Always Write.

I read something long ago and faraway, back when words mattered, our attention spans were longer than that of a goldfish, the world was somewhat cooler and polio wasn't again a thing.

I forget where I read it or what I was reading or who it was about. And these were the paleolithic days when you couldn't immediately save something to a pdf and keep it in a folder to find when you needed it. In short, I read it, remembered the part that mattered to me, and left the back story for all time.

The piece I read was about an author, a fancy-schmancy one at that, who lived alone in the mountains above Denver, Colorado. When he was writing, he would sit at his type-writer, blindfold himself and just type. 

No it wasn't a kink. 

It was a think.

He didn't want self-editing, over-think and all sorts of other writerly-afflictions to intrude on his words and the fingers and brain that were rendering them.

He wanted to full-speed-ahead. Not exasperation through perseveration.

Likewise I read that Kerouac with "On the Road," or Ginsburg with "Howl," taped together innumerable sheets of typewriter paper and scrolled the near-endless sheet into his old Smith-Corona or Remington. Whoever it was, like Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson in some cinematic gore-fest, didn't want the delay of having to pause to put more paper in the dingus or ammo in the killing machine.

Truman Capote, of course, said of the Beats, "that's not writing, that's typing." And to a degree, he may have a point. Speed is good. Spontaneity is good. Getting it down is good. Not necessarily art, but good.

In fact, I read somewhere about a Hollywood screenwriter, I forget who, who would stay late at his desk and write the entire first draft of whatever he was working on in one sitting. His thesis was a simple one. And one I happen to agree with: write fast, because re-writing is always easier than writing.

What prompted today's digression, roughly my 7,000th since I started this blog (you can probably add 1,000 manifestos to that total and you have some idea that my fingers bleed) was my usual weekend self-torture. Particularly on weekends when my calendar is stuffed to the gills wth places I have to be and things I have to do.

When that's the case I have a monkey on my back. When will I write this blog? Chances are I won't get to the computer until late when my brain is mushy and my eyesight is blurry.

But then I realized something.

I have been a writer on deadline since I worked in the in-house advertising department at Bloomingdale's and for three years in the early 80s was charged with writing about ten ads a week.

That onus has remained on top of me for the forty years since then. I'm almost always behind the "I-have-to-do-this-eight-ball."

When that's you're life, you're a little like a good gunnery sergeant in a battle zone. You're always looking for something to size up, aim at, and get into your sights.

This post was written entirely in my head and largely committed to memory because when you're charged with writing on demand, you demand such acuity from yourself. You find not just topics, but references, jokes and whole paragraphs. You cobble them out in grey matter, and when you can finally get someplace to pixel it up, it's all there.

For most of the last twenty years of my agency career, account people, planners, other creative people and especially bosses would make me out to be some sort of a freak because I can write so fast. 

I often felt like an animal in a zoo. They'd throw me the meat of something that needed doing, then back away so as to expend no empathy.

That's what practice and pressure can do for you.

Virtually no one understands how I got so fast. I have a standard phrase for that--a well-written one at that.

"I don't start typing," I tell people, "until all the words are already in my fingers."

IYKYK.

Or better, IYWYK. (If you write, you know.)