Category: just do it (page 2 of 4)

your inner editor

January 12, 2017 / / 2 Comments

A favorite exercise of those who want to get over the mental block of writing and just get words on the page is to pretend there is no backspace key on your keyboard. The goal is to just write like you should, to type as you’re thinking and get into a flow state to get lots of words on the page. You’ll write much faster by turning off your inner editor. Just keep typing.

For those like myself who just can’t help but use that backspace key, there are apps that completely eliminate that temptation:

  • First, there’s nope.press. Any time you try to use the backspace key, you’ll be greeted by an audible “nope” instead.
  • If you need a little more incentive to keep getting those words on the page, “the most dangerous writing app” takes it a step further by deleting your work if you don’t keep typing.
  • Then there’s write or die. This is for the truly masochistic writer. Not only will it delete your progress if you don’t keep going, but it’s as evil as you want to make it beyond that. You set a timer and a word count goal. Then it’s up to you if you want a pleasant auditory or visual reward for continuing to type (such as nature sounds or kittens in the background), or an unpleasant consequence (like spiders crawling across your screen).

It’s such an ingrained habit to use the backspace key. I hate seeing mistakes on the page because I hate the idea of having to go back later to fix them. That’s me in a nutshell: I’d rather get unpleasant tasks out of the way right freaking now so I don’t have to remember to do them later. But perhaps I’m sabotaging myself more than I realize with this kind of mindset.

I find that if I write without a backspace key, I write slower so as to avoid mistakes. That defeats the point of the exercise. I’m supposed to turn off my inner editor. Mistakes aren’t the enemy. Failing to get words on the page is the enemy. Mistakes are a part of practice.

Your internal editor can disguise itself as your friend but really be a form of resistance that can go unnoticed for years. I’m realizing now for the first time that that inner editor goes deeper than with writing. I want to fix things as they arise, which may be taking time from what I really need to be focusing on. I need to get the bulk of the work done first, to get in the flow of doing it to get my best work out. You get your best work out on the first try when your thoughts are raw, not by editing them as they come out. Get out the good work onto the page as it exists in your mind now, in its most purest, freshest form. You can fix it up later. The important thing is to preserve the original thoughts. If you compile all of the time that you would have used backspacing or erasing or otherwise fixing little mistakes along the way (or doing things peripheral to, but ultimately distracting from, the task at hand), it will probably add up to a lot more time than you would like to admit.

There may be thoughts in your head that don’t get a chance to make it onto the page because you focused your attention to editing or something else, to something like writing down another idea as it pops into your head. Now your focus is on your to-do list rather than the subject you were initially writing about. Now you’ve broken your momentum. There were thoughts in your head about the subject you had started a flow of writing on, but you broke that stream of consciousness and aborted something that might have turned into a good bit of writing.

Just keep going. That is the important thing. You did the hard work of showing up, now you have to do the hard work of keeping solid focus and finding your flow state. You’ve sat down to do the work, you’ve eliminated distractions, now the really hard part is undoing that thing that has become such a habit in your creative life and every other part of your life. You have to turn off the part that wants to “fix it now.” If you’re a perfectionist like me, this is a deep-seated habit. But your work with will thank you for it if you just let yourself get into that flow state. Dive into the work distraction-free, without the pressure to be perfect, and you’ll be surprised what comes out of you. You could have pages and pages that would have remained in your head if you were editing along the way. You could make something much more beautiful than your editing hands normally allow if you can force yourself to turn off your editor brain, to let your brain go where it wants to go, unencumbered by the pursuit of perfection. Perfection is not the goal. Perfection is the enemy of done. Ge get the important work done. Edit later. So what if you waste a canvas? It’s a first draft of an idea. You can paint it again better if you want to. The important thing was that you tried it on the page. You tried it on the canvas. You brought it into existence. There is absolutely nothing wasted if you write a super messy first draft. You do, however, risk wasting an awful lot if you edit as you go and don’t get all of the gems in your mind onto the page.

I imagine someone panning for gold. You can’t find all the gold out there. Know that going in. But if you want to find the quality gold, you don’t walk along the river bank hoping to find one perfect nugget of gold. You grab a ton of sand and sift through it. You take a pan full of dirt and let the current take it. You let the river do the work until you’re left with lots of little bits of gold to sift through later. Then you compile all those tiny flecks into something valuable. But you can’t find the flecks unless you sift through the sand, and you’ll never see them if your only goal is to find perfectly formed nuggets on the bank.

Similarly, if wheat harvesters walked through the field and gathered individual grains, at the end of the day they will not have even gathered enough usable grain to feed themselves. Instead, they glean whole stalks at a time. Later, they separate out the usable grain by allowing the wind to blow away the unusable chaff.

