Does anyone else find it incredibly frustrating wanting to describe some experience, or express it somehow, and not being able to find specific words (or sounds, gestures, movements, images, depending on what you’re doing) or even get beyond a vague, general feeling? This has to be universal. In the evening I was stuck in exactly this way, and made a completely inadequate first attempt at a poem, which I basically threw out right away. (Those disappointing first attempts sometimes seem to be necessary, though. It’s like they open up the channel for the real thing.) After that, I was tired, so I went to bed, and JUST as I was settling into the pillow a different first line popped into my head—followed by a second line, third line, and so on. So I got up and scribbled it all down before I could forget, and then went to sleep. In the morning I revised it and was satisfied. This process has happened to me enough times that I’m convinced that the “stuck” feeling is really just me trying to force myself to come up with words consciously, and my conscious mind saying, “Hey, I don’t know how to do that!” Going to sleep seems to produce much better poems.

It probably produces better days too.