I hate writing. What I really love is reading. I tell people I became a professional writer so I could be a professional reader. (Adam Phillips: “I had never had any desire to be a writer. I wanted to be a reader.”)
The Risks Worth Taking
One of my least favorite quotes on creativity comes courtesy of ad man George Lois:
You can be Cautious or you can be Creative (but there’s no such thing as a Cautious Creative).
I hate this quote for two reasons:
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I think the word “Creative” should never be used as a noun
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I am one of the more cautious people I know
A few months ago, a reporter said to me in the middle of an interview, “It seems like you haven’t made any bad choices.” I stammered for a bit and mumbled something about how I’ve been very lucky, but then I told the truth: I’m not a big risk-taker.
Something small, every day
It takes time to do anything worthwhile, but thankfully, we don’t need it all in one chunk. So this year, forget about the year as a whole. Forget about months and forget about weeks.
Focus on days.
The day is the only unit of time that I can really get my head around. Seasons change, weeks are completely human-made, but the day has a rhythm. The sun goes up; the sun goes down. I can handle that.
There’s a reason many recovering alcoholics adopt “one day at a time” as their way of being. Here’s Richard Walker in Twenty-Four Hours A Day:
Anyone can fight the battles of just one day. It is only when you and I add the battles of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives us mad. It is the remorse or bitterness for something that happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.
Building a body of work (or a life) is all about the slow accumulation of a day’s worth of effort over time. Writing a page each day doesn’t seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.
The comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a calendar method that helps him stick to his daily joke writing. He suggests that you get a wall calendar that shows you the whole year. Then, you break your work into daily chunks. Each day, when you’re finished with your work, make a big fat X in the day’s box. Every day, instead of just getting work done, your goal is to just fill a box. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
Every day, no matter what, I make a poem and post it online. Most days they’re mediocre, some days they’re great, and some days they’re awful. (Jerry Garcia: “You go diving for pearls every night but sometimes you end up with clams.”) But it doesn’t matter to me whether the day’s poem was good or not, what matters is that it got done. I did the work. I didn’t break the chain. If I have a shitty day, I go to sleep and know that tomorrow I get to take another whack at it.
The past couple of months, I haven’t worried too much about keeping a calendar, because I’ve got myself pretty well trained. But there’s always the temptation to skip a day, so when I moved into a new studio space last week, one of the first things I did was hang (a modified version) of one of these workplace safety scoreboard signs on the wall. We’ll see how long of a streak I can go on.
Anyways, if you make a New Year’s resolution, make it this: something small, every day.
Figure out what your little daily chunk of work is, and every day, no matter what, make sure it gets done.
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time for the work?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies. You find it in the cracks between the big stuff—your commute, your lunch break, the few hours after your kids go to bed. You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time to work if you look for it.
What I usually recommend: get up early. Get up early and work for a couple hours on the thing you really care about. When you’re done, go about your day: go to school, go to your job, make your family breakfast, whatever. Your teacher or your boss or your kids can’t take your work away from you, because you already did it. And you know you’ll get to do it tomorrow morning, as long as you make it through today.
Do the work every day. Fill the boxes on your calendar. Don’t break the chain.
And should you start to despair at your progress, always keep in mind the words of Harvey Pekar: “Every day is a new deal. Keep working and maybe something will turn up.”
Happy New Year.
This post contains adapted excerpts from my books Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work! Subscribe to my newsletter to get new writing and art every week.
Shut up and write the book (5 things that have helped me recently)
1. Shut up and write the book.
I’m an extreme extrovert, which is really great after I write a book and I have to go out into the world and talk to people about it, but not so great when I need to sequester myself long enough to actually get some real writing done. I do most of my thinking “out loud,” which means ideas don’t really come to me until I’ve expressed them — if I express them through speech, I’m less likely to turn around and go express them in writing…
2. Use the bathroom.
I get a lot of good ideas getting ready in the morning — if I have an idea in the shower, I write it down on my Aqua Notes pad, and if I have an idea after I step out of the shower, I’ll use a dry-erase marker to write it on the bathroom mirror.
3. Fix that mise en place.
Mise en place is a French cooking term that means “everything in place.” It’s used to refer to the way chefs will have all of their ingredients organized and ready to go before they start cooking. For writers, I think it’s equally important to have your workspace organized and ready to go, nothing in your way.
I made a slight adjustment to my desk recently that made a world of difference — I raised my external monitor up slightly, so I could set my laptop in front of it, then I got rid of my external keyboard. Now, when I sit down, I can just open up my laptop and get to work — if I need the extra monitor for research or design work, I can plug it in, but most of the time I don’t even use it.
4. Less notification, more meditation.
It might be an obvious point, but it’s crazy how many of my devices tout their ability to distract me as an intelligent feature. The dumber I make my devices, the smarter I feel. Notifications I’ve killed:
- I turned off all notifications on my iPhone.
- I quit using Tweetdeck on my laptop.
- I turned off my Gmail Notifier.
As for meditation, it’s pretty simple: I put my kid down for a nap, sit at the top of the stairs, set my iPhone timer for 10 mins, and close my eyes. That’s it. I’ve been doing it on and off for about a month and a half and I’ve felt less angry, less stressed, lighter.
More about meditation here. (Above are some crazy visions I’ve had while meditating.)
5. Stop researching.
I’ll let Steven Johnson take this one:
Email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat — particularly for non-fiction writers — comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet.
David McCullough agrees:
There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.
Okay! Back to writing.
If you liked this post, you might like my book, Steal Like An Artist.
The best salespeople are the ones who are in love.
The July 20th issue of Publisher’s Weekly featured a piece I wrote about book tour, bookselling, and my newfound love for indie bookstores. Read it here or below.