Some mornings, I wake up and there’s mud in my head. It’s the morning that’s set aside for a good bit of writing. But there’s mud and fog in there. I’ve got the time, I’ve got a pot of tea, I’ve got my notecards out, ready to write. But I sit down to the notecards, and the gears are grinding slow. The little gray cells, as Hercule Poirot says, they are sluggish. So what do you do?
You write. You do it anyway, and it may well be crap. Or maybe that part of your brain that’s still asleep will tether down into your subconscious and connect in to the something brilliant that I’ve been looking for, the Aha that would help me roll along.
Maybe not. But either way you slice it, now is time for writing. So I take a quick chastening from Annie Dillard, and get back to it.
“Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book. Complex stories, essays, and poems have this problem, too- the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that. He finds ways to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues, he cantilevers the whole narrative out into thin air, and it holds. And if it can be done, then he can do it, and only he. For there is nothing in the material for this book that suggests to anyone but him alone its possibilities for meaning and feeling.
-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p. 72.
