Because I never quite knew how to finish any writing I think of it all as “The Unfinished Writing Of. . .” or “The Forthcoming Writing of . . .”
If that is a joke told only in my private soliloquy, it is neither all that funny nor that useful.
Anyone who has found an excuse not to share their work knows the fear of putting out what is less than perfect and has felt how ripe for criticism creative work can be, how deserving it is to be ignored.
Yet deadlines and readers, even imagined readers, bring focus to creation. Turning unfinished into finished, forthcoming into now, means you make the journey that demands presence, if not of yourself than of your authorial persona. You can live behind the curtain, in a full costume, mimicking someone else, but even then someone out there may think of you as a consciousness, a being capable of saying “I.” Your work may be an invention as if from another person altogether, but that person will not be absent from the stage.
How one says “I,” on the page, in politics, in life, and to oneself deserves more attention and is, in any event, something I have been thinking about at least since my father offered me his one useful piece of wisdom, which I will get to on Saturday.
Tomorrow, though, I know I will write about something that happened yesterday at Cafe Thijssen.
. . . Woops, tomorrow became now (Tuesday) and yesterday two days ago because, last night, when I went to post this, I got the following message.