First you think bigger and just go forward. Go with the flow without worrying about precision. Later, you can pick and choose what you want use and what you want to throw away. You are a gleaner and a gold miner, but only if you don’t waste your time expecting a perfect end product to fall in your lap. It’s important to get the crud out of the way to uncover the good stuff. Send your inner editor on vacation so you can just WRITE WRITE WRITE (or draw, or paint, or whatever it is you’re passionate about doing). That flow state is where you want to be.

perfectionism, part three: consistency

February 24, 2016 / / 1 Comment

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”   –Mark Twain

A huge part of what stunts creative work is the feeling that we need to do perfect work instead of prolific amounts of work. In last week’s post about procrastination as it relates to perfectionism, I compared this to taking continuous steps rather than making a single, intimidating leap. There are habits creatives can adopt to keep on a consistent schedule of creating and keep that daunting beast of perfectionism at bay.

Routine

Many highly focused people, especially creatives, maintain consistency by creating rigid daily routines. My grandfather was very routine-driven. Every evening he would shave, shower, and get into his pajamas. Then he would fix himself a small stack of cheese and saltines, which he ate while he made his to-do list for the following day on a pocket-sized memo pad. During his lunchtime, he would check off what he had done so far that day, then revisit the list in the evening. If anything wasn’t done, he carried it over to tomorrow’s list. He knew exactly what needed to be done the next day, so he could just wake up and start doing them without having to waste time deciding where to start or devising a plan of action. He created momentum for getting things done every day because his consistency eliminated any guesswork for what would need to be done when he showed up to the tasks every morning.

Having too much freedom can invite paralysis. Narrowing your focus ahead of time makes tasks easier to check off your list, so you will be more likely to accomplish them. Eliminate as many choices as possible so you’re not overwhelmed, and be specific about your to-do list for the next day. Having tomorrow’s tasks in mind when you go to bed allows your subconscious to mull it over all night and wake up in the morning with a fresh perspective.

Don’t Break the Chain

Developing a consistent habit keeps you from crashing and burning when you just don’t feel like showing up. Jerry Seinfeld is credited with the technique of “not breaking the chain.” In short, if you want to be motivated to improve at something, mark off on a calendar each day that you’ve shown up and done that thing. Once you see a chain of marked off days, you won’t want to see an unmarked day on the calendar. You don’t want to see that you’ve broken your promise to yourself. You want to keep the chain going as long as possible. Once you break one link, it’s easy to let yourself break another one. The longer the chain, the more motivated you’ll be to keep it going. Show up every day to maintain momentum and keep Resistance at bay. Say yes every single day to the activity that’s most important to you.

Often like begets like. When I start writing, I get ideas for several more things I want to write about. That creates an idea snowball. Conversely, if I skip a weekly post or my daily writing, it’s way too easy to let myself flake out on consecutive days. Want momentum and endless ideas? Keep the yes going.

Practice, Practice, Practice

If you haven’t read the book Art and Fear, please stop reading and go buy it or check it out at your local library. You can read it in a couple of hours and it will change your life. In it, we are told the parable of two groups of ceramics students. One group was to be judged solely on the quality of their work, the other on quantity. While the quality group focused their efforts on creating one perfect pot, the other group turned out so many iterations that they got really good at it. Because they had so much more practice than the quality group, the quantity group ended up producing a higher quality.

clay-pots-jodhpur

There’s an old Chinese parable along the same lines. A king commissioned an artist to paint a picture of a rooster. After a year, the artist had still not come through with the painting and the king complained. The artist painted him a perfect rooster on the spot. The king responded, “If you can paint a perfect rooster in five minutes, why has it taken so long for you to give me this painting?” The artist shows the king to his studio, where there are stacks of thousands of rooster paintings. He tells the king, “It has taken me a year to be able to paint a perfect rooster in five minutes.”

rooster2

When we get hung up on perfectionism over just showing up and practicing consistently, we can miss the big picture. We get better by doing. Rarely will our work be up to our own standards, but we can only hope to excel by doing it thousands of times. Ira Glass states it nicely:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

It’s not a matter of choosing either quality or quantity. Quantity begets quality. Don’t let perfectionism keep you from producing work that may not meet your standards. Don’t make perfectionism your goal; you can only hope to get any closer to it by producing lots and lots of (probably bad) work. Every work you treat as practice is another step further in your growth as a creative.

