[2022-06-17] Finished crap can be edited
A friend asked me recently whether I have a roster of Jenesis posts in various states of readiness to publish on any given day.
"Nope," I said. While I do maintain a list of story ideas that sometimes serves as inspiration, I compose most posts from scratch when I sit down to reflect on my day at 8:00 PM.
In the first months of writing this blog, I would often draft in the morning or early afternoon, particularly when I was recovering from cancer treatment and spending the day on my couch. But as I got past active treatment and started feeling more energetic, I began to pursue other activities and projects during the day, pushing my writing to the evening.
Many nights, I have no idea what I'm going to write about when I put fingers to keyboard. On such occasions, I take a few moments to recall what I did or thought or felt that day, and hope that some worthwhile topic will present itself. Sometimes, I'll start a post, then restart it multiple times, then abandon it because I'm not sure where to take my fledgling idea. The final product belies the amount of effort that goes into producing just a few hundred words.
As I thought about this challenge tonight, I remembered what writer Margarita Gakis says: "Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn't write!"
Similarly, author Margaret Stones says: "The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written."
Reading those words this evening was the inspiration I needed to produce a first draft, which I could then refine.
Another friend asked me recently when I'll stop writing Jenesis. I considered the question for a moment, then said, "I'll know when it's time." But I'm not there yet.
I believe, as author Barbara Ueland says, that writing is "an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had." Many times, those feelings or truths resonate with at least a few Jenesis readers. And that makes the hard work of writing all the more worthwhile.
