A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-One-Hundred-And-Forty-Five

I pushed myself to get to work tonight, and I did get started at a more reasonable point in the evening.  When I found myself distracted, after a bit of work, I took a moment but then just pushed myself to go back to work.  I wound up writing a poem about the fact that I was having trouble keeping to my work, which may not be the greatest thing I have ever come up with, but the fact that I was able to use even that to get myself back in gear was liberating.  It reminded me, in that moment, that there is always something to write about, even if it is not anything more than just a fleeting moment, and that I can even confront many of the problems I'm having with the work through the work itself.  It also was important in terms of giving myself the permission to just go with it, to accept that whatever I chose to write about in that moment was fine.  It takes a lot of the pressure off when I know I don't have anything to live up to.  I mean, sure it wasn't a great poem, or I don't think so anyway, but so what?  Most of what I write will always be relatively bad.  I don't mean that in a disparaging way, but in a sort of statistical sense.  If I write one hundred poems, a certain percentage may be exceptional, but many others will not meet that standard, just as a matter of course.  Even more, a poem can start out as one thing and be revised into something more, something beautiful.  Without accepting the bad poems when they come, I wouldn't be able to even get to the good poems because I probably would not be writing at all.  I can't say that this is the solution and I will always be able to get myself into gear when I want to, but I know that it does help, that it seems to be a worthwhile strategy for keeping on track when I find myself drifting away from my writing when I have work I want to complete.

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