When Want to Becomes Have to

Copyright Square-Enix.  Source

Pressure makes diamonds, or so the saying goes.  But here is an interesting fact: pressure also leads to declining performance.

Let me give you a scenario which is applicable to me and might be applicable to you.  Let’s say I have no job and rent that needs to be paid.  I have no skills (other than writing fiction) and/or contacts and can get no job.  I decide that I can sell short stories for a living.  What happens to my stories?  They never get written or they are crap.  What happens to my motivation?  It declines steadily until I dread the return to the empty screen.

Writing is supposed to be fun.  Not all the time, but it should at least have the capacity to excite you from time to time.  If this is not the case, one of two things is happening.

One, you don’t like writing.  Two, you’re putting too much pressure on yourself.  Pressure you can’t handle.

If your next day’s meal depends on how good your story is, it is likely that it’ll break away some of the allure of writing.  This is a hard subject to accurately determine, since each person’s level of stress-handling is different, but the fact remains.  If you have to, you have less inclination to want to.

When you do this for a living, how do you counterbalance that problem?  You drop the importance scale a bit.  Stephen King says that if getting your kid to baseball practice is just as important as finishing your draft, there’s a lot less pressure.  Make sure you find time to write, but don’t make it so important that you can’t fit anything else in.

You need a bit of pressure and challenge (say, a wordcount for the week), but when I want to becomes I have to, there is a problem you should look at.

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Make a Plan (Not Excuses)

Copyright Natsume.  Source

This is my first (if you don’t count the quotation on Monday) post of the year and today I’m going to talk about excuses.  This may or may not be familiar, but I think it is a fairly common problem (especially with writers).

It is a form of procrastination and it took up a hell of a lot of time for me in the beginning of last year.  I made excuses.

There is a saying in Afrikaans that goes like this: ‘n Boer maak ‘n plan.  It translates to “A farmer makes a plan.”  (I don’t think the farmer part is there to specifically point out farmers, but rather because the majority of the Afrikaans speaking people at the time this saying was created relied on farming as their source of living.  And it became a sort of an unfortunate nickname for Afrikaans people.)

Anyway, what it means is that there is an alternative plan can be made.  In one word, adapt.  If something goes wrong, find a way to fix it.  Make use of what you have to fix the problem.  I’m not sure what the American or UK equivalent is, but I’m sure the Great Depression folks followed this philosophy.

Back to writing, I often made excuses as to why I couldn’t write.  For example, in my brief stint as a plot-card-guy, I didn’t want to start until I got cards that were the EXACT right size.  I could’ve written on pieces of paper or post-it notes, but I wanted it to be perfect before I began, and that really slowed me down.  (Eventually I got over myself and wrote on post-its.)

My point is that we often try to find crutches to support our writing.  Like saying that you’ll write later when you can afford to buy Scrivener.  But the actual fact is that you don’t need it.  Stephen King wrote his first stories with a drum print for which he had to buy stencils at 19 cents apiece.  Hemingway wrote on paper and on a typewriter (apparently he wrote descriptions longhand and dialogue with a typewriter).

If you have fancy things and they help you, great.  If you don’t, maak ‘n plan, make a plan.

Don’t make excuses not to write.  Write.

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