New Phase

Let's keep this short and to the point, for there's no time to waste.

It's been five years since I touched this record of my thoughts on process. When collaboration failed, I turned to the self. Working a solo project, you're the only one who can let you down.

I did a lot of letting myself down in the intervening years, but that time produced triumph as well. No failed collaboration, I got myself to the end: a whole book, a novel, ready for sale.

I've tried to explain how it can be done - a little at a time, it must become a habit. Without the habit, there is no constancy, no plodding to the end of the race. And if you please, the race is against time, the most precious resource we have.

Don't work in isolation. They say a writer's life is solitary, but does it have to be that way? The first time I met with a whole group of writers, it astonished me the things that they said. The words on their lips were the words I had used, when I told my spouse of my troubles writing. Find others like you, seek encouragement, don't get lost nor despair.

In the end there is the dream and its decree, that we must go forward or die trying. That is the human spirit, and the end that can be served.

Prolific Aspirations?

This post may be a bit preliminary. I'm still sorting this one out:

For a long time in my life, I have admired very prolific people with large bodies of work. People like Bill Leeb, who has been in or started 9 different bands, or Frank Zappa, who has perhaps the largest discography of all time. I admire people who espouse hard work and dedication as the secret to their success, such as athletes and other successful individuals.

But this admiration is in direct conflict with the other half of me, the half that says slow down, relax, don't stress, have as few desires as possible. The 'calm' me doesn't like to work, and is content not to be successful. This, in turn, is in conflict with the part of me that wants to succeed at something.

But, do I want to be famous? Maybe I do. But until yesterday, I simply admired famous, successful, hard-working, prolific people, and felt guilty about not being those things myself. It then occurred to me, finally, after many years of this, that it is possible that I do admire them, but maybe I don't actually want to be like them. Am I ready to give up my "balanced" life to dedicate everything to one goal? I know that many areas of my life would suffer for the sake of success, if indeed success is even attainable purely through hard work (talent is a difficult metric to guage).

It's just a thought. I had never considered my admiration in this way. My initial goal, "finish one book, at some point" is much more reasonable than the prolificness I coveted and guilted over.

No Goals

This year, I realized that I didn't want to get to the end of my life, at some unknown point in the future, without having done anything.

The list of goals I mentioned in my previous entry is actually a new development. I spent a long time in my life without long-term goals. Growing up, my parents always told me that I needed goals, but I never listened to them and never did anything about it. At one point my father arranged for us to study martial arts together, because, in his words, I needed to know what it was like to work toward something over a long period of time.

This process, I might add, was successful. When we began 8 years ago, I was nothing, and now I'm a martial artist. I have studied four styles with several teachers, and I have taught martial arts classes based on what we learned. There is a markèd difference between 8 years ago and today.

All of that came just a little bit at a time, practicing over and over again. I don't know if this process helped me understand what I should do this year, but I have applied the same principle.

For people like me, who have willpower problems, routine is a powerful structure. After I selected my long-term goals (subject to change) at the beginning of this year, I set about trying to do the same things in the same order every day, without fail, things which worked toward those goals a little bit at a time. For my health goals, this meant exercising every day, just a little bit. I actually ended up having a problem with overtraining, and I had to vary my activities!

I keep my goals in a text document open on my computer desktop, so that I can see them. The Langston Hughes poem I mentioned is right below. This way, I can consider my goals often. This is good because I need to know if my goals have changed, and I need to know whether I am working toward my goals or not. I have noticed myself being very honest about which goals I've done a good job with and which I haven't, which is half the battle.

My original idea for this entry is reflected in the title: I also found out, this year, what happens to people with no goals. When my major goal was snatched away from me, it left me listless, lifeless, and lacking will. It was a horrible feeling, like running at full speed and slamming into a wall. I had been moving uncharacteristically fast toward my big goal of writing a book - even my spouse noticed. When I ran into IP trouble, I suddenly didn't know what I was doing anymore, and so I did nothing. Having no goals is a terrible thing.

You Can't Keep It All

This past evening, my co-author and I discussed his IP decisions and their effects on my long-term plans. As we talked, I re-visited in my mind why I was troubled by having "wasted my time."

Certainly no creative effort is a true waste, is it? Can't it be asserted that each time you create something, you add to yourself?

My grief over having to scrap my plans had to do with my goal. My goal had been to present what I had created to a wide audience, and now, that was off the table. So, from my point of view, his decision was a setback.

The new clarity about my work's IP issues showed me that I had not advanced toward the goal of any publishing/sale/distribution, and that was disappointing. But had I not advanced in any other way?

One reason I particularly disliked this turn of events is that some of the work I've done is unsalvageable. [For clarity: half of the situation I'm in now amounts to misunderstanding / poor communication between my friend and I, and the other half comes from my (poor) choice of source material. The bit of work I've done that is unsalvageable is directly related to the latter half.] As we assessed the situation, I realized that my displeasure revealed immaturity on my part.

Expecting to be able to use everything you make is immature. Fighting to protect ill-conceived work is equally so. If you checked out the link in my first post, then it's easy to see a major difference between me and a practiced author: she is mature enough to know when she's created something atrocious, and she throws it away. I am new at this pursuit, and I haven't learned to let go. The flat-out truth is, you can't keep it all, and you shouldn't want to.

I knew or suspected when I laid my plans and began work that I had made a less-than-ideal choice of source material. One method of preventing this kind of grief might be a "confidence check": if you feel confident about your plans (and you've attempted to head off any problems you can anticipate), it's probably okay to go ahead and start work. If you have doubts about what you've planned, then you're not ready to invest a lot of effort into creating - you need to re-visit the planning stage. Invest up front to save a headache later.