Today’s bus sketch.
Okay, so I’m just starting a quick sentence to note down that I don’t feel like I have anything to write about today.
My mind keeps coming back to that quote by Austin Kleon, about how you don’t write daily to say things that you already have to to say—instead, you’re writing to figure out your thoughts and parse them out in words. (Note to self: find the actual wording of this quote for later.)
I think I get the principle of it, but its practice and execution feels much easier said than done. Obviously, as a human being, I have no shortage of thoughts, but they’re mostly disjointed, scattered fragments that often don’t cohere into anything that resembles all the lovely writing I read on a daily basis.
This is compounded by the info-dense world we live in, where an ocean of notifications, messages and ideas threaten to drown us in information. So many of my day-to-day musings never resolve into anything substantial. Incomplete, they float off into the void, conclusions aborted, as my attention divides across manifold distractions.
I suspect this is the same for everyone. Good writers just have the clarity of purpose, and probably a good measure of patience, to organize their thoughts on paper.
That’s where the craft of it comes in, I guess. Find a nugget of a fragment of a whisper of a thread, and braid it together with some offhand knowledge. Splice in some memories and wrap it up in language to produce a readable string of sentences. I dream of doing this without struggle, letting the words flow out of me the way I imagine it does for the great writers of our species. Until then, I’ll keep plugging away at it, like Murakami on a marathon, focused on the journey rather than the destination, each word a step that takes you further toward that horizon.
Hey look: a few paragraphs just materialized. Not bad for having nothing to write about. More tomorrow.