79. How My Brain Works
I have written now for many years and I’ve discovered something that I think is true about how brains work, or at least how my brain works. When I have a deadline, especially one with a given theme, I look it up several weeks before the deadline and read it over. That is my process for putting it into my brain.
Then I go on about my life doing other things. This is my mulling over time. I strongly believe that in this time, my brain is working. Sometimes I’ll start to work on the poem or the prose and it’s not there. There’s nothing that clicks. So I let it go again.
And then before the deadline (often not very long before the deadline), I try again and it is there. I write, I revise, I come back to it the next day, I revise again and I send it off.
I depend on that brain working while I am engaged elsewhere—and I think my brain comes through for me, just about every time.
