Cold Start

Every time I take a break from daily writing, I’m reminded of that concert pianist (it might have been Liszt) who said “if I skip practice for a day, I know it; after two days, my wife knows it; after three, the public knows it.” As far as performance goes, writing is much more forgiving than music. Ideally, the “public” should never know you’ve taken time off, because you will have edited out all your mistakes before the “performance” even reaches their judgment. Every line in this paragraph, for example, has been rewritten several times; more times than I can count.

I hope my struggle to make sense this morning is no longer evident in these lines. But when I take a week off, boy do I ever feel it. Just to write something as flimsy as this post, I have to return to absolute basics, and sit alone at a table with pen, paper, and coffee. Sometimes I put on some ambient music; a favorite of late has been Robert Rich’s 3-disc live performance, Humidity.

Doing all that forces me to focus, of course. But equally important is the heightened sense of engagement I feel when I physically draw my words out on a piece of paper. After a while — five minutes, an hour — I feel fully engaged and I have to switch to a text editor because I’m thinking more quickly than I can handwrite.

There’s an interesting thing I’ve discovered about making this switch: if I increase the font size so that the letters are about a centimeter high, I can sustain that same sense of purely physical engagement with the lines. Why should that be? My guess is that the letters are so huge, my brain gets tricked into perceiving my edits and additions as being the same kind of physical manipulations that are entailed by paper and pen.

Anyway, I’ve returned to daily writing with this post. Fall is always a productive season for me, and I’ve got quite the interesting set of projects lined up for the next month or so; I’m even planning to do NaNoWriMo again this year, about which more later. The next five weeks should be exhilaratingly busy. I’m looking forward to it.

posted: 08 October 20
under: Open Folio