The Inner Editorial Committee

The inner committee, comprised of representatives who claim to be legitimate aspects of your personhood, often reminds you of a publisher's editorial committee, looking for excuses to reject, wanting to keep losses down, willing to gamble on established projects from established producers rather more than being willing to take chances.


Yes, they are that way; it is a necessary condition. You, who have honed yourself into a necessary condition, are thus frequently whipsawed by your committee, all for being of an anarchistic nature, your goal being to keep at your composing until you have learned at least one tangible thing.

In a manner quite similar to the way your interior processes seem to work, writing is often in some form of argument with itself. To compound the comparison, the arguments within your interior process seem to escalate into argument ad homenim, which is among other things, Latin for name calling.  The argumentative positions related to writing set forth on their own energetic vector.

To begin with, writing is supposed to be fun.  If it isn't, there's a clue that something has been overlooked or it has become the noisy complainer.  This necessary ingredient has a counterpart in the internal process, which recognizes how often life is less sane than it is made out to be, more trying than it need be, and more contentious than it ought to be.

If the writing process is ever to be fun as opposed to being a chore, the subjects and objects of writing should be oriented to the goals you place at the top of your own personality triangle.  As one of your favored writers, Elmore Leonard was wont to say, and in fact said to you in person more than once, don't write the parts that don't interest you.  Does that mean, you once asked, that things you believe ought to be there must be made to seem as though you had fun writing them?

He said that was putting a bit of a spin on it, but it was not wrong to invent a character or circumstance that would present necessary material in an unorthodox and unexpected way.  From this exchange, you have arrived at the belief that the same process applies to those moments of self-reflection, self-analysis, and decision making  associated with the interior life.  

You're better at finding ways to turn writing into fun than you are getting through the bureaucracy of governing the self, but if any one thing does call itself to your attention in this regard, it is the strategy you have stolen from a strategy directly associated with another governing body, the United States Senate.


The technique is the filibuster, which you use to prevent the kinds of internal compromises which would result in you agreeing to do something you have no wish to do.  Exaggerated ad libs become an effective strategy for coping with things you do not wish to do but reckon you must.  

By exaggerating your response to them, you're able to satisfy your primal desire to avoid the matter by making fun of it to yourself.  Another excellent filibuster technique involves improvising outrageous approaches to the matter that, were you to actually do them, would land you in considerable trouble from backlash.

You'll have done most of the hell-raising things associated with using humor to destroy a target, then you will be able to do as you must, having reduced by a factor of at least ten the degree to which you consider yourself a hypocrite in the transaction.  

You will have made it possible to congratulate yourself for having performed the odious task and achieving quits with the need to do it, and you will in the bargain be able to congratulate yourself for the restraint you showed in not using the more anarchistic solutions at your disposal.

Another important aspect in writing is to get some done every day, with no days off.  This last part is important because the more you practice the thing you wish to do and have in fact rearranged your life to be able to do, the greater the possibility you will feel guilty for taking a day off.  

As bad as a day of writing awful, throw-away-able pages is, it is better than using some excuse such as not feeling like writing or being too hung over to having anything to say, whatever the hell that means.  You will regret making the excuse and you will feel awful for not having tried, and you will see a day of writing awful things as infinitely better that having to wonder what you might have written.

This ties nicely with living the internal life of the external day which, by previous definition, is a day where you with deliberation arrange things,even mere words, to produce a quality of health and happiness, both of which you recognize to be of considerable value.