I had a writing afternoon today, the first in several weeks, the first of the new year. It was great to be back in it, and awful. I spent some time this evening looking for what Annie Dillard has to say about this kind of thing, and she says it so well:
“I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
“This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!'”
-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
And so it would seem that I absolutely must return to my method of a page a day. Either that, or I have to get myself a chair….
