19 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
19 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: 'There Was Something Back There About Practice, Right?'
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date: '2006-06-29T08:37:00-04:00'
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permalink: /there-was-something-back-there-about-practice-right/
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tags:
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- writing
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---
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I realized over the weekend that I’ve been struggling for so long with the article I’m writing — or, to be honest, not writing — that it’s (a) now pretty heavily overdue, and (b) threatening to take on the albatross-like status that only things I feel hugely guilty about can take on, a situation that compounds daily, as my guilt prevents me from being able to fully confont the object of my guilt. Etc. So clearly steps must be taken.
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I’m now in the second day of a very strict regime, in which I sit down at the computer immediately after performing the necessary morning ablutions and having a little breakfast and caffeine. I am not allowed to fire up the email client. I am not allowed to open a browser window. There are no forms of interactivity available to my computer, for one half hour. For one half hour, I open only the article draft and my notes, and that is all I look at. For one half hour. And I write, something, even if it’s totally placeholder prose that I know won’t make it into the final version, even if it’s just bullet point notes about what comes next.
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What I have, after two days of this, is a lot of mangled bullet points and notes for things I’ve got to read and/or recover from old research. It’s not pretty, but there’s a lot of it, and it’s starting to take on a kind of shape. I’m beginning to get interested.
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And today was a bit easier than yesterday, I think.
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I seem to recall having [mentioned](/practice_practice_practice/) something like this a while back, about the relationship between ease and frequency in writing, something about needing to practice daily. It’s probably bad when [the need to reread](/on_the_need_to_reread/) applies to your own ideas, too.
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