This was one of those days--weeks, really--when there are so many errands and mini-tasks to carry out, I start to feel like a human pinball. It sets in the fifth time I have to leave the house on a quick shopping trip or to pick up the kid, or take him somewhere; or the eleventh time I have to run up the stairs to get something. This rabbit-like activity is not at all conducive to writing; it defeats it, more often than not.
Writing requires: a room (with a decent desk and chair and your favorite writing tool--or in desperate circumstances, at least the writing tool); an underlying boundless desire to write that never goes away, plus, at any given moment, a constant itch to write that one specific thing...and finally, time. Wonderful, magnificent time.
I did manage to squeeze in about forty-five minutes of writing just before picking up my son from school. Attacked a short-short story I'd begun months earlier--mashed it up, re-shaped it, started to feel the form of it, but also, doubted more and more that any of it was any good--and the time quickly vanished, leaving me with a half-chewed story on my hands and a sick feeling of my own ineptitude.
The fourth thing that writing requires, then, is a sort of zen-like sense of timelessness. None of us has time, and yet, there is all the time in the world...hold those two thoughts in your head, and the explosive energy created will blast through the human-pinball mind (or "monkey mind" as others have phrased it), making way for the true writer's mind that cuts like a diamond, right to the heart of the matter. That's the hope, anyway; I rarely achieve anything as wonderful as that.
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