Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter any more, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done. – Kurt Vonnegut

At heart, I am a basher. I generally dreaded writing in school for this reason, and this feeling reached its feverish peak in university. The essays assigned in my philosophy courses were generally short in length but low in external support. They were close dissections of abstruse primary material with few citations of anything but the primary text. Writing these essays was for me an excruciating process of expounding thoughts one sentence at a time, and continuously subjecting all those thoughts to scrutiny. After I had written even a short essay of a few pages, I would be exhausted. It was a painful process of midwifery. My ultimate fear was that my draft would somehow be lost because I genuinely wasn’t sure if I would have the strength or creative reserves to redo it.

This writing style was feeding off an innate inclination that I have “do” things in some definitive way. It’s a compulsion that sees tasks in the world as things that can and should be done in such a way as to be completed for good, without needing any more attention. The to-do list caters to the same mania, only there the process is one of elimination as opposed to creation. I am naturally inclined to go through the to-do list one item at a time, trying to deal with it completely. In doing so, I don’t want there to be any sub-tasks or follow-ups remaining. If some loose thread comes up after I considered an item done and checked off, I quickly deal with it so that the item can remain off the list. This is bashing applied to life.

I’ve made a conscious effort to become more of a swooper. When I think of swooping, I think of Cinderella. Swooping, both linguistically and kinetically, feels close to sweeping. While the name ‘Cinderella’ may not mean anything in English, in the original Italian it refers to ashes, as it does in other languages. Cinderella sweeps ashes and is then herself swept away on a magical journey. There is a lightness to her being. At the core of swooping lies a similar levity based on insouciance and deferral. Editing and cleaning are suspended and postponed, which allows the energy and momentum of actually doing to flow. In contrast, constant monitoring and remediation are oppressive.

The key to swooping is tolerate disorder temporarily, knowing that the time will come to tame it. With writing, this is editing, and with life and tasks it’s periodic reviews. Periodic reviews are moments of stopping activity, taking a critical eye to what’s been done, and reinstating order. Reliance on such reviews is what underwrites the initial freedom. Afterwards, when editing, one has something real to work on – a draft or some jumbled tasks – rather than staring ahead into a ponderous void. It’s a well-established principle that when generating ideas the key is to separate brainstorming from critique. If ideas are subject to critique as soon as they’re presented, most of them will be killed off right there. Many would have developed into something viable had they been allowed to breath. Bodybuilders, too, have a standard protocol of bulking and cutting. Rather than trying to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously, they alternate phases dedicated solely to gaining mass and to getting lean. The unidirectional stimulus in each phase yields better results on net. Sweepers and bashers may end up in the same place, but bashing is hard way to write and live.