When I wrote my PhD thesis, I wrote over 200,000 words that never made it into the submitted work, mostly written before the mere 90,000 that did. I needed to write those 200,000 words in order to arrive at the 90,000. It was a process, a journey. When I arrived at the point where I could write the thesis, I actually wrote it very quickly. What came before was slow. Although none of those words are visible, what is visible builds on them; and, to my mind at least, only makes sense in the light of those other, discarded, words. [God knows what sense, if any, readers have made of my thesis. Thankfully, that is not my responsibility.]
So, I've been writing towards some commissioned thoughts [and writing to someone elses remit is - as I only belatedly remember from my dim and distant undergraduate days - much harder than writing to your own stream of thought]. I've come up with around 5,000 so far; none of which will ever [in their current incarnation, at any rate] see the light of day. May be I'm a little closer now than I was to something that might...
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