My Workflow
Start with a genuine good intent to serve with writing.
Try to express a nuanced thought, it goes sideways.
Write pretentious, preachy garbage.
Write about other people writing pretentious, preachy garbage, and how they’ll be the death of us all.
Suddenly notice that the magazine is Writers & Poets, and not Writers AND Poets, become enraged at how their insufferability has ruined the “&.” But M&GA sounds like a railroad, not a political slogan, and spelling out MAKE AMPERSANDS GREAT AGAIN would be copyright infringement. Chuckle, pacified.
Get frustrated an hour in, wrap it in a funny rant about how we (me) need to chill, fail to recognize it as a note to self.
Put a good meme in it.
Delete references to glass houses, Cain, trolling people, Jesus, rotten tomatoes, trolling more people, trolling them in a literary way, and useless snark.
Eat some eggs for breakfast, stare moodily towards the oaks on the ridge.
Remember the first idea.
If Peterson’s interpretation is right, and the “plot” of the bible is that the State always fails, but salvation is in the Redeemed Individual…how do we all rise to this ideal?
And: are our ideas really our own, and do we agree with them? Or are they hollow echoes of an ideology we instinctively trust, even if it shows itself to be deadly?
Leave it at that.
Pick a classical gem.
A Classical Gem
Crank this, man. You’ll love it. And have a darn good weekend. Don’t forget to look at the sky. Don’t let ‘em convince you otherwise.