diamonds from ash

as i write these words, it is the eighth consecutive day i have made progress in writing.

i don’t know how long it’s been since i’ve done this. in fact, it may very well be the first time; even when i was back in school i generally wasn’t writing on the weekends, barring reports or projects, and i certainly wasn’t doing it for my own pleasure.

yet i’ve been working on a couple different stories – original and fan fiction both – and the line has continued unbroken through up to this point. and it is a wonderful feeling that i want nothing more than to continue, as long as i can.

it’s not about the number. to hell with the number! i don’t need a damned streak counter or leaderboard or any of that shit. i don’t need some auto-tracker recording what could be anything, or nothing, or gibberish, like lorem ipsum dolor shit. i’m not running a word or character or page count (or at least not actively looking at it).

the point is not that i’m hitting an arbitrary threshold of ‘content’. the point is that i am creating, and making progress on the thing i am creating.

earlier (not here), i posted the following:

once the brain gets re-geared for constant creation, just guiding the river’s flow a bit is a lot easier than trying to drive a convoy of water trucks somewhere and dump them all out to create a new river out of nothing

i cannot possibly stress this enough. the more you do something, the easier it is to do.

it sounds trite, but there are a lot of little corollary observations that come along with that; like, the more you do something and want to keep doing it, the more obvious the little pain points and frustrations in the process become. so the more you work at a task, the easier it becomes to make it easier for yourself to do. and some of that refinement is (arguably) done subconsciously, without you ever realizing it’s happening. because your brain is a marvelous and wonderful thing, even if it can get pretty fucked up sometimes.

there’s parts of my writing that i don’t like (for my own reasons, notably, not someone else’s!) but in order to fix them i need to expose them. and to expose them i simply need to write more – just do more. quality will naturally arise out of quantity, not because there’s a physical or statistical law that demands it be so, but because your human intellect is guiding the selection process. your artistic sense knows where it doesn’t feel right, where it doesn’t look or sound or smell or taste right; if you didn’t have this sense, you wouldn’t care about improving. just do more, and you’ll grasp the issue(s) in time.

even if you don’t have the refined vocabulary to express precisely what’s wrong with your art to someone else, it doesn’t matter. if you’re not a teacher or instructor who’s trying to communicate that, then don’t worry about it. as long as you’re doing it for yourself, what feels correct or incorrect to you is what matters, not the words you use.

literally just do more. the more you do the easier it gets, the more natural it becomes. then, when you want to create something specific, to really paint the image you hold in your mind’s eye – it’s so, so much easier than trying to begin from a cold start. it is almost laughably easy by comparison. not all the time, sure; but without the practice, without the body of work, trying to create from a dead stop is akin to looking up at a five-story brick wall and telling yourself you have to barehand climb it.

it’s day 8 and honestly, i’m not where i want to be. i’m not anywhere close. but i’m a hell of a lot closer than i was eight days ago when i hadn’t seriously written fiction in weeks, months, however long it was. it’s not easy, but it’s getting easier. smoother, more natural, with every paragraph, every sentence, every word.

the tide is rising and i’m gonna let it carry me all the way out there.