I’ve been falling pretty far behind on these little nominally-weekly essays again. These delays probably started with Elden Ring, but the reasons why I haven’t gotten caught back up are a bit more nuanced and interesting – though some of them may actually loop back around to Elden Ring, since as yet I’ve yet to finish a piece about it, and not for lack of trying. I’ve still been putting in the hours and writing regularly, but most of the pieces I’ve started are simply not fit to publish yet. There are a few different versions of “not fit to publish” that I tend to experience, and my recent efforts have allowed me to review them all in detail. Some of these are:
- Pieces which I start and get a few hundred words into before realizing I don’t know where to go next, how to develop the idea to a conclusion. I leave them around in the hopes that I might know what to do with them in a week or two. I don’t encounter this problem as often as I used to – I think I’ve gotten better at either figuring out where a piece is going or deciding it’s not going anywhere from its inception. Nevertheless, it still happens.
- Pieces which I write almost all of before deciding that they’re vapid and pointless, that the thing I’m writing about is simply a construct of words with no bearing on anything real. This happens fairly rarely, but I’m always worried about it anyway. More often I realize that this is one of those–
- Pieces where the point I find myself making isn’t the point I originally set out to make. I must therefore delete about half of what I wrote, rearrange everything, and create a new framework around this new understanding. This is always a process that is both frustrating and exhilarating: The outcome is always a huge improvement, but I always hate to completely toss away viable work, even when it’s misguided or not very good.
- Pieces which are mostly done but are too raw and emotional, unrefined by deeper thought. Raw and emotional may sound like good things, but these are invariably improved by taking a week or two to step back, reread the piece a few times, and figure out which parts of the whole glisten because they’re gems and which parts glisten because they’re soggy.
- Pieces that I start writing and are turning out well, but in that process I realize that they’re bigger pieces than I thought, thousands instead of hundreds of words, if I want to fully develop the idea that started unfolding. These have been by far the most common kind to show up over the past few weeks, which is why I find myself here, now, uncomfortably delayed and mildly ashamed.
Sometimes I think I worry about this sort of thing too much, that I’d be better off just getting something done and published, that I can worry later about potentially refining its ideas in future pieces. Indeed, I was only able to start and maintain this project by embracing that idea – by accepting that everything I put up will have imperfections and someday need to be discarded or refined, but hoping that some nebulous audience may find interesting or useful regardless. I have learned to accept imperfection, but I still struggle with accepting incompletion – so, inevitably, I have pieces that burgeon like waves out of control, and must accept that these will create delays.
A fortunate coincidence, then, that in a project that is an ongoing discussion of the process of art, understanding these delays is, itself, one part of that discussion.