To-do

I’m not ready to write just yet; the sun is in the wrong place, the coffee is too hot, my sweater is too scratchy. I’ll take any excuse I can get to avoid sitting down and bang my head against a block of text that refuses to figure itself out.

That’s why I like what Marcin has to say in his latest newsletter:

What helps facing an empty page is a reminder you’ve been there before and survived. What helps with writing and rewriting is the embarrassing notion that you can button mash yourself into greatness. You have no idea how often I kept moving things around and arrived at a perfect flow not through careful thinking, but by brute labour that resulted in a happy accident. Since it happened to me a few times, I now assume that this happens to other writers, too.

Marcin’s right. Brute force (and a good deadline) is the only way to make progress sometimes.