Corona Chronicles: Missive 13

Guys, every so often, I sit here and I try to compose my thoughts about something that I've experienced in my life that might be of interest to you.  And I'm gonna be honest here.  I love having written something.  But the thing I hate, hate, hate is writing.  Writing is hard.  Writing is challenging.  Writing forces you to go inside yourself and mine all those brilliant ideas that seemed so scintillating in the shower an hour ago and force them into some coherent form for someone else to consume in a way that truly and emphatically highlights all your shower-born epiphanous genius.  And also to be funny, because that is the general nature of our interaction here, in case you haven't noticed.

But man, sitting down and actually putting pen to paper (which I often do), or fingers to keyboard?  So, so hard.  And there are literally a million-I mean that, LITERALLY ONE MILLION-things keeping you from doing that thing which you wish you would have already done, but cannot possibly do right now.  My current favorite: psyching myself out that the thing I was just going to write about is no longer relevant and therefore should not be written about at all, saving myself the trouble.  I was actually just talking myself out of writing a non-traditional cover letter for an assignment I really wanted, mentioning to myself that since I saw the posting a few days ago, I was already too late to bother writing it, when a louder voice in my head had these words of wisdom to share:

"No, Genius, that is not a good idea!  How 'bout you do the writing first before you convince yourself that the reasons for writing it are not any good?  Then you will have the writing done so that you have something real to throw in the garbage at the end."

"Well that seems unnecessarily sarcastic." (This being Voice One in my head.)

Voice Two: "Listen, 'wah, wah, writing is hard.'  Everyone knows that it's hard!  But you sit your tushy in a chair and you put words down and you keep writing even if every idea seems like crap as you are writing it.  And then you go back and you revise and revise and rewrite and revise.  And then you cut out that section that seemed like the only glimmer of radiance in the whole thing because you realize it makes no sense, and you play with the words and you punch up the tone and you fix the grammatical errors and you add a whole new paragraph that perfectly ties together those two points you were trying to make and you spell check one last time because you clearly meant to type "luck" and not that other word.  And then you crumple the whole thing up in a murderous rage and go get a drink (of Diet Coke, very important) and then you come back and lovingly smooth out the wrinkles because as you read it once more you think, "by George, I think I've got it!"  But the truth is, by then, you're so far in you don't know what you've written anymore, and so gingerly, clutching your pride in your hands like a tattered old cap, you show it to a friend or a sympathetic spouse, who comments with, "yeah, that was really funny," or, my personal favorite, "lol," and you nonchalantly shrug and say, "yeah, I just jotted down some thoughts the other day," while inside, your soul shimmers with joy at the glorious wonder of having your genius finally recognized.  And you bounce along for a few days on the effervescent euphoria of having written something that you can admit to yourself is pretty great...until you realize that your next deadline is coming up and now you can think of a brilliant new excuse to conquer all over again.  And that is writing.  Now go do it."

Voice Two is pretty smart.  So I'll leave you with this little note that I just jotted down and go work on that cover letter.  Or, don't I need to do the laundry right now?...Just kidding, I'm on it.

Until next time, wishing you good luck, good night, and good health!