The Importance of Deep Play

I was deliberately trying to squash down the thing that I knew was my absolute life's mission. And so I had to absolutely learn to fail at being a writer before I became a decent one. The skills of deep play, which is where art comes out, took far longer to learn than anything I'd studied before. To read Catherine May on the page is to feel a really fully gratitude that she did this. They meant confronting my stultifying, the stultifying terror of failure and learning to enjoy eviscerating mediocre, mistake-ridden work. It was long and slow and uncertain and quite often boring. Then you say it was all worth it.