There's a lesson in there somewhere
How to get started (or restarted) creatively
Hello! I took a break there that was part-intentional and part-unintentional. It can be hard creatively to get started, especially if you’re prone to overthinking. Here are quotes from writers you may know who had the same issue.
I recently hurt my back almost a month ago and it turned out to be more recovery-intensive than I thought. For the first few days, I spent a lot of time sitting on an orthopedic pillow in a desk chair. As my back didn’t improve and the pain got worse, I figured I had to go to the doctor.
As it turned out, it was not a bruised tailbone as I had thought, just a common back injury. Long story short, everything’s fine now. It’s one of those events where seeking medical attention improves the situation immediately, so I’m annoyed I didn’t do it sooner.
But the most important part of this is that during the last few weeks, I didn’t feel like writing anything. Then for the last week, I didn’t know what to write. As each day went by, I got frustrated with not doing anything. It’s hard to get started.
Instead, I did what I normally do (and then regret later) when I’m stumped and that’s stare at my phone. During one of my scrolls through Pinterest, I saw this quote:
This one felt specific to my latest procrastination. The awkwardness and doubt that comes when starting (or restarting) something is overwhelming enough to stop, because for me, the weight of embarassment feels like more than the cost of entry. I was ready to start multiple times but that little voice in my head whispering, …But what if this sucks? That voice is persuasive at times of doubt.
The antidote? Books and time
But what helped me get throught it was reading. In the last few weeks, I cranked through a bunch of books and specific quotes from authors stuck in my brain. This one from the foreward to the Calvin & Hobbes Collection felt directed at me:
By the fall of 1981…[a]t this point, I had four years to go before drawing Calvin and Hobbes. Four years is a pretty long time, especially when there's no indication that the story will end well. On weekdays, I designed car and grocery ad layouts in the windowless basement office of a free weekly shopper for minimum wage. I learned a bit about design doing this job, but one might charitably say the boss had rage issues, so the office environment was dreary and oppressive, except when enlivened with episodes of fire-breathing insanity.
After a certain amount of this sort of life, a reasonable person cuts his losses and opts for a different career, but I don't recall that this ever seriously crossed my mind. In the free time I had, I drew up more comic strips. In hindsight, all this failure was my good fortune…My early strip proposals were unevenly written-an occasional good character surrounded by flat ones, put into limited or clichéd worlds beyond my experience. These are common mistakes, but the only way to learn how to write and draw is by writing and drawing. The good thing about working with almost no audience was that I felt free to experiment.
Nobody cared what I did, so I tried pretty much anything that came into my head, acquired some new skills along the way, and gradually learned a bit about what worked and what didn't ... Eventually, one syndicate expressed some interest in my work. They didn't like the strip I'd done, but they liked one of the secondary characters--a boy with an imaginary stuffed tiger. The syndicate gave me a contract to develop them into a comic strip of their own. I knew these characters had more life than any of the others I'd done, but I'd always resisted the idea of doing a "kid strip," partly because of the long shadow that Peanuts cast over the whole genre. The more I wrote, however, the better the boy seemed to be, and I had the sensation that the strip was "clicking."
I was overthinking the importance of everything on here. So the summary from this quote is “No one cares as much as you do so do what feels right. It will figure itself out.”
That thought felt like the first step in quieting the 😱What if this sucks?😱 voice.
More books
I also picked up The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman and have been reading it to the kids. Since it’s an anniversary edition, it features a short forward from Pullman about the origin of the story. One paragraph has this gem:
When I began the whole story, I didn't think it would do more than sell a few hundred copies and then vanish. But I'd written a few books by that time, and I knew what I was doing, and I think my craftsmanship was sound; and besides, I had a feeling that if this book wasn't going to sell very well, there was no point in trying to please people, so I could take a risk and write what I really wanted to write.
So that's what I did. I wrote the book that I wanted to write, as if there were going to be no readers at all, and the result was that it found more readers than I could ever have dreamed of. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
But I'm very happy to thank those readers now and send them my greetings, and I hope they'll all enjoy the Book of Dust, which is what I'm writing at the moment. I'm writing it because I want to, and if I thought it would never be published, I'd write it just the same. It's about Lyra.
Keep reading!
It felt like it would take something great to combat the What if this sucks voice. I’d convinced myself that there’s a chain that goes “long absence”, which leads to “heightened pressure”, which leads to “overthinking”, which leads to delaying, which creates a longer absence. Then the cycle starts over.
But Watterson and Pullman didn’t have that problem. They combat the What if this sucks? voice with a big 🤷♂️Who cares?. By lowering expectations, they stepped past that. There’s plenty of room out there once they got past the fear of failure.
One last quote
The last quote is from On Writing by Stephen King. Less than two months after a near-death accident in 1999 but still in pain, King worked his way back to writing. The book’s 2nd to last paragraph ends with this quote:
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
After that, things can only get better.
This was the quote I wish I had seen at the beginning.
Reading these quotes within a few days of each other was a reminder to pick back up again, dust off the cobwebs and start plowing ahead. I made a video this week (which will go up this weekend) and let me be honest, it was hard. I recorded it a few weeks ago pre-injury and have been dragging my feet putting it together.
It was hard to fight all the doubt as I put it together, but I pushed ahead and I’m a little proud of it.
You know what’s my favorite part about it? It’s done. The joy and excitement and releft fWatching a finished video also gave me enough excitement to crank out a few more, so stay tuned for those as well.
Consider this my backhanded advertisement to subscribe to this newsletter. This is more of a one-off. I promise there will be tutorials about video making in the future.
If you already subscribe, thank you! If this helped you in any way, please be sure to share it with someone you think it could help.👇
The end.
Writing and creating are hard! Awesome post!
Welcome back! Mason Currey has dubbed October “blocktober” and is focusing on creative blocks. Happens to the best of us!