Junk Pages

My student, Sharon, a runner, was talking about how to avoid running “junk miles.” To run competitively you have to find that sweet spot—running a lot, but not too much. Running so you are strong and fast and lithe and knowledgeable about running, but not running yourself into the ground, breaking down your body, practicing bad habits, overtraining.

It hit me, on my own run last night: how I can get into writing “junk pages.” Blabbing away on the page, stringing together words, writing to hear myself think, writing to meet some weird goal. Pages no one will ever read. Even me. Is junk writing helping me as a writer? or doing more harm than good?

I feel better, as a person, if I write every day. I love the habit of focus and concentration—getting my mind to do one thing, for a longish period of time, say, thirty minutes or an hour. “The mind is a terrible master but a wonderful servant,” the saying goes. But I’m wondering, with this concept of “junk pages” if I would be better served by being more intentional about what it is I’m setting out to do on the page.

There are so many things I want to learn how to do as a writer. I want to learn a method for summary. I want to get better at turns. I want to learn more about sentence architecture. I want each sentence to be about two things, so that my prose has the power of poetry (but reads easy, like a mystery). None of those techniques are going to just happen. I’m going to have to design a pedagogy for myself.

Maybe I’m replacing “writing every day” with “learning every day.” This past Lent, instead of giving something up, I added: write a poem a day for forty days. I worked with a partner, and we e-mailed each other our poems by noon. Every day. Maybe I need to keep adding on…and create little learning units. May: a short course in summary. The art of the sentence. June: the art of the sentence.

I’m drowning in pages. The “E” on my keyboard is so worn down, there’s a divot in the plastic! The “A” is rubbed so smooth it shines and the “H” is flat as a stone. (The number keys all look as pristine as the day I bought the keyboard.)

I was married to a Quality Engineer. Maybe “work smarter not harder” has infected me? I’m not sure. I love writing. I love just writing, writing, writing. I wonder what you think. Can all this not-good writing-for-the-sake-of-writing take a toll?