It’s been a while… as usual.
I’ve started working on my novel again, in fits and starts. I determined, with my coach, that my deadline for being done the draft should be March 31, with May 31 as a backstop. (In other words, I’ll aim for the nearer deadline, but be content if it takes me ’til the later one.)
I agreed to set aside two one-hour blocks a day, five days a week, to work on the project. I haven’t exactly done that. But I have worked on it for a couple of hours in the past week… which is more than in the previous months.
So be it.
I have a stack of index cards I made when I first planned out the book, and I’m adding to them: there are scenes in there that don’t fit the story anymore, or never made it into the draft in the first place. And now I’m revamping a lot of the last half of the book, introducing a different antagonist, etc. It feels good, but it still feels like the project is on the periphery of my awareness, like, I try to remember to work on it, ever.
I had an idea recently, that it’s not just you either build a habit of writing every day, or nothing. It’s worse:
If you’re not building a habit of writing every day, you’re building a habit of NOT WRITING. Which is going to make it fucking hard to get a novel done, believe me.
Yikes.
Sounds dreadful, right? But there’s another side to it: this question that Tim Ferriss has mentioned asking himself:
What would this look like if it were easy?
Fact is, it’s not real hard to put a little time into the book every day, even if it’s just a few minutes. Just one card, just one scene. It’s when the whole project turns into this big ball of feeling bad about yourself that it seems impossible. It’s not impossible, it isn’t even a big deal.
Even writing regular posts for this blog: what would it look like if it were easy? I got the idea for what I’m writing right now whilst washing dishes, and why not just sit down and type it out, half-formed, edit it… it’s fine. It’s something. It’s a record that I exist, instead of no such record. If I write a book, if I write a hundred books, that’s all they’ll be. I’m not out to change the world, just have something other than my eventual epitaph that says, “Hi. I was here.”
I’m not sure this is a very good post. Know what? I’m publishing it anyway. The way to get better is to just write a thing and then write another thing… Whenever I think too hard about what I’m doing, I just don’t do it. And that’s the only surefire way to fuck everything up.