Posts Tagged ‘hard work’

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19
Nov

To Do or To Have Done?

There’s an important question when choosing your pursuits: Do you actually enjoy the hard work of doing the thing, or do you like the idea of what you imagine it would be like to have done it?

There are two ways, for example, in which I love being a writer.

I love the idea of being able to spend my days at home, to shape my own schedule — rigorous, yes, but not without grilled cheese sandwiches and walks in the fresh air — to tell people I’m a writer, to collect hefty royalty checks and periodically release good, gripping mystery-fantasy-comedy novels with a touch of philosophy and some life-changing spiritual insights worked in so deeply I wouldn’t be able to sell my books in the Christian section.

That would rock. Sadly, it’s probably not what being a (full-time professional fiction) writer would actually look like at all. More to the point, it’s miles from the life I’m actually living. It’s a pretty picture, but fundamentally irrelevant as long as it’s not turning into steady, systematic execution.

Luckily, the second way I love writing is that I draw massive mind-bending soul electricity from typing lots of words really fast, then erasing most of them and starting over, and repeating that process over and over until the words hum with meaning, ring true to the core, shimmer and dance and set sparks in peoples’ souls. Gah! I can’t stand how much I like filling a blank page with words. I could sit here all day — I do sit here all of some days — punching my brain until sentences come out, then squeezing the sentences until the brilliance positively drips from them.

Point is, pick the thing that you can’t stand not doing, not the thing that will be awesome once you’re so good that you don’t have to do it any more.

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18
Oct

Fresh Thinking

It constantly amazes me how easy it is to fall back on old thinking. I’ll plan out a story, say, and then, as soon as it’s on paper, it hardens. Suddenly the paper is a security blanket. Every time I’m trying to figure out or remember what needs to happen in the story, I’m all nervous and I have to find my paper to find the real way the story goes, because it’s no longer an idea, a scribble, a brainstorm. Somehow it’s taken on this severe level of authority, and I feel lowly in its presence. It is the revelation, the work of the master. Any new ideas I develop feel iffy, like I’m trying to remember the real one but not quite getting it.

Which is weird, you know? I wrote it in the first place. It was just an idea. Why does it suddenly hold such sway? I trace it to two things:

1. I’m always — usually — amazed by what comes out when I actually sit down and start producing sentences.

2. It’s hard to sit down and produce sentences.

So reading the old stuff becomes incredibly easy, and the stuff is so good, so good it almost feels like fairies must have written it, so good I can’t imagine where it ever came from, that it reinforces my instinct that this must be the real one, and anything I sit down and laboriously scratch out now will be a pale comparison.

So I have to break that kind of thinking. One, realize that when I work good things happen, and my old ideas do not hold this weird authority over me just because they exist now. If I work more, my new ideas will exist, too, and I’ll be all surprised and delighted all over again. Two, work hard. Write sentences. Suck it frikkin’ up.

After all, this is what I love.