Creative hygiene

There was a kind of tension between this note and an earlier one.

In the first, I say that regularly setting down what's deep inside you is enough, that there's no need to dig. In the second, I say that I now write for 25 minutes a day without stopping, precisely "to dig deeper."

So?

I think the older one is right. There's no point in digging, as long as you're caught up.

Recently, I'd been on the move with my son and fallen "a bit behind": some ideas had piled up and needed to come out. Hence 25 minutes of writing that were actually "full."

But once I'd caught up, the extra time no longer helped. It was turning into intellectual filler.

I feel like ideas form naturally, at their own pace. If I don't get them out (writing, art, conversation), they get stuck and block the others. But if I express them regularly, they make room for the next ones.

So the famous flow may be nothing more than a form of creative hygiene: keeping the pipes clean by regularly expressing the ideas that are in them, ideas you don't choose.

A well-maintained machine goes after ideas faster and further.