I’m sitting in the wine bar editing some essays for a new writing gig I can’t talk about yet. It’s exciting, but maddeningly filled with red tape, so I am practicing a significant amount of patience. Humility, patience, and submission are not everybody’s favorite topics to discuss or experience, yet I seem to be living in the midst of all three. I would rather break the rules and defy the Institution.
I’m also blessed and excited to have found a lovely writing partner. We are friends already, but decided to set aside some time regularly to talk specifically about our writing projects and the difficulty of maintaining a writer’s life amidst parenting, marriage, homeschooling, and the like. I have found her to be a great encouragement, and filled with very helpful and specific feedback.
In the past few weeks as I’ve read some amazing essays by amazing writers, I again felt a twinge of jealousy that I’m not that good. I stewed over this for awhile, and then was able to let it go at the realization that I have great potential to be that good given enough time to form a coherent thought.
Much of what I write is good, but it could be great. I often cringe when I hit the Publish button, knowing there is a much better word or phrase in me, if I could just remember where I last left my brain. Blogging has extracted The Draft from me – something I could never wrap my head around. I’ve spent many hours sitting staring at a computer (or typewriter, back in the day), waiting for just the right thing to hit me, that one thing that was worthy of taking up space on the page. I was terrible at writing papers in college, and almost flunked a class because I couldn’t bring myself to put words to paper.
Blogging has given me license to write the shitty first draft, in all its bare imperfection, and I was reminded that this is just the right place for me to be right now with two small children at home. So once again I have folded up my impatience and tucked it back into my pocket.
[I am now forcing myself to hit the Publish button, despite the crazy punctuation and incoherent thoughts: “sitting staring”??? Really, there is a much better way of saying this, I’m sure.]