December 2: "What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?"

I'll confess that my initial, gut-level response to this prompt was on the snarky side. (I mean . . . I do quite a bit each day that doesn't contribute to my writing, at least not without resorting to a really high level of abstraction. Showering? Biking to work? Walking the dogs?)

But it turns out that I do have something to say here. I may not be much of a creative writer, and heaven knows that I don't blog consistently, but a substantial chunk of my lawyerly time is spent writing. And writing is my primary work product.

And I know, through much painful experience, that I tend to be an excruciatingly slow writer. A lot of this springs from my insatiable need for perfection. It's nearly impossible for me to just let loose and flow. Dunno if any of you are familiar with Bryan Garner, that legal writing extraordinaire, but I've heard him describe the optimal writing process as invoking four personas: madman, architect, carpenter, judge. I seem to be almost all judge. I agonize over every. last. word phrase construction etc. I tend to be so concerned with getting everything just right that I often don't get much of anything written at all.

Actually, this has as lot to do with the paucity of my blog postings, as evidenced by the astonishing number of draft posts that will never see the light of day because I never relax my standards enough to finish them. It manifests differently at work, of course, where I don't exactly have the luxury of total stasis. ("Umm, sorry about that brief that I never turned in. You see, I just couldn't get it written to my satisfaction." Yeah, doubt that would fly). The work version just involves a lot of hemming and hawing and overthinking every damn word that I put to paper, coupled with almost-inevitable panic as I approach a deadline and realize that my need for perfection has ensured a crunch at the back end.

So I keep thinking about that stupid aphorism (sorry, Voltaire!) about the perfect being the enemy of the good. Except in my case, it's more like the perfect is the enemy of the . . . anything. I'm working on that. Agreeing to participate in Reverb is a huge step in the right direction. I'm committed to getting something written every day, or just about every day, which surely means embracing my madman. Easing up a little and just writing. . .