Typing. Deleting. More typing. More deleting. MOAR typing. Delete delete delete. Delete it all. Every last word, comma, and period.
That was yesterday.
I was working on an essay for this blog and … it wasn’t going well. I was working on a topic that had been rolling around in my head for a month. All my arguments and counterarguments were lined up. I even had a catchy title … well, I thought it was a catchy title, until I googled it and found a hundred thousand other uses of it (including one by Garrison Keillor, which I discovered in a moment that was both uplifting and depressing).
Anyway, for hours I wrote and deleted in precisely equal measure, and in the end I was left with the same blank page I’d started with.
At which point I stopped and wondered: why was I having so much trouble?
The answer was obvious: I had no passion for the topic.
Not anymore, anyway.
Oh, when the idea first struck me, I was all fired up and ready to unleash my staggering intellect upon the world. See my reasoning and despair! But now, a month later, things have changed. Not externally. The premise still stands, the argument still works, and I can find no flaw in my logic, but internally … I just don’t care about it anymore.
This is not a bad thing. (more…)
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 