Is Not a Blog. Indeed, perhaps "realize" is the wrong word. Perhaps that was the moment I ceased blogging.

I see the full realization of that change in the language I use. At some point I stopped speaking of "posts" or "posting." I refer to the writings as "pieces." The verb I use is "publish."

Words have energy. Treat what you're doing with respect and it will return respect to you. "Post?" You post a "Roommate Wanted" or "Lost Cat" flier on the bulletin board at the coffeeshop. You post an ad on Craigslist. You post something about your weekend on Facebook. But don't post your writing. Publish it.

Today I did things a little differently. I was facing the usual blank buffer, watching the cursor in the upper-left blink blink blink. I knew what I was going to write about, but how was I going to start? Could I do this with less struggle than usual? How was I going to handle the moment of transition?

This is always the hardest moment: facing that blank page. How do you make that first mark? Everything follows from there, doesn't it, and so you have to make a decision and start, and if you start wrong...

...but that's the thing. I was going to zero-draft. So there was no wrong. So then...

So I wrote as my first paragraph, "Today I am going to write about today. About the deep insomnia of last night and what that tells me. How my energy has been today. How I cleaned up a little clutter, and why that mattered. About strapping the guitar on, YES YES YES." And then I went from there. 1000+ words fell out with no trouble.

Publishable? Not immediately, that's for sure. But by experimenting with handling the transition by simply telling myself what I was going to write, I found myself paying more attention than usual. How did it feel? It felt like a very crude zero draft. How am I going to make this into something publishable? I don't know. But there were a few moments--individual sentences--when what I was saying and how I was saying it seemed to come together such that I would be able to pull those pieces out and run from there. Here are the seeds. That's how it felt.

Will it actually work that way? I don't know. This was an experiment, and I won't know how well it worked until I go through more of the process of editing, of trying to make the thing into an actual piece.

But that transition worked well. I was writing.

---

During drafting this afternoon I wrote this as my final paragraph:

It's Friday afternoon and there's a quality to the noise here in the coffee shop. The weather is threatening thunderstorm and you never know how much of what you're experiencing comes from your environment (some, probably) but at the same time I am not the only one counting down the minutes until the workweek is done. That's what I think I hear in the tenor of the buzz of conversation. Louder than usual, more jagged than usual. We are all of us tired, perhaps.

Tired oh yes I'm tired. It is now early Friday evening and once I click "Publish," I get to transition into my weekend. I have no plans, no responsibilities, and no one to answer to: Introvert Heaven.

Today I kept flipping through the various zero drafts in which I'd written about transitions, looking for the hook for today's piece. I wasn't seeing anything obvious, and I was feeling the pressure of getting the piece written and published (because I'm not breaking that promise, oh no), and so I decided instead to dive into working on today's zero draft, aiming to explore what it was that was getting in the way. Once I got into the writing I could let myself feel the writing and what the writing was bringing up, and I started to recognize that part of the challenge of the transition into writing is that writing carries within it a whole array of complex emotional valences far beyond "the physical act of organizing letters into words into sentences so as to talk about something." I began to notice that the challenge of making that transition is energetically in many ways similar to the challenge of dealing with clutter, which is another something that I've struggled with and have been trying to deal with, and I started writing about how piles of clutter aren't just the obvious stuck energy that pile implies, that actually, as long as you remain aware of that pile, as long as it continues to impinge on your consciousness, then it is drawing in energy via the recognition that, "Shit, that pile is still there," which means that the stuck energy contained in clutter actually increases over time. (And woe be unto you if you manage, one way or another, to stop noticing it, for at the point that it ceases to enter your awareness you have suddenly crossed the boundary that leads to "hoarder.") When I started to direct that realization back toward the challenge of starting writing every day, and how much emotional stuff it seems to bring up again and again and again, I began to feel a particular frisson of recognition, that of approaching the boundary of writing about something very interesting indeed.

And so this here right now is a teaser (for you and for me as well) of some I think exciting and important stuff to come.