A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Thirty-Four

I expect that this will be a rather short entry, as I am quite tired, and was actually hoping to get to bed early.  Ah, well, the best laid plans, as is often said...

Anyhow, I feel that my writing is going well, though I am still adjusting to the shift that I feel in my work recently.  This is a change in process as much as content, and I think that it is truly the process related qualities about which I am uneasy.  In some ways, it is a matter of my feeling that this new work, which is often far more spontaneous, is not real work because it doesn't feel like I am taking the same time to craft it.

The truth is, that's an illusion.  The time I take in advance considering an idea is not time actually writing, and I don't tend to spend much more time on a poem I have considered than on these new poems.  In writing these new, less planned poems, I am doing less that feels like "work" in some sense.  I mean, I am writing the piece without the same hindrance of preconception, but instead letting the words and ideas flow out.  Of course, I still edit the work, but the process of the creation is very different, and I need to be more comfortable recognizing it as a valid and equal effort.

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