Report from the Trenches, #19

Following up on our Poll and its responses from the past two weeks, I’m thinking it might be helpful for me to share my own process and the craziness inside my head right now. Here goes:

The Daily Pressfield is out now, but that was completed (for the writing part, not the promotion) almost two years ago. Since then I’ve been working on—and just finished—a follow-up to A Man at Arms that came out in 2021. I’m really happy with this new one, but as far as my mental health is concerned, that job is over. 

What’s next?

I’ve got two others, both nonfiction, that are at various half-assed points of completion. I have faith in both, but neither one is really catching fire for me right now.

So I’ve started another fiction piece. I’m racked with self-doubt over it. Big, big Resistance. The voice in my head is telling me the idea is really dumb (which it may be) and for sure not commercial. The voice is telling me the idea is totally out of the areas I’ve been writing in (which it is) so that no reader who likes my stuff is going to want to follow me into this totally new area.

And the idea is lightweight. It’s not big or bold or ambitious (though already it’s really hard). The voice is telling me I’ve run out of big ideas. I’m over the hill. It’s time to move to the farm. 

Worse, I think, of this new idea, “How could I possibly sell or promote this?” I have no answer for that either.

Notice please that I’m not offering even the tiniest clue in this post as to what this idea is about. That’s because I’m superstitious. It’s been my practice for years when I start a new project to give the file a name that’s NOT the name of the real book. Why? Because the devil might be watching and I don’t want him to be able to find the file and screw it up.

Ming the Merciless. If only our adversaries were this clear and obvious.

Why am I offering this report from the trenches? I’m not sure myself. I think maybe to encourage all of us reading this with the notion that the process of writing is nuts … and we all go through these ordeals of massive self-doubt and self-sabotage.

Bottom line for me: I’m not stopping. I take the voice in my head as pure Resistance and I draw strength from it, reckoning that Big Resistance = Big Dream. And even though I don’t see how this new project is going to work or possibly appeal to anybody, I know I have to keep going AS IF I WERE CERTAIN that it will or that, even if it doesn’t, it’s important FOR ME in whatever journey I’m on, even though I have no idea what that journey might be or where it’s headed, if it’s headed anywhere at all.

Shit like this is why writers and artists flame out or fall off the path. These are the crazy (and I DO mean crazy) obstacles and shape-shifting fake-outs our work makes us face. There’s not even a name for them. They’re the totally glamourless, quotidian, uncinematic, pain-in-the-ass, solitary-to-us ordeals that nobody but us knows about and even we think we’re crazy when we find ourselves coming up against them.

The pro, I’m telling myself, keeps going even when no progress is visible. Even when her time in the hundred is going up and not down, even when there’s not a part of her body that isn’t hurt and aching. The amateur lets these dark patches discourage her and break her will. The pro shuts up and keeps going.

That’s what I’m telling myself now.

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