You write and you write one story, not knowing when you'll finish it, if ever, but knowing that once it's done you will finally hear the sound of one hand clapping. But when the moment comes, it's like a little death. Suddenly, you've got nothing left. And then you feel like eating something really good to celebrate the finality of something. But you know deep down that that won't fill you up and it won't complete the experience because the experience is inherently incompletable. Then you think, maybe sharing the experience with a friend will help, but that too turns out to be an illusory sense of self-enhancement. What do you do?
As I'm sitting here at Buzz Coffee on Beverly, I'm realizing there's nothing to do but to continue sitting.
"What about the rewrite?" my mind wants to know. But what I'm really thinking about is the end result.
Right action is only appropriate in the moment it's needed. What's the right action now?
Nothing is coming up, but I'm not as worried as I used to be in a similar situation.
10 minutes later:
I got an impulse to read an excerpt from Peter Brown's book and I came across the questioner saying "sometimes the words come together in just the right way..." and Peter answering, "my approach is if you throw enough words out, kind of like a million monkeys pounding on a million typewriters, sooner or later you'll say something meaningful..."
That pretty much answers my rewriting question.
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