Coal & Diamonds

One year ago, I had a lot more ideas of things that might be worth writing about than I do this summer. Each week I had at least a handful of topics bouncing around in my head. Each idea just waiting for their turn to solidify into something. Not all my ideas could stand alone, but they all contributed in some way to a piece ready for sharing by Tuesday.

Sometimes all an idea needed to do was get out of the way. Sometimes my brain just needed to examine it for a few minutes, then set it back down. But more ideas came, every day. And each Sunday or Monday when I opened my computer to build a small structure with my words, rarely did I stare for long at a blank page and a blinking cursor.

This summer is different. Lately I’ve opened my computer on Tuesdays and stared at white space for a while before I realize nothing feels quite solid enough yet. So I close my computer to try again later. Sometimes on a Tuesday evening something comes together. But more often lately, it’s on a Wednesday morning that discipline wins. And this summer I’ve accepted that one day late is sometimes the best I can do.

If my brain keeps coming back to a single topic before Sunday, I know I’ve found something good. Those weeks feel like the diamonds scattered in a whole bunch of coal. The coal weeks have potential. But the coal weeks are the Tuesdays I press publish knowing that with a little more digging, I might have found something different altogether.

Or maybe more time wouldn’t have changed anything. It turns out that coal is just coal, and coal doesn’t actually turn into diamonds. Coal and diamonds form in similar ways and share a common element, but coal is less pure. For coal to be a diamond, you’d have to dig a whole lot deeper and strip away all the extra. They might come from a common element, but one is not the other. 

Maybe that’s why diamonds sparkle so brilliantly. Because they are something special nestled in a bunch of ordinary. And that’s really what writing is too. Sifting through a lot of words to find the ones that feel different than the rest. Spend enough time hanging out with words, and you’ll know when a certain one will sparkle. Sometimes a word can be ordinary. And sometimes, the same word can shine through the debris around it.

The more words you write, then pick up and examine, the more routine it becomes to know which ones are building something brilliant. And this summer, I’m simply not writing enough words to be as practiced at finding the diamonds. It’s the same with anything really. You can maintain a skill if you practice the same thing often enough to stay on your plateau. But if you want to get better or broaden your skillset, that takes a different commitment all together. That takes more time. More variety. More failure.

This summer, I’ve been mostly comfortable standing on my plateau. There are days where I want more, but I know I haven’t put the same time into writing that I did a year ago. I’m not writing every day. I’m writing once a week, maybe sometimes twice. Of course the ideas aren’t coming as easily, and of course I’m feeling a little rusty. Writing is one of those things that takes a lot of time. Time that I haven’t been giving to it.

So, of course this summer is different. One year ago I was in the habit of writing at least 500 words every single day. For more than four months, pages and pages of words would pour out of me daily. I’d write short things, and I wrote one big long thing. All made up of singular words. Words as tiny pieces of sentences filling blank pages. Some published, some deleted.

And some waiting. Nearly 220,000 of them sitting in a folder on my desktop, waiting for me to come back to them. They’re waiting for me to add, delete, adjust. They’re waiting for me to get my hands dirty and remember how to find the diamonds.