There’s a moment when your consciousness detaches from the writing and starts to read and recognize – “Oh, that’s good, that’s sweet, that’s meaningful” – and that’s the moment of truth.
Either you pause and celebrate what you’ve just written or you double down – you say to yourself, “Shut up, Self, we’re writing here and nobody cares what you think at this moment.”
Maybe you do shut back up and keep writing, or maybe you start trying to outdo yourself and it turns out sounding like self-conscious slop, or maybe you stop and say, “Well, there it is, that’s the best I’m going to do today so I may as well stop.” Only one of those three choices is likely to produce more brilliance, but you have a chance of batting .333, which is mighty good baseball.
Sports make pretty good analogies. Babe Ruth’s strikeouts and Brett Favre’s interceptions are part of their stories of brilliant success. Ted Williams set a record by failing six out of 10 times – because the best hitters have always failed seven or eight of 10.
And the point being: You don’t get a hit every time you swing. You just keep swinging.
Warren Bluhm 