The Writing Life
If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do. Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art”
If you intend to write and publish a book, you have given yourself an immense challenge. You might think it’s impossible to do. You must not think that. If you hope to make your intention a reality, you must view it as something that is possible.
Pressfield may be known for the line “do the work,” but it isn’t original to him. He simply made it popular. The term has been around for years, even centuries.
Some days – sometimes many days or weeks or months – you are going to awaken, and you’ll be more tired than or just as tired as when you went to bed. Everything in you argues with the alarm. You wonder how it’s 5:30 a.m. already. You wonder why you set the alarm for such an early hour, then remember you are trying to create a space in which you can do your work. Even so, you struggle not to throw the alarm against the wall. You argue with the voice that says to turn off the alarm and to pull the covers over your head.
I’m sometimes asked how I deal with failure or how I keep moving forward when I struggle with perfectionism. One of the tricks is to keep a forward mindset as well as an other-minded one. The other, to borrow a phrase from Paul Jarvis, is to “view everything as an experiment.”
On the days the words don’t come easily, you have two choices: you can whine about the fact, or you can get to work. If you’re in the former group, I give you permission to wail about the difficulty for two minutes. You’re not going to get anything done until you do. I know. I’ve been there, so go. Cry, scream, or swear for the next two minutes then come back. Are you back? Good. Now you’re ready to join the latter group, the one that yells “This is Sparta!” and gets to work.