Writing is hard, say some people. Anything creative is hard. Is effort. Is work.
I think that complete hogwash. However, I will agree on one thing. Starting is hard.
Over the past six months I’ve been trying to get back into a creative routine. To write regularly. To be me and express myself in the way that comes most naturally to me.
The only thing was, it felt difficult. Unnatural. Intimidating. Once I got into writing, I loved it. But getting there was a struggle. Laundry folding, dishwasher unpacking, dusting, all seemed more enticing than actually writing.
Which was crazy, because I love writing. There’s a special joy that comes from creating and the process of producing something new.
So I couldn’t work out why I didn’t want to do what I loved to do. What was stopping me from sitting down and playing in my own personal sandbox?
Before I tell you how I fixed it, let me hand over to Creativity for her explanation of the process.
Have you ever noticed how much you hate to fail? Whether it’s perfecting the process of greeting and cheek pecking your mother-in-law or trying for the umpteenth time to successfully wrap bacon around asparagus (if there were a vegetable that I would happily allow to go extinct, it would be asparagus [not cauliflower, because: cheese sauce]. Save the bananas, lose the asparagus, that’s my motto) humans want to get things right. For some humans, they want to get things just right.
And the result is that the page or the canvas or the blackboard or the pasta maker takes on a scary life of its own. It’s the place where we might not get things right.
Where we might (shock horror!) make a mistake.
And who wants to voluntarily make a mistake?
Well, I do, but let me explain why.
There are two reasons. Possibly three, but let me stick with two.
One is because mistakes are fun. Well, mostly.
That time when you were greeting your mother-in-law and you went right when she went left and you ended up landing your peck right on her smacker, that wasn’t fun. (Funny, but not necessarily fun.)
But that time when you wanted to write a historical romance and ended up producing a cosy steampunk mystery, that was fun!
And that time you purchased the mustard yellow wall paint instead of muted beige and were committed to a feature wall out of the seventies was also fun and full of potential.
The reason why mistakes are fun is because your Creativity is given more potential (more fodder for ideas) when things don’t always go to plan. When you do something exactly as it says on the box or exactly as people expect, you end up with something potentially ordinary. But when you and your Creativity are on the back foot trying to figure out how to fix/recover/retrieve a situation (yes, you can retrieve a situation, why else would we say something is “going down the gurgler”?) amazing things can happen.
But they only happen if you’re ready to fail.
The second reason mistakes are fun is because if you’re making a mistake then that means you’re at your desk or your keyboard or your oboe or your easel actually doing things. And that means wonderful things can happen. And they only happen when you actually turn up somewhere where you can record your ideas, where they are put down on paper, or canvas, or silly putty (no, actually, not silly putty. I’m thinking of those itchy-sketch things [whatever they were called] and nothing is permanent on one of those, for this to work you need permanence).
Mistakes mean you’re trying something, you’re out on a limb doing something new and adventurous. That means production is happening. (I won’t say “work” because that’s a bad four letter word which should never be used in connection with anything creative. “Fun,” yes. “Work,” no.)
And the third reason is because there is no such thing as a perfect creation. Aiming for perfection in something is tantamount to creative death. Creativities thrive on random, on fun, on different. Anything that has to be just right to be acceptable is like clapping your Creativity in irons and then expecting them to fly.
You need to be okay with things that are a bit weird, unexpected, wrong even. (Wrong by whose definition though, that’s the question.) Only then will you produce something that’s truly and completely you. And something that is worth sharing.
Perfection is rubbish. Unique requires being comfortable when things come out a little wonky. Your kind of wonky.
Anyway, that’s my way of looking at the subject.
So how did I get myself to the page regularly enough to produce a novel which I’ve just handed to my beta reader?
I made a deal with myself (and my Creativity, naturally). All I wanted to do was to write something, anything, any amount every day. I’d be happy with five words. Just so long as I went through the process of opening a story and doing something. Anything.
Instead of expecting a word count, I just expected attendance. All I needed to do was turn up at the page. Some days I wrote over 1,000 words. Some days I wrote less than 50. But I wrote.
I had fun. But I had to first allow myself permission to turn up and do virtually nothing. All I had to do was pull out my iPad and keyboard and open a file. That was success.
The success was in the turning up, instead of writing something amazing. And that meant that with that success under my belt right from the get go, I had permission to play and enjoy my writing without expectation.
So that’s my goal, currently: writing something, anything, every day. I’m not prepared to say I’ll do it for the whole year, but I’m on a streak and I want to keep it going as long as I can.
For me, that’s success.
If you’d like to read more about why trying to be perfect is such a problem, take a look at Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s book The Pursuit of Perfection and How it Harms Writers. It’s on my regular reading list.