We all got into writing because we dreamed of writing a book, having a way to express our ideas or because we wanted to see our name in print.
Something drove you to put pen to paper or wriggle your fingers over a keyboard.
It was exciting to start with. The beginning of the manifestation of your dreams. The first step on the way to having a best-seller, giving up the job or general super-stardom.
But then it got hard.
The book took SO much longer than you thought. And then it needed a re-write. Then you gave it to a couple of friends to read and they had the audacity to not understand the wit and beauty in your words. They even suggested other ways you could have done it.
What was once exciting became a drudge. A scary drudge because the inner gremlin increasingly started to show up and whisper doubts in your ear.
Meanwhile daily life continued to be challenging, but now it’s worse because you opened the door to potentially better possibilities but they haven’t happened yet. The drudge gets worse.
You’re bogged down in the writing. You’ve gone too far to give it up (and you’ll hate yourself if you do) but it isn’t panning out the way you wanted. It’s hard. There’s a lot to learn, both in the craft of writing and in figuring out how to get a bajillion readers.
You start to feel sorry for yourself. And you start to complain about it.
In her book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert has a stern rebuke for you:
… you’re scaring away inspiration. Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you, offended. It’s almost like inspiration puts up its hands and says, “Hey, sorry, buddy! I didn’t realize my presence was such a drag. I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
No one is making you do it (unless you signed a contract for your work) so if it is really that bad then you have two choices:
stop and find something more pleasurable to do in your spare time
or
learn to tame the complaint and reframe the harder part of writing to something more encouraging.
I hope you don’t take the first option (though for some people it might be the best course of action), so let me help with the second.
The shit sandwich
Staying with Elizabeth Gilbert, in Big Magic she talks about the shit sandwich. The theory is that most lofty goals involve having to suck up some bad and difficult stuff too. For example, if you want to be a top flight lawyer then you are going to have to work some serious hours. If you can’t take the shit sandwich of the hours then you aren’t going to make it to where you want to go.
For writers the shit sandwich includes facing rejection, spending years working on our craft but still not earning a sustainable income or facing fear and doubts every time we sit down to write.
These things go with the territory. However, continuing in spite of them also brings us the joy of having our characters grow on the page, having likes or comments on a blog post where we know we have touched someone’s heart or the satisfaction of seeing our name on the cover of a book.
I was listening to Creative Penn podcast yesterday where Joanna Penn talked about the difference between being a writer and an author. Writing is the activity that most of us enjoy – sitting at our laptops or notebooks and creating something new. But being an author also involves marketing that work, dealing with the technology of getting it published as well any business aspects to our writing. I thought that was an interesting distinction.
Complaint v gratitude
In my Buddhist practice we are told that complaint puts a hole in our bucket of good fortune. No matter what goodness you put in the bucket, such as prayer and meditation or being kind to others, if you keep complaining, your benefit will drain away.
The best way to counteract complaint is with gratitude. There have been numerous studies that show that expressing gratitude has huge benefits for our mental and our physical health. (This article looks at a number of those studies and findings.)
I like to think of three things to be grateful for as I get ready to go to sleep at night. Mostly they are very small, every day things. For example, the new recipe book from which I made a delicious dinner, or the lady in the coffee shop who noticed that I’d dropped my scarf, or the lovely conversation I had with my best friend.
If your writing is proving difficult, what are three things you can think of right now to feel grateful for?
I’m grateful that the first rough draft of this article had some good nuggets in it. I’m grateful that I bought a new handbag recently which inspired me to write about it as a character in my Tales of the Countess series. And I’m grateful that I’ve had enough energy, in spite of my recent bout of fatigue, to write these weekly articles.
There’s always more to learn
It is easy to be frustrated because you’re not as good a writer as you’d like to be, or because you are daunted at the scale of the fixes required for your novel.
Sometimes we come to writing, expecting to be good at it simply because we know how to speak and use the English language. But there are skills to article writing, plotting a novel or making relatable characters. These take time to master.
How many years did it take you to get proficient and respected in your day job – which you spend 40 hours a week doing? Getting to where you want to be with your writing will take also take time.
You can choose to enjoy the learning experience. Learning is growing and growing keeps us youthful, irrespective of how old we are.
Don’t let the gremlin win
The feeling of complaint might be a special facet of your inner gremlin. It’s much safer for the gremlin to make you think your writing isn’t worth it.
It’s difficult to write. If it wasn’t, everyone would have written that book they’ve been prattling about for years, and they’d all be on the New York Times best-seller list!
We have no choice but to trust process and know that there is a solution to a difficult part in our writing if we just keep on digging.
Yes, there is drudgery in plodding forward consistently not always seeing results, but focus on the pay-off. Think back to a time when something wonderful came into fruition because you stayed the course and doggedly stuck to a plan of action, even though it had its difficult moments where you just wanted to give up and run away.
What one small useful act could you do when you catch yourself complaining about your work?
Photo credits: Elisa Ventur on Unsplash, engin akyurt on Unsplash, Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash
You might also find this article useful:
Writing A Novel Is Like Doing An Archaeological Dig - Both are meticulous and involve creating something viable from fragments and clues
Plodding gently
Cali xx
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I really appreciated this post! Thank you for sharing.
This is such a great reminder to appreciate the opportunity to write rather than complain about dashed expectations or hopes. When my book came out, the PR team was overwhelmed with the number of books they had to handle (due to being acquired by one of the big publishing companies) but convinced me they could handle it. Since I'd previously been a PR exec, I was constantly disappointed by what I perceived as them not doing enough. There was no benefit to this, and in fact I'd sometimes lose the pleasure of having been published!! This piece is a great reminder to appreciate what is instead of lament what's not.