Not a Game
Do not consider failure! Cat does not know Failure!
A Serious business, in fact. What is? Being a writer, of course. I set myself up a schedule to write a specific number of words per day on the major project (ignoring the numbers for research, notes, free-writing, scribbles, etc.) so I could focus on the main (the proper) job. It happened when I found the arena where the character arc wasn’t doing what it could be doing. Required some play-time to get the right feel (and some deleting). And of course, I got behind. Didn’t keep up the output. Bound to happen.
And what did I do? I said, I’ll be waiting until tomorrow to pick up those few lost words.
Whoa! Stop, go back. What was that? Keep adding the shortfall to the next day, or the next week, or the weekend – always playing catch-up? I don’t think so. Unless it’s a deliberate ploy to set up for failure. Because that’s what would happen.
I have to accept that there will be days (another song verse!) like that, where the count for the work isn’t what the schedule insists; there will be days when there’s more research and freewriting and scribbles than the main work, and how should I deal with it?
Not by adding the lost few words to the next days expectation of output, that’s for sure. It wouldn’t take long at all to feel so swamped and overwhelmed that the only choice would be to give it all up and go [insert depressing activity, or lack of, here].
I will start each day with the expectation of output as a fresh and blank source of energy. No adding in the missing bits from yesterday or last week, no building a mountain of failure and disappointment, no feeling of dread when I approach because I’m so far behind and . . .
You know how it goes – we pile it all on and expect we can deal with it all eventually. We can’t. We never could. There are physical limits, there are emotional and spiritual limits, there are the limits of reasonableness. I mean, how can we expect to have a mind free enough to be creative when we overload it with other ‘stuff’ that doesn’t contribute to the dream?
We all know the answer to that, but do we stop it? ‘It’ being the things that get in the way, our own expectations and demands, the family, friends, and community expectations, the normal life business.
Most of them we don’t stop, wouldn’t want to, but we can stop the complication of expecting too much of ourselves, of layering on the guilt for not keeping up with . . . whatever benchmark we think we should set for ourselves.
So I start each working day with the fresh count, no add ins from the past, this is today, the present, and I go into the present (now fully warmed up by the exercise in writing words on a medium) fully armed with only one output expectation! Story!
Yeeeeehaa!!!
