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31/10/14 16:04Here is what has been hard for me to learn:
That my relationship with writing is a thing that I couldn't fix all at once; that knowing the right things I should feel, and giving myself pep talks, was insufficient (though a thing I've become very good at). That coming back to it again and again, and accepting the hardness of it, and accepting tiny tiny word counts, and accepting all the times I felt avoidant and suddenly sleepy or preoccupied, and working at it like a thing I almost needed to learn from scratch -- that's been the only way to make it work.
And I still want really badly to sell a lot of books, and be able to write full-time, but I've got to be okay with not telling myself this story of "If you REALLY WANTED IT you would be working fifty billion times harder."
Some time ago I read an essay online arguing that most advice is going to be great for a lot of people and terrible for a lot of people, depending on where they're starting from. "You should work harder" and "You should take a break, you're working hard enough" are both true things for some people and false things for others. And the emphasis in online writers' spaces on "If you want to be a writer you have to write, you have to write a LOT, you have to do it on a SCHEDULE, plumbers don't get plumbers' block they just do their jobs" is understandable and good for a lot of people but if you're in a space of exhaustion and burnout it doesn't really give you room to recover and regrow.
I have to understand that I can work hard without shifting myself into "You have to write ALL the words NOW" mode.
That my relationship with writing is a thing that I couldn't fix all at once; that knowing the right things I should feel, and giving myself pep talks, was insufficient (though a thing I've become very good at). That coming back to it again and again, and accepting the hardness of it, and accepting tiny tiny word counts, and accepting all the times I felt avoidant and suddenly sleepy or preoccupied, and working at it like a thing I almost needed to learn from scratch -- that's been the only way to make it work.
And I still want really badly to sell a lot of books, and be able to write full-time, but I've got to be okay with not telling myself this story of "If you REALLY WANTED IT you would be working fifty billion times harder."
Some time ago I read an essay online arguing that most advice is going to be great for a lot of people and terrible for a lot of people, depending on where they're starting from. "You should work harder" and "You should take a break, you're working hard enough" are both true things for some people and false things for others. And the emphasis in online writers' spaces on "If you want to be a writer you have to write, you have to write a LOT, you have to do it on a SCHEDULE, plumbers don't get plumbers' block they just do their jobs" is understandable and good for a lot of people but if you're in a space of exhaustion and burnout it doesn't really give you room to recover and regrow.
I have to understand that I can work hard without shifting myself into "You have to write ALL the words NOW" mode.