The Idea of Grit

For Thanksgiving, my partner and I drove up to Seattle to spend the holiday with his family. On the way there, he played the first few chapters of an audio book called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. And while I haven’t finished the book, the several hours we spent listening to it as we drove in the Pacific Northwest November grey and rain, I found myself attaching a particular interest in its primary thesis.

I’m not going to breakdown the primary thesis here 1) because I haven’t finished the book and 2) the purpose of this post isn’t to actually talk about the book. I only mention it now because it has gotten me thinking about why it can be so hard to find the energy to accomplish even the little tasks we need to just to survive, let alone reach goals and milestones we set for ourselves.

I’m thinking, for example, of my recent goal to complete a rough draft of my novel Penelope. For the first week of NaNoWriMo, I devotedly worked on this manuscript and kept on track with my word count. Having completed NaNoWriMo twice before in 2015 and 2016, I knew I was more than capable of completing this goal. Yet, I haven’t. Tomorrow is the last day of NaNoWriMo and I haven’t touched my manuscript in weeks. There’s no way I’ll be able to finish the goal now, and while I am glad that I got anything done at all, I am disappointed that this project I was so excited about is now left incomplete.

What’s different this year from the two years when I successfully completed NaNoWriMo? Well, for one, I’m working full time when before I was a full time student, which left me more time to devote to creative writing. I’m divorced now which means I have more financial worries than I did then. I’m also much more aware of my mental illnesses which means I’m no longer pushing myself to the breaking point to mask/ignore/avoid the healing process. This is also year two of the Covid-19 pandemic, which means my entire way of life (and the ways of life for basically the world) has been altered. I’m home 90% of every day. I have less external stimulation and fewer opportunities to release negative energy. I exercise very rarely because even outside, people won’t wear masks or follow social distancing protocols, which makes me much less likely to go hiking or even for a walk around the block.

In other words, a shit ton is different now. And all of these things impact my feelings of creativity, as well as the amount of energy I have to be creative.

One point that was made in this book, though, that I also think applies to my struggles with keeping to my writing goals is that, regardless of natural talent or personal work ethic, the people who accomplish their goals and seem to get the most done are those who focus their efforts on what they most want to achieve.

I have a busy mind. I always have. As a teen, I could never even start most of my writing projects because I’d finish the outline of one, get inspired with a new idea, and move to the outline of the second before any actual headway had been made on the first. I have more discipline now in that I have finished projects before moving on to new ones (essays, short stories, poems, and now I’ve completed my first collection of poems), but I am still too busy in my creative mind to really devote myself to one thing. I get inspired watching other people be creative and it makes me think, “I can do that, too!” and then I get burnt out/discouraged when the new thing I’m trying doesn’t come naturally or easily to me.

I’ve tried crocheting; it didn’t stick.
I’ve tried knitting; it didn’t stick.
I’ve tried learning new languages; it didn’t stick.
I’ve tried cross-stitching; it sticks in cycles.
I’ve tried drawing so many times; it sticks up to a certain point when I reach the limits of my abilities and then I get angry and give it up.
I’ve considered taking up acrylics and other painting forms and have spent more time thinking about it than actually studying/starting it.

And then I’m heartbroken when I realize it’s been over a month since I’ve written any new poems.

Part of “grit,” then,” is having the discipline to remain focused on one thing, one project, one idea. And it’s not that trying new things is bad. Trying new things is good, but not every new thing is going to aid my creative writing endeavors. Many new things will inevitably detract from my creative writing endeavors, and it’s up to me to figure out which things I mostly need to accomplish to feel fulfilled in life.

This includes genres of writing.

I have always imagined myself writing, completing, and publishing a novel. And maybe one day I will. I’m not going to limit myself there, but I think one part of being a writer is recognizing when we’re not yet ready for a certain goal. Maybe part of why I had only a burst of success with my current novel is that I’m not yet ready to write it? I have been, for over a year now, obsessed with all things poetry and the bulk of my current creative writing ideas are wrapped up in the poetry genre. My reading goal for next year is to read 100 books of poetry, two books of poetry every week. My writing goal for next year is to write more poems than I have yet, both in number of individual poems written, as well as styles and forms I haven’t yet practiced.

I know that I want to be a poet more than anything else. I know that writing poetry feeds my soul and spirit more than anything else. I also know that giving up poetry right now would mean the literal end of my writing desires. I love writing fiction. I love writing nonfiction. But perhaps these two genres were meant to be my stepping stones for finding the poet inside myself?

I also know I want to be a literary scholar. I want to write scholarly papers on Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, and other 19th Century British writers. It’s something else that is simply stirred within me to do and be.

But I also can’t write everything. I know some will disagree with that, but I stand firm in its truthfulness as regards myself. I really can’t write everything. And as much as I want to write it all, I have to decide in every individual moment of composition what I feel I most need to write at that time, and what I can put aside for the time being. In undergrad, I felt that I most needed to write prose: fiction and nonfiction. In my M.F.A., I realized early on that I most needed to write poetry, and with poetry I have remained. There’s something about the fact that, once I left my ex, poetry emerged from inside of me, first in a slow trickle, and then in a flood. There’s something there. Something below the surface. Something blown open when I finally climbed out from under the oppression of his shadow that I still don’t quite recognize.

And it’s not easy, recognizing that the ideas for the books of fiction I have might never come to fruition. Because here’s the truth: if I have to choose between writing poetry or writing prose for the rest of my life, I will absolutely choose poetry. I don’t think I will actually have to make this choice, but I do think I should know this answer now so that if the choice comes, I’m ready for it.

As Angela Duckworth says in her book, “Talent plus effort equals skill. Skill plus effort equals achievement. Effort counts twice.” What do I need to do to protect my efforts with poetry? To push and challenge those efforts? To infuse those efforts with energy and focus? These are the rhetorical questions I’ve been considering since hearing the start of Duckworth’s book. Because while I have an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, I am fairly new to the writing of poetry. I’ve studied poetry for years, but writing it, revising it, editing it, has been only about two years. It takes thousands of hours to become proficient in a skill.

What must I do to become proficient in poetry?

What must you do to become proficient in the thing you love most to do?