This made me laugh as I read it.

We stress, and block, and struggle with discipline.

Then we worry about writing quality, and writing quantity, and then acceptance.

Fear holds us back.

Asking: Will anyone want to see what we pour out on the page?

Now and again it is refreshing to not take it so seriously.

Most non-writers survive, after all.

“It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them. —JULIAN BARNES, Flaubert’s Parrot“

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

You don’t save.

You don’t hold back.

You write!

Because time is now.

Age is coming.

Life is moving.

Write, write, write!

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.””

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life