On Penholder Friction

In yesterdays’ post, I wrote about something I call pen-holder friction and why you should try to eliminate it if you are trying to write a lot.

One of the ways to write more and better is to write more about the same thing! Often you do not know how to write better, but you do know how to write more and that is by just doing it. You won’t notice that it is better right away. This is part of your training, and training always takes time to notice.

One of the ways to write more is to eliminate the friction between you and writing. I described the basic idea of going to grab a pen. You go to where you know the pen is (to the penholder) and you are excited. You have the idea that you want to write down. You have it in your head. You’re going to the penholder. And then when you get there…there is no pen, or the pens don’t work. And then now you have to redirect the momentum that you had towards finding the pen, and not being too angry at your penholder, which was just there as it should be. It’s not its fault it is empty.

And then you wanted to write whatever it was,

I wanted to suck on his teet, but he was wary. I saw the redness in his eyes, the redness of his face. He presented himself to me, open, to be extracted from. We looked into each other’s tired eyes. Does this feel extractive to you? That I drink from you as if I’m drinking from the universe, filling myself up with you so that the grayness of my vampiric self becomes more colorful for a moment

or whatever it was

anyway you can’t write it down because you don’t have a pen.

This is one of the problems you generally want to recurse on and perfect, as if you are perfecting a soufflé recipe for catering. If you’re going to be doing something over and over, you want it to be a frictionless process, because otherwise the friction appears in every single instantiation of the process.

So how do you recurse on perfecting this feeling? How do you follow this instruction?

First — noticing the friction. This is a big step because if you notice it, you can do something about it.

Sometimes you are laying on the couch, writing, but your legs are in an awkward position, and you’re actually expending energy to keep yourself from falling off the couch because you don’t have the right ottoman for your feet. That would be useful to fix.

Or perhaps the login for your writing app is kind of weird, and this actually annoys you a bit.

Or you are worried about writing in your notebook because when you run out of notebook you won’t have a new notebook.

Nothing is too petty.

All obstacles must be cleared.

Remember, if you are writing a lot, you are repeating these annoyances every time you run the process of trying to write.

And writing is hard enough that you just don’t need this extra baggage.

Be petty. Let it go.