Report From the Trenches, #20

The Opposite of a Practice A Practice Is Not a Means to an End

Report From the Trenches, #20

A further update from the front …

I reported a few weeks ago about the experience of massive self-doubt on a new fiction piece I’m just starting. This has been superseded in the past week or two by a period that I’m sure we’re all depressingly familiar with:

When you work hard hard hard every day and see absolutely no progress.

I don’t know if there’s even a name for this. The closest I can think of is John Keats’ “negative capability.”

Whatever it is, it’s a trial that definitely separates the pros from the amateurs. Can we take it? Can we keep slogging?

The place I’ve read most about this phenomenon is in accounts of athletes. The pole vaulter who hits height X but just can’t get past it. The miler whose times refuse to get better, no matter how hard she trains, recuperates, etc.

I’ve read about it in football or basketball, like the famous time when Phil Jackson installed the “triangle offense” with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. The team “buys in.” It works and works … and just keeps losing. They can’t get over the hump no matter how many times the coach implores them to “trust the process.”

In other words, this shit is normal.

It IS the process.

What’s weird for me is that I’ve gone through this fifty times on previous projects, but I always FORGET how hard it was. Looking back, I remember struggling a bit … but not like what I’m going through THIS time.

Bottom line: Resistance takes many pernicious and diabolical forms—and this is one of them.

Are we pros? Can we “play hurt?” Alas, there’s no hack or trick for this (or for any of Resistance’s schemes) except to keep muddling through.

Did you ever see the PBS pic, “The Gathering Storm,” starring Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave, about Winston Churchill’s wilderness years in the late ’30s before he was called back to His Majesty’s government as First Lord of the Admiralty?