Consistency Defines You

Here’s a related thought from an earlier post about permission :

Consistency is what gives you permission to call yourself something. You can call yourself whatever you want; it’s what you actually do that people will notice and identify you by. Who you are isn’t defined by whether or not you’re getting attention, or if somebody picked you out of a lineup of other people vying for attention, or somebody telling you that you’re good enough. You are what you consistently do…when you show up every day, you are showing up to the same world as everyone else, but you are showing up with your story.

What you do on a consistent basis is what identifies you to others. The work that you do the most is what sets you apart.

perfectionism, part two: procrastination

February 17, 2016 / / 1 Comment

You’ll go further taking one step every day than you will staring at the chasm you intend to overcome in a single jump.

The other day as I was reflecting on procrastination, I had the thought that maybe procrastination isn’t about caring too little about something to see it through. I believe the opposite is often true, that it comes from caring so much that we get paralyzed by the idea of not completing it to the perfect level that we had hoped to attain (see part one).

Identity and romanticism

It may be a combination of that and caring more about the peripheral consequences of not finishing the thing you’re putting on hold. I care so much about writing, but I don’t do it as regularly as I ought because I’m afraid of it not being perfect. Of course it will never be perfect. But I do it because I said I was going to, because I want to be a writer, and because when I do it I feel like I’m in my element.

The consequences of not writing include letting myself down, falling back on my promise (explicit or not) to my readers to post every week, and putting my reputation at stake. In school, my grades and diploma were at stake, in addition to my identity and reputation among my peers and professors. It can be very daunting when doing what you love feels like it includes holding your identity in the balance.

Practice

Rarely do we think of the consequences of procrastinating. Generally, there’s just an overall guilt of not doing that thing. When I do remember how silly it is to put off doing something I love or to which I (for better or worse) attach my identity, I have to remember that I only get better with practice. It’s stupid to be paralyzed by perfectionism. That next thing that you’re going to do is just one of many thousands of iterations you should be performing to hone that skill. Always strive for excellence, but it’s absurd to expect to sit down and turn out a masterpiece in one shot.

Each member of an orchestra tunes up and practices before each performance. They don’t just show up and play a note-perfect symphony. Excellent musicians practice constantly. They stay sharp by practicing scales and rudiments every single time they pick up their instrument. They don’t become virtuosos by thinking scales are something they learned as a kid and therefore don’t need anymore. Proficiency is only possible with practice. The same is true for athletes, painters, actors, singers, writers, newscasters, carpenters–literally any skilled person became skilled because of repetition.

Not every painting that every famous painter did was their piece de resistance either. The great ones in anything showed up to their work every day. Sure, they were probably perfectionists, too. But those who excel at what they do only got to that level because they overcame that mental hang-up and just did it over and over and over again. They probably hated even their best works.

The less Art there is in painting, the more painting there is. –Picasso

Just keep doing your craft and the next thing you make will overshadow the last thing. When you sit down to do your work, remind yourself that this is not your Guernica or Sistine Chapel. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you create something. Everything has been done, but anything you do will have your unique spin on it. Put in your time doing the rudiments in preparation for the good work that will come out of you. But get over the idea that you have to turn out your masterpiece.

Picasso said, “the less Art there is in painting, the more painting there is.” In other words, quit thinking everything you do has to be a significant piece of art and just shut up and do it. The more you romanticize the medium, the more you’re likely to be too intimidated to do it. (More on that in a later post.) Forget about external judgments, definitions or standards lest they leave you too overwhelmed to even start.

Picasso averaged at least two paintings per day in his lifetime. How many of those were ever seen by anyone but himself? Jimi Hendrix, who only lived to the age of 27, made around 70 albums. Mozart composed over 600 pieces in his lifetime and certainly wasn’t famous until later in life. Charles Schulz created nearly 18,000 Charlie Brown comic strips before he died. You better believe they all practiced their craft every day without fail and weren’t paralyzed by the thought that each next thing had to be their masterpiece.

Expectation

You’ve heard it said that sometimes people spend their whole lives with their masterpiece still in them because they were afraid to try; or what’s just as disappointing, they obsess so much about creating their one big thing that they miss the fact that they might have already succeeded. Maybe you were so focused on what you thought it would be that you already created what the world sees as your masterpiece, but you didn’t see it because it didn’t come about how you’d imagined. Instead of a singular piece, it came about as the result of practicing and doing your work every single day. Maybe a work you’ve already done resonated with someone, or simply your dedication to doing the work consistently resonated with someone.

A closet full of unused canvases is a huge waste compared to the small amount the paint “wasted” on what you might think is a failure of a painting. But you practiced. A blank page is sadder than a bad poem. Every artist has done loads of bad work before they became masters. The common denominator is that every single day they shut out the negative inner voice that told them they weren’t good enough and did it anyway.

