Reflections on the aging writer

I've noticed a dramatic change in the rhythm of my writing life in the past six to twelve months. I'm curious whether or not other aging writers experience this or if it's just a personal change. To understand this, let me provide a context.

I've always been a 24/7 obsessive kind of writer. I haven't have five seconds of writer's block in over 50 years. I'm always working on more than one project at once. In my process, I enjoy the rewriting stage best -- printing a draft and filling it with red ink. In a sense, I'm never "not working," part of the obsession I mentioned, and this naturally has consequences, many of them negative (especially in personal relationships). This is the way it's been for me.

The process roughly goes in this order: brooding and thinking about a project, putting it to paper/screen the first time, fiddling with it until a draft is finished, printing the draft and rewriting it more deliberately and slowly, inputting the changes, printing again, rewriting again, etc, until I get a draft with very little red ink on it.

What has changed is this: the initial step, brooding and thinking, has started to become its own reward. That is, I get more satisfaction in the first step than I used to and am tempted to stop there (!). Writing as thinking. Now, of course, the work never materializes in the usual sense if this becomes all there is to the process. Moreover, this echoes the avoidance of the beginning writer, or the barroom writer, who never gets around to putting anything down. Yet it's different. I know from over 50 years of doing it that I can "put something down" -- but now I have the temptation to stop before I do it.

For example, I've been stuck in my splay story but at the beach I reread what I had, got enthused about the story again, and saw what the next line of action must be. In the past, I would write this down quickly, obsessively, and get on with it. But I haven't. Instead I've been almost self-congratulatory in my satisfaction of having "solved" a dramatic problem, without going to the trouble of making it visible and concrete. I'm reminded of Fermi's famous exclamation, "I have found a most wonderful proof of this" (a famous mathematical problem) but never getting around to writing it down. It's as if the mental solution is becoming more of its own reward.

I'm also reminded of Norman O. Brown, "doing nothing if properly understood is the supreme action", or William Blake, "the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought." I'm reminded of the silence of zen monks.

Well, I do need to get this action in the splay down on paper! I'm not really ready for silence but I see its temptation in a way I've never felt or understood before. In the end, I can see myself writing every day -- but only mentally, my entire career internalized and my exterior presentation to the world a vast silence.