I know I'm writing about my trip to Philly
for Zine Fest, but I don't know what I'm going to write between then and now, except
that it will be about writing, and self-publishing, in pamphlets, and on the worldwide
web.
Last night when I went to bed I didn't know what I was going to write
today, except that I thought I'd write something about publishing 172 pamphlets myself,
or posting 76 books on the web. I mean, that establishes my bona fides.
I did it. How did I do it? Why did I do it? What do other writers do instead?
Why is my way better?
When I got up I read my email and looked at MobyLives,
on the web. That's a site on the web I read every weekday.
There's been
an exchange of letters about MFA programs, and I thought about writing something
about that, but today I learn that Lynn Freed has an article in July Harper's
about her years in the MFA gulag, so I thought I'd read that before I wrote my piece.
So I both have a plan, a loose outline, and it is adapted, to respond to events that
pop up in my life.
Whatever pops up, that's relevant, I write about it, as
it pops up.
This gives the writing a herky-jerky structure, but once you
get used to it, and relax, you will see how it's all related, at the end.
That's the first rule. And the second rule is, it never ends.
And the third
rule is go back to the beginning and start over. You'll see more the second time
through.
Mark Twain writes,
Howells was here yesterday afternoon and I told him the whole scheme of this autobiography and its apparently systemless system-only apparently systemless, for it is not that. It is a deliberate system and the law of the system is that I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted. It is a system which follows no charted course and is not going to follow any such course. It is a system which is a complete and purposed jumble--a course which begins nowhere, follows no specified route, and can never reach an end while I am alive, for the reason that if I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime. I told Howells that this autobiography of mine would live a couple of thousand years without any effort and then would take a fresh start and live the rest of the time.