Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.
— Mary Oliver, Upstream
The month is merely a few days away from ending, and my 30-essay project seems doomed to failure. But the point really was just to get myself to spend more time at my desk writing, and to begin publishing my work. By that measure, despite missing a few days and greatly overestimating my throughput, it’s been a success.
It feels like getting on a bike again after years of not riding, and I’m glad that some muscle memory remains. I remember now just how much I enjoy the whole process of writing, which actually involves much more than the writing part: reading a lot and widely, pursuing interesting threads, processing what I read to some provisional coherence with the rest of what I currently (think I) know, getting over the fear of just beginning and attempting to express even just one tiny bit of my experience and findings, drafting, rewriting, publishing (always with some amount of anxiety), looking forward to the next piece or project and figuring out what and how I want to write.
I’ve found myself paying more attention to the quality of writing I read online, and while it should come as no surprise, I still am a little amazed at the sheer breadth of range of what’s out there. There’s really good writing, precise and creative and original, and in a profusion of forms: tweets, blog posts, articles, books, stories, novels, even beer bottle labels. There’s also really bad writing, perfunctory or boring or simply uninspired and pointless.
This increased attention and exposure to all kinds of writing is perceptibly expanding the range of creative work that inspires rather than discourages my own. I also can’t help but develop humility, and a sense of camaraderie for all writers and artists and thinkers out there, no matter the current quality of their work.
Creative work is hard, but for me the only kind of work worth doing. So let’s all keep going; we can never know where we’re going to get, but we all certainly need to do the work to get there.
This essay is part of a month-long series of 30 essays.