A good writing day for Floyd Skloot often has nothing to do with putting words on paper or on a computer screen. Because my health makes it impossible to count on actually working on any given day, because the essential truth of my writing life for the last twenty years—since a viral attack on my brain—is fragmentation, discontinuity, and compromise of such basic functions as memory, concentration, word-finding capacity, abstract thinking, I've had to learn that writing for me must be a matter of capturing fragments of thought or disconnected ideas, images, or memories, filing them, and discovering in time where they lead me, how they cohere. So a good writing day is a often a day containing times of contemplation; the emergence of a few provocative, stirring fragments; or preparation from focused reading. And some days, when I have an hour or so of time when I can do the actual work of composition, it feels as though the less obviously productive days have in fact been the days of hardest "work."
Labels: A Good Writing Day, Oregon Book Awards