When I told myself that a blog was necessary, I was initially apprehensive about content, or rather lack thereof.  “But Ruben,” you may be asking yourself, “aren’t you a writer, dedicated to your craft? Don’t you write every day, slaving over words, furiously typing until the sweat beads on your brow?” Well, as it turns out, mostly not. While I try to write every day, not all the things that get written end up being home runs. The expectation that your artist friends are always producing is okay. But the idea they’re sitting atop a Gurlitteqsue trove of creativity is silly to say the least.  It would be like someone saying to you in your 20-somethings, “Why haven’t you accomplished more? You haven’t done shit. You should have changed the world by now.” 

Additionally, my apprehension was coaxed from a self-sustained anxiety and questioning of self-worth. Will it be good enough? How will it be received? Did I do enough edits? Again, is it good enough? But it’s not about my readers. It’s about my personal feelings towards my work. Ira Glass and his opinion on writing narrows the writer’s block to a matter of taste. Good taste is the driving force behind the arts. Your taste is what asks yourself, “Is this good enough?” And almost always the answer is no. So you spend all that time trying to perfect something that will never reach your vision. You look at other writers and their body of work and ask “Is this good enough?” and depending on who it is the answer will also be no, but there are the occasions where one thinks “Yes, this is good enough.” And that’s the startling difference. The entire time you’ve been telling yourself no over and over again until the moment when you reach that one yes.

 My own process is arduous, and not because of the amount I write, but because of the amount of worry and self-doubt that prevails. There are too many instances where writers take painstaking amounts of time to craft something that they’re happy with, only to be dissatisfied with the project in its entirety. By the time they do manage to write anything, fatigue can set in and you don’t want to write for the rest of the day. It’s a hole we bury ourselves in. It’s exhausting. But you know you can get this work done because the only thing to do is to write one perfect sentence, and you know you can reach the end that much sooner once you get this sentence just right and the one after that and the one after that. 

This is what I mean by autoneurotic asphyxiation. Writing feels good, knowing you’re writing your best feels good, and all of that can feel like work. So spending a ton of time writing something that you feel is your best feels like work. But that’s not true, and you end up hurting yourself in the long run. There’s only so many hours in a day, and that novel that you were so certain you could knock out in a year is suddenly eating up a decade. Work doesn’t make perfection. Work means progress. Perfecting makes perfection. You perfect when you edit. Just because it feels good doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

So now the question is, what the hell is wrong with me? I work, I know when I’m being struck by neuroses, I know achievements are attainable, and the editing process is in sight. So why aren’t I churning out more stuff? And the truth is… I have no idea. The only conclusion I’ve managed to reach is that my editing process and my writing process occurs simultaneously. I write a piece, maybe I finish it, more likely I don’t, but getting to the point where I can sit back and say “It’s done,” never seems to come. I reach the point of editing, only to find myself writing more and more stuff that will need to be edited later, finding myself writing more and more stuff to be edited later, writing more and more stuff that will need to be edited later until it’s a monstrous ouroboric affair. This must be another pitfall, a trap of self invention. I go over one obvious snare, only to sidestep into another. I’m not entirely sure how to fix it yet, but I’m currently okay with going headlong into the area that’s just a few steps from self destruction.