A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Fifty

Each of the three pieces I wrote today was a bit of a struggle to get going, if I am honest.  That happens, as I have mentioned, and my answer is generally to just wait it out, and the results vary.  A lot of the time, if I am really stuck, I might try to force something out, often it winds up being a bit meta, with me writing about being stuck without much in terms of inspiration, and it feels a bit like I am working scales in a way.  All the aesthetic decisions are there, they just don't always have a lot of purpose behind them, and that is fine in that context.  Essentially, I am just forcing myself to do the work, and getting it done, and I am showing myself that I can and will do it even if inspiration never strikes.  This can often take pressure off, and that lack of pressure opens up creative thinking and inspiration.

Now, that is a fine thing for me to do, and I am likely to use that approach again many times in the future, but today I felt that I wanted to make myself do more than that in the work I am doing, and so I forced myself to begin with something that was not about writing.  In two cases, this worked into ideas I don't think I would have had at all, and the third was a sort of personal reminiscence, but one that I think works well in the poem.  It is not like a lot of the work that I have been doing, really, but I am very struck by it in some way.  I have to see what others think of it, honestly.

I have to wonder how I can force the work out like that, and what it might mean, but I think I am also realizing that the energy and output are habits I am able to build, and skills that I can develop.  I am in that process each day, and at this moment, I  want to be writing even more poems each day, so  I am likely to push for that.  If I find the quality is suffering, that is one thing, but I think it seems like the opposite is often true, that pushing myself to create is not only building my work in quantity but also improving it overall, a natural result of writing more.

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