April Littrell
Cleaning unwritten drafts
While headed towards a Chinese restaurant, I held my notebook tucked in between the warm fold of my arm. The notebook is a go-to object to grab when headed out the door on a solo excursion where I know I’ll be occupying a space meant for more folks than one.
Surely enough, I was sat at a four-person table in a packed place full of cheery, chatty citizens. I opened the brown, cloth-bound book and didn’t know what to scribble in the time before my tofu peppercorn dish would arrive.
Thinking of what to write had me writing down topics I could possibly write about. Here are those topics.
I’m also including a slurry of pending post titles to clean up my drafts folder. At one point I thought these words would spur well-wrought articles, but instead they’ve occupied a digital graveyard. In case they might be a source for future thoughts, I wish to preserve them—while not allowing them to crowd the sacred canvas, the digital abyss, the zero-bit brain bin dot txt.
…
- What it means to break from comfort and why it is the absolute most comfortable
- Whether it is necessary to deviate from your authorial style after you are almost certain you have established one
- What it feels like to imagine the magnetization of attention and why it is a lie
- Embarrassment toward certain potential writing subjects and why those are the most authentic and therefore essential
- Pseudo-intellectualism, uncertainty in one’s craft, and how to be sure you are not simply a savvy buffoon
- Jealousy towards cheery people and how a single phrase can open wide the otherwise unaffected
- The daunting thought that everything has already been written and you are wasting your words
…
Beach House, Bummly, Capitalization Crisis, Deletism, Discontent, Fructose, Giddy Prompts, Literary Blue Balls, Milk, Plants, Principles, Privacy, Self-discipline, Stingray, Superstition, The Horween Wrist Wrangler, Tiny Concerts, Ukrzaliznytsia