Word Limit

Some people take the view that we have only so many minutes allotted to us, and that to waste a single one is wrong. Similar theories hold true for breaths or heartbeats. I’ve never subscribed to any of these theories, and maybe that’s why I’ve seen more movies than a lot of the people I know and climbed fewer mountains than some of them. When you break life down into breaths or heartbeats or minutes, waiting in some weird way for the last one, and you manage to maintain that outlook through a good portion of your life, your deeds speak directly to your values without you having to say a thing.

Lately I’ve been thinking about words this same way. Maybe there are a finite number of them available to us in life. We must choose carefully how and when to use them. It’s a good story, anyway, a cover for not using many at all of late. But it’s not all bullshit. When I sit down to write … scratch that … before I sit down to write, I think about what I want to say and how. I have an idea, sometimes it’s just a phrase or a bit of dialogue in my head, that I want to get down. The next thing I know I’m thinking about how I’ll never be able to capture it the way I want, which leads directly into “why even bother?” Sometimes I run through that full cycle without my fingers ever touching the keyboard.

It’s a lazy person’s way of evading the task at hand: I can’t do it right so I may as well not do it at all. Why waste words? Part of what holds me back is an obsession with needing what I write to be better than anything I read. Most of the time that’s not hard—there’s an awful lot of crappy writing out there. I see it every day, clogging my email and polluting the Internet. But reading this stuff regularly, and seeing how successful some really bad writers are, is discouraging and tiring. Often I feel like a small voice shouting into a shitstorm of garbled syntax, non-sequiturs, incoherent grammar and aimless storytelling.

And so, when it comes time to use the words at my disposal, I hesitate. And then they evaporate, and into their space filters this overriding exhaustion. There are so many things to think about other than the next sentence. I have to get up tomorrow and go to work. If I don’t go to bed now I’ll be tired tomorrow. But I’ll be tired anyway, so what’s the difference? Already this post is meandering and I’m second-guessing what I want to say. I should really cut back on my caffeine intake because it’s making me moody at work. It’s not the caffeine, it’s work. It’s not work, it’s me. It’s the weather. The moon phases. The tides. Shit. How am I ever going to write a book with this loopy thought process?

Meanwhile, here are a bunch of words. I’m using them but to what end? Am I just using them up?