The Accidental Herbert Pearl

For lack of a smart post-its app on my laptop's home-screen, for the sake of an obsessive need to sort issues out then and there, for an upcoming quiz that had me scrounging through Wikipedia's pages looking for odd trivium, for my suddenly-increasing respect for sci-fi novelist Frank Herbert, for my more-than-occasional fandangos with the writer's block, I have to make note of the following quote on my blog.

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two.

- Frank Herbert

There's no difference on paper between the two. I know I sound like an idiot who's only just latched on to something that was common knowledge all this time, but I don't care. There's a time and a place to realize things. You can't do it sooner, you won't understand it in its entirety. You can't do it later, and if you do, you might as well not have realized it at all.

This is the right time for me to integrate the choice that there's no difference on paper between the two.