The longer you wait to do something, the more you build up in your head and hold it to an unattainable standard. The ten unedited journal pages your write for your eyes only have more value than the book you intend to write. The small steps taken to hone your craft are valuable and help add up to the greater works ahead.

You’ll go further taking one step every day than you will staring at the chasm you intend to overcome in a single jump. Don’t be so intimidated by the distance that you don’t make that first step. That step itself may make a difference to someone, and it will certainly build momentum in your skill.

fear of futility

November 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Do you ever get tired of feeling guilty for not producing enough? For me, in the middle of National Novel Writing Month, this novel writing business is proving to be something hanging over my head rather than an enjoyable activity; I feel like I’m letting it defeat me.

Life is too short to not do something meaningful, but it will feel a lot longer than you’d like if you continually beat yourself up for not being perfect. It’s a catch-22. You will never meet your own standards, and that subconscious idea that perfection is the goal is completely paralyzing. Isn’t it better to just get something done rather than beat yourself up over something that you barely even started?

I know I have these unspoken, arbitrary, lofty standards. But what’s the point of such high standards if I’m incapable of meeting them? If I’m so afraid of failure that I never accomplish anything? If I have nothing to show for all my showing up, then I have failed. If I just do it I have succeeded. Isn’t the latter easier? What is keeping me from just doing the work to even 75% of my standards? There’s time for revision later. Why can’t I just do it? What am I so afraid of? Why do I feel like I’m not even capable? There are millions of people in the world doing what I’m doing. I know I can do it just as well or better than most of them, but not all of them. Being the best isn’t even the point. So what is it that causes me so much anxiety and paralysis?

It’s Resistance with a capital R. I’ve been showing up every day and trying to get out of my own way so the muse can show up. Shouldn’t that be enough to banish Resistance? Why is it still rearing its ugly head? What psychological roadblocks am I not seeing? It’s not fear of success, because finishing the first draft of a novel doesn’t really require anything of me after it’s done. I can roll with it or not. It can’t be the fear of failure because the only way to fail at writing is to not write. A draft is malleable. I can always fix what isn’t perfect. There are only words, and my only failure is not putting them on the page. I’m sure part if it is that little nagging dark force telling me that this isn’t what I should be doing. I should give up. I’m not a writer. I should either move on to some other creative pursuit (which I also won’t be good at) or just give up. Resistance is manifesting itself as both inadequacy and futility. What’s the point of all of this? My work doesn’t matter. My work won’t matter. So what’s the point of doing it? Why show up every day and pour my heart out? What are my blood, sweat, and tears going to accomplish in the end? I struggle to find the meaning and purpose in any of it. Who am I helping by showing up to write every day?

Somewhat ironically, the novel I’m struggling to write deals with immortality and youth. I ask myself why a character would want to live much longer, even with the benefits of youth. My thought was that many people wouldn’t know how to handle living more than a hundred years, that only those with an exceptional sense of purpose and joy would want to go on living. If you outlived all of your loved ones, what would keep you going? Albert Camus said that it takes more courage to live than to commit suicide, and that happiness (even for Sisyphus) is to enjoy your work in spite of the apparent futility of existence. I think the drive to create is stronger than the desire for immortality. Creativity, in one form or another, is where souls find their purpose. It’s how we make sense out of the lives we are living, and helps us and others enjoy that life. It brings context and clarifies meaning for us as we try to imagine what forever might be like. The need to create is a very strong human calling, and when I feel creatively blocked, I start to lose my sense of purpose, direction, joy, and meaning. Guilt creeps in.

Piled on top of personal guilt is the public shame of not having a word count on the NaNoWriMo site for my novel. This feels like a huge failure. Maybe it is a failure at the moment, but the entire project hasn’t failed. I am not a failure. I am a person who matters, who loves to write, and will write my heart out. Even if it feels like it doesn’t matter. Defeat is a mindset. The only thing causing me to fail is the idea that I’m not good enough. If I show up and write in spite of that voice in my head, I’ve won.

It’s frustrating to say that the cure for creative block is to just create, but time and again that’s the answer that reveals itself. Feel like you can’t do it? Just show up and do it. Simply doing anything creative usually helps to make the guilt of creative block go away, even if it’s not related to what you want to accomplish. If you’ve been staring at a blank page for a while, get up and go outside with your sketch book or make some bread. Every act of making something helps to bring you back to your center and remind you of the joy of creating without the pressure of meaning or perfection. It’s in your DNA to create, so find something–however small and seemingly insignificant–to make that makes you happy and don’t feel guilty about counting that as a success. It’s part of showing up to your work. If you showed up, you’ve won.

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