Creative Work Is An Endurance Sport

AKA: Why it’s more fun to start things than it is to finish them.

I’ve got to tell you, I am having a great time right now. I’ve had this idea and the words are positively spilling out of me. You know that feeling where you’re typing slightly faster than you can because you’re afraid that you’ll miss one of the words pouring into your mind from some rich, unseen source? Yeah, I’m feeling something like that right now. Right now, I have everything under control, I know where this is heading, and everything is potential.

The second paragraph is more of the same. More or less. There’s the odd pause in the flow now, but it’s still basically smooth sailing. If I keep up this pace I’ll have a thousand words in 15 minutes or so, I’ll check for spelling and grammar, do a little polishing, and that’ll be that.

Is this self-referential style getting boring? I wonder if your attention is starting to drift, maybe you’re already skimming down the page deciding whether the rest of this is worth your time. Please don’t, there’s a structure here and you’ll ruin it if you skip ahead. I’m still not 100% sure what that structure is, and it’s getting harder to hold the image of it in my head now that the flow of words is slowing down, but we’re arriving at the meat of things now. You’ve got the basic idea…