For me

I know I should be thinking up a better topic. The fact that so many days I just start putting down a bunch of words that enter my head at that particular moment may not be the best approach to make anything interesting. Is that supposed to make a difference? Who am I putting these words down for anyway? My entire approach to starting this was that I wanted to do what everyone said I needed to do to get better at writing. I needed to write. Write, write, write. Put the words down, get them out, stop editing as you go along and write, write, write.

I've been doing that. It may or may not be the best approach to getting any better. It certainly isn't any good for writing anything interesting. Words tumbling over more words, linked to even more words do not usually produce anything interesting. It might give you an idea for something that may become interesting but then you have to plow through all the many words to find the real idea.

I've done that already. I wrote an entire manuscript of words that I thought had some kind of interesting idea around it. It didn't. It's merely a first draft of a bunch of words that I strung together. And maybe that is what I needed to do. It's how you learn. You start out and do it and then, hopefully, you keep working on it. But you can't think that is where you stop. It isn't done. It never ends there. Never. Not for any writer. Don't fool yourself into thinking the first time you put those long string of words down that you are done. That is only breaking the very edge of the idea.

Yes, I know you can write your outlines, and plan your characterizations, and there are reams of pages of advice on how to get it done quickly and easily and avoid numerous re-writes. The fact is its more work even when you have done all that. It's more than you thought, even when you thought it was a lot. It's even more.

But right here in this space and all these words I put down have always been, from the beginning, a way to get me to write. I think of it as a run. Not a training run, or a sprint, or a long run, or an anything run. It's just getting up and doing something along the lines of what I want to do to keep me going. I want to keep going so I keep on doing it whether it counts or not. Sometimes it comes out better than other times. Sometimes not. But then, I'm putting these words down for no one. Except me.
TT