A few days ago I cried while telling my wife that the version of me who returned to the 500-day writing practice this year felt like a stranger. I could not find my way back to the 'spirituality' I had in the previous round—the ability to reach for emotion and stream of consciousness and have it come easily.
She asked me one question: 'Do you like what you used to write?'
I was quiet for a long time. 'No.'
'And now?'
'I find it unfamiliar. It does not feel like something I wrote.'
Then I went to Notion and made a new folder called 'Written Between New Years.' Inside it I created a note called 'Written Before the 2023 New Year' and left the first keyword there: stranger. I plan to answer my own question in the annual 'before the New Year' piece. By then I will be on day 365 of this practice; there are still two months left for me to get to know this stranger who writes through my body every day.
Usually, when someone writes about their own writing life, the reflections come out vague and tedious. Who wants to read another life summary? I cannot live your life, and you cannot govern mine. I have read two books about 'experience' that resonated with me deeply: The Road Less Traveled and Becoming a Writer.
Becoming a Writer makes a clever comparison: writing is like three people. One is a character in the story. One holds the pen and contradicts that character, creating all kinds of trouble for them. The third watches from a god's-eye view as the other two complete another round of contradiction. These three people make up the meaning of writing.
The first time I felt that a character was truly alive, truly self-aware, and truly capable of guiding the plot on their own, the excitement was hard to put into words. But that author managed it.
Honestly? It is obscure, and it offers no practical guidance.
Still, because I have already completed one 500-day writing cycle and am more than halfway through this one, I have genuinely felt those three people. They are the three selves present while writing: one uses feeling to arrive at an absurd conclusion; another decides to use reason to gather evidence proving that conclusion absurd, but while writing, ends up accepting the absurdity; then the third—the one actually writing—records the conclusion and the process of arguing it. You realize that feeling really is an elephant, and reason is the tiny rider on its back.
See? Still obscure. Still no practical guidance.
This is probably the pleasure of writing: someday you meet someone who has had the same experience and the same 'abstract touch.' That person might also be your future self. In The Road Less Traveled, the author destroys with his own hands the map he spent years drawing in search of life's value.
— 500-Day Writing | The 700,000th Word
- Abstract touch: the process of turning abstract concepts into concrete works of art. Few people notice the flow of their own emotions, or face their emotional shifts, or record them and trace them back to a cause. A smaller number can express their emotions through writing, painting, or music, or use spiritual practice and asceticism to talk with a higher-dimensional layer of their own subconscious. This is a concept I came up with myself.