Taking Stock

Last few days I have been very annoyed with myself, for not really making good progress on my current work-in-progress. I have been procrastinating more than usual, and eating more junk food to compensate, and generally feeling like I haven’t been putting my best foot forward.

Trying to cheer myself up, I was talking to my mom, who asked me if I was being hard on myself. To which I mentally replied – ‘no, I don’t think I'm being hard enough’. Then she told me about something difficult she accomplished recently – and that given the obstacles she faced and the constraints she was under, she did the best job she could under the circumstances. And when she said that, I realised – I was upset because I was comparing to myself to other people, vague others who were probably writing 5000 words a day and completing their books in 3 weeks. Which I wasn’t – nowhere close. I had to instead be content that I was making much better progress than I had been previously – at least I was writing every day, or almost every day.

And then I looked up my stats for this year – my cobbled together spreadsheet listing everything I have written so far this year – and realized that my total word count for this year till date – is more than 290,000 words! Which is an awesome feat for me, compared to any other year so far. And granted, not all of that is great or publishable, but it means I'm making progress, I'm getting better as a writer.

It’s easy to compare to ourselves with others – there is always someone better, prettier, richer than us. The only way to maintain sanity is to keep taking action, keep making progress, and sometimes take stock – look back on that long road and see how far you’ve come. Stop, drink an ice-cream soda, and then start again – renewed and refreshed by taking stock of how many steps you have already taken.

Just A Restless Feeling

Lately I have been having trouble with momentum, as I have mentioned earlier. The last few days working on my current book-length project, it’s really felt like pulling teeth. I keep finding all sorts of distractions, things I would rather be doing than work on my project. I do have a self-imposed deadline coming up, and knowing that I am behind already, I have been pushing myself to make good progress.

I finally gave in and decided to catch up on my RSS feeds, and I came across this article, which quoted author Josh Shenk, reminding me that writing a book-length project is hard:

Writing a book is a crushingly lonely experience in ways that no one who hasn’t been through it can really imagine.

Reading this helped me recognise my restlessness and nervousness of the last few days – I'm at the point in the project that the initial excitement has worn off and I'm far enough off from the end that I'm feeling the burn, it’s getting progressively harder to maintain a good pace. I just have to recognise to myself – yes, this is hard, yes I’m lonely because I have declined all social invitations in order to write, and that’s just how it is. But the good thing I that I'm not the first author to face this, I'm not strange or weird. Knowing others have gone through this, survived and gone on to other projects makes me feel much better.

Obstacles to Creativity

Artists, and indeed anyone trying something new, taking some risks, going out on a limb, face obstacles as a matter of course. The only problem is that every time we face them, we are surprised, unprepared and more than a little annoyed at the disruption to our routine and plan.

Obstacles can be in the form of an unexpected event taking precious time away from a deadline, like the family emergency that happened to me at the beginning of the month, taking away 2 whole weeks of precious time from my deadline, and even more time trying to regain my previous momentum. They can be in the form of a sudden illness, or a last minute request from a client or boss, that may threaten to derail your present assignment.

Obstacles may also come up in your creative arsenal – your laptop starts to give trouble, freezes or becomes agonizingly slow just as the last hours of the deadline creep up on you; you discover that you’re out of the exact shade of fabric you needed for a crucial detail; or, as I have been facing for the last few days, you get pain in your fingers and find it difficult to type or hold a pen.

Our tools are everything to us, and when they don’t work or we forget a crucial implement in our toolkit, it can be beyond frustrating. It can be debilitating. The first thought at such a time is to curse, get angry, blame sundry forces that are conspiring against you.

However, I have come to believe that obstacles are actually your friends, in disguise. They are there to test your resolve, to see if you really have what it takes to complete your project, to wow your client and deliver on your promises. It’s not supposed to be a test so you can fail; if you recognise that it’s simply a gut-check time, do you have the conviction in yourself to go all the way, to follow through, then the obstacles transforms into a challenge, something you are anxious to overcome, to triumph over and send packing.  

When the project is over, when you have crossed the finish line, the obstacles that you have overcome are what you will look back on with pride, they will fuel your sense of accomplishment. So look at them with appreciation, and tell yourself that the obstacles you’re facing are actually a sign that you’re getting close to the end, and to your achievement.