What’s Left Over
There is no way to win this. You go one way or the other, and you look, and there’s still no way to win this. The direct path past the school is loaded with cars to pick up kids, so you have to go to the traffic light instead. If you miss the left turn signal on this detour, you’ll be stuck for five minutes. If you take the initiative and plow straight instead in order to go around the block and catch the smaller light on the other side, you’ll have a better chance of being stuck there even longer. None of these traffic lights are on a timer, so you are rolling dice on a long chance that you’ll win, but you’re really betting against yourself. So, there really is no way to win this. The only way to win this is if you don’t get out of the house in the first place.
In contemplating these monotonous options, what you’re trying to do is to make the most out of your day, saving whole minutes with which to use later on something more meaningful than sitting in your car. In writing, I locate a problem that makes me think of the traffic lights. Even though your writing is on a schedule, and you’re diligent about it as if it were as essential as breathing, you still need to take paths that will grant the highest return. This is just like how some of us use techniques like making a right at the red light and planning your route so you make the most use of your red light rights, optimizing on them, successfully cutting down the driving time by reducing the effects of at least some of the obligatory stops.
You are writing because you have a lot to say. But you have little time. So, you begin to feel desperation when you work on something over and over, turning it in the light to make sure it catches a sparkle from every direction, until it finally feels done or you’re sick of it, and then you howl with regret about all the time it took. It’s crazy, because you want to do the best job possible, but it takes so much time to do it, you feel it is almost wasted on minute considerations in craft.
What are your options? I suddenly get the idea that I want to make things shorter, that minimalism is the strongest virtue in writing. Just go straight to the point. Limit your options. Too many words are wasted. On my keyboard, I’ve stumbled across millions of words! Where did they get me?
But making a piece of writing shorter always requires more time, because the words left over need to hold more, they need to be carefully chosen and then slotted like a bridge that is made of less material but is supported by advanced engineering.
Screw minimalism! Instead of tightening something to the point of bursting like that, I think it may be better to go with the flow, because sometimes more words gets the point across like a mallet, which works great when you use it to pound on something over and over, and that kind of impact is more visceral, and the drone of repetition could create a music, imposing a certain tone across the ideas.
So, I decide to go loose, which is what I admire in a piece of writing, especially an essay, and this is perfect because I’ve always believed that essays are best executed as if written at the speed of thought.
But this won’t cure my time problem. Such crafted spontaneity always comes at a price; it takes a plethora of revisions to make it work and to make it feel as if it were tossed off in one sitting. It’s the greatest lie since it can never go at the speed of thought, even though it convinces most people that it was.
This is almost as frustrating as being stuck in an involuntary traffic situation. There is not enough time in the world to be sitting, going over the same maneuvers everyday.
So, you’re thinking about all those things you will never have time to write before your ticket is punched, and you wonder if it would have been different if you didn’t have a family or a job — or if you lived in a place that had a lot less traffic! But the reality is that there is only so many ways you can say anything. And this is a completely different problem striking this thought at a vicious oblique angle. You have so very many things to say, but there’s only so many ways to say anything, and it is the limits of the second that will corral just a few things in the first. In the end, they both mean the same thing, so you know you have to commit to just a handful of projects, because there is no agency for all the rest, due to either lack of time or limitations in language.
Having many things to say and only so many ways to say it are the two forces working against each other, and the friction caused by their confrontation is the amassed energy that will one day deplete you completely. Yes, this is the unwanted reality. And you wonder if it is worth anything to ramble about traffic lights like this when the time should be taken for something a little more immediate, a little closer to home, something you actually want to leave behind.
— Rey Armenteros