You are reading the first draft of what I'm calling a book. And I'm calling it that because for years I wanted to write one, except that I didn't want to write a novel and I haven't lived enough to tell my life's story in a memoir. The only things I've done a lot are read and write, and so those are the only things I can write with some confidence about. I believed I had enough, in fact, that I could write 200 essays on the same and collect them in one place. I don't intend to put together this manuscript and send it to a publisher, however. At 23 and as a person who's very skeptical of any form of advice-giving, I feel at odds with the idea of publishing a book about writing, at least traditionally.

But a series of essays on what I know and don't? That's something I can do.

Perhaps I am fooling myself and my readers by calling this a book, but it's the only way I can see this project. A book is limited in scope, it is about a specific topic, and it has a last page. If I said I were starting a blog about writing, I could keep writing on it for the rest of my life. I could take a decade-long break and still return. You don't do that in a book. There's the first page and then the final page and at one point it is done.

And I want to have a project that's done. I want to have a complete project that I created all on my own, something that brought some good into the world. I've never done such a thing before. Perhaps in three or five years this book won't exist anymore, unless I save it on a hard drive or get it all printed. But that is fine with me. I'm not concerned with preserving this book as much as I'm concerned with making it in the first place.

Recently, it's been hard to write here, but that's my perfectionism. Nevertheless, once I get over the fear and start typing, the perfectionism fades. I write several paragraphs that I know I'll never publish, and somewhere after 200 words I'll write what becomes the beginning of the final draft. I'm not afraid to abandon a bad beginning, hit enter, and start again. And once I start, I keep writing until I'm done, even though it often turns out that out of the 3,000 words I write, I'll end up deleting over 2,000 of them.

This is how it's been, and this is how it'll be for most of these essays. Clarity, the kind where you just have to get it all down and it's easy and simple and effortless, is rare in writing. Most days, you just show up and get started, even if it means sitting at your table at 9 am but not writing the first sentence until 3 pm. It is easy to procrastinate, especially when you don't live alone, when you're writing on a device instead of in a notebook, and when it's a wonderfully cloudy, grey day right before Holi, the Festival of Colours. One can watch the formless clouds and the rushing flights of pigeons for hours and not feel like that time was wasted.

Sometimes, though, sitting still won't do. You have to drag your chair into the balcony and write while the wind dances outside, while eagles glide in and out of your sight and vehicles pass on the street below. You start writing and hate the introduction and keep going until something better comes. You keep going even when you've written a thousand words dealing with ten different aspects of the writing life, none of them with enough substance to carry the weight of an entire essay.

You hit enter and you continue describing what it is that you're struggling with, even if it's a pointless struggle, even when you know a better solution exists. Because sometimes, it's not about being efficient with your writing, getting that essay done and out of the way. Sometimes, you write because that's what you want to do, because it's in the writing that you find joy, not in having written.

Sometimes, all that matters is that you're sitting in the balcony in the afternoon on a Sunday and the sounds of conversation from down the street are accompanied by the sound of your fingers tapping the light keys on your keyboard, words filling up the screen in front of you.

Sometimes, it's about the pleasure of the act itself, and not its product. Today is one of those days for me. There's a lot about the art, craft, and business of writing that I'm yet to share. But right now I want to talk about the joy of writing. About how the mere act of putting down words is meaningful, even if you delete them once you've written them, wiping them out of existence just as they've been birthed. It is meaningful to simply write rather than create an important or useful or entertaining piece of writing that will touch or help others.

Writing isn't always about sharing and reading and commenting and improving. Writing is meaningful as it unfolds on the page, because it means that someone is creating something, even if it's a temporary creation, like a soap bubble. It gives me joy; I get to spend my finite time on something that feels good. In this, the mere act of writing serves its purpose, justifies its existence to whoever is demanding an explanation of its use.

When, after having written something, the writer shares her writing with someone or publishes it online, the piece of writing gets another chance to be useful--remember, another chance. Writing that never sees the light of day is useful and meaningful too, because it meant something to the writer when she wrote it. A deleted draft is not a wasted draft; it's not an opportunity lost--it is joy gained.

At the very least, that is true for me. No word I write is ever a waste, no moment spent with a blank page futile. It is all filled with joy and meaning. Everything else that happens afterwards is a bonus.