sometimes time inverts like a sock

Just a couple of clipped observations on the craft.

Until three days ago, I would consider an idea I had and mull it over but not start writing because I thought I needed to learn more. However, it was only on the second day of writing desperately and furiously that I realized that this was the wrong way of approaching things. You need the writing to do the thinking. Plotting might work for the academic essay and for authors who know how to reach the end. But essays are explorations, not itineraries. You don’t know where you’re supposed to go. The only thing you know is that you must start. Which is what I do, every time I look at a sentence or quote that intrigues me or interests me. I can’t wait for it to inspire something in me–that happens too infrequently to be a reliable technique for an essayist who has very many words to write in order to become an essayist. I have to write that other author’s words with my own fingers and then write what comes to mind. Try to figure out what I think. This is how essays are made.
If anyone really visualizes my routine—do they do that? I don’t do this, not really. But if they did, I suspect the surprise would be how little I’m glued to my chair. The process is typically one of brief outbursts of writing in the course of long spells of reading, cooking, housecleaning, playing computer chess, watching Mets games, and so forth. Then again, sometimes time inverts like a sock, and I discover that it was light out and now it is dark, and seven innings of the Mets game have gone by without my registering what happened, because I was writing. Or there’s nothing to eat because I didn’t cook, or the laundry rotted in the washer for three days. I don’t call this multi-tasking, by the way. I don’t believe multi-tasking exists. I’m just dodgy and unsystematic, and I’ve stopped worrying about how this would appear to others, or to myself.

(This Lethem thing seems like a much more shruggy version of Grace Lavery’s confession to being “a vomiter”.)

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