Blog – Page 323 – Deborah Makarios

June 15, 2013

Talent vs. Character

Which is more important, effort or success?

If asked, I would say effort, but apparently I don’t really believe it. As the saying goes, you believe not what you say you believe, or even what you think you believe, but what you act as though you believe. If your money isn’t there, it doesn’t matter where your mouth is.

The first two weeks of my finish-the-first-draft-by-the-end-of-the-year regime went well.
I wrote more than I expected on the Monday evenings and was thus under no pressure on Wednesday and Friday mornings.
I sailed over my word count target with relatively little effort (besides a savagely aching hand, of which more another time).

I was pleased with myself and my achievement.

This week was different.
I think my fear of the unknown – in this case the unknown Thing That Happens Next – slowed me down on Monday evening – I struggled and sulked and tried to keep writing something, anything. I ended up with just over 1,400 words – 1,000 fewer than the Monday before.

And then on Wednesday when I should have been chipping off another 400 words, Life Happened (in a good way for once) and I didn’t write a word.

So there I was on Thursday with 1,100 words to go (although my shonky late-night arithmetic convinced me it was only 900, which looking back was probably a mercy). I was expecting to arrive home late and tired on Friday, and due to be out most of Saturday (happens every six weeks or so). Opportunities to write were limited.

The chances of making my target were not good, which made me feel depressed, which made me feel even less up to writing.
So what did I do once I’d picked myself up out of my sad little heap on the floor?
I used the half hour I still had left to write.

When I didn’t know what to write next, I kept going, one sentence after another, inventing word by word and not stopping to worry about whether the words were worth writing.
When I ran out of ink, I filled my pen with the new purple ink and kept going.
When the purple ink turned out to be more magenta than amethyst (horror!), I kept going.

Possibly like this, depending on your screen. (And your eyes.)

[Incidentally, thanks to the wonders that are Wikipedia, I can now identify the colour as somewhere between Fandango (this made me feel better) and Flirt (this didn’t).]

I only managed 400-odd words, but I’d kept going.
I managed another 300-odd on Friday morning.

The mathematically astute among you will realise that this still left me a few hundred short, but there was still some time. And if Life Happened again and I didn’t get there, well, at least I’d know I tried.

Last chance: Saturday night. The evening stretched out before me. I had my chance. And I didn’t feel like taking it. Like a nervous horse, I had to bring myself up to the fence I don’t know how many times before I lurched over.

I sat down, I picked up the pen, and I finished it. 425 words – over the line.

Looking back, I feel I should be more pleased with myself for what I accomplished this week than the two weeks before, and yet I’m not, really. Could it be that deep down I still believe it’s more important to succeed than to endeavour?

Is character of so little account with me that I believe achievement without effort to be of more value than making less headway in adverse conditions?

To do something well without effort argues a natural ability, which is beyond my control. To do somewhat less well with effort argues perseverance, which is a matter of character, and not innate.

So maybe this week I’m not a better writer on the face of things. But I am a better person, and I hope that will work its way into my writing.

As Calvin Coolidge said: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.”
(I am tempted to think that if he had lived to see modern reality TV, he would have added that here the reverse is true: nothing is more common than successful people without talent.)

Whether or not success comes to me is beyond my control. Whether or not I persist is not. So here’s to one more week knocked off – and to the twenty-eight still to come.

June 9, 2013

May: A Sense of Possibility

You cannot dream too big for God, I’ve recently been told.

The fifth chapter in The Artist’s Way is all about daring to dream. And I have most certainly been struggling with this.
There are lists to complete: what would I try if I weren’t too crazy? What would I love to do but aren’t allowed? I wish…

Not surprisingly, the DDJ showed up on a lot of these lists – or rather, the absence of the DDJ, along with reading all day and eating hot Vogels toast with butter. Also a writing room in the shape of a teapot. (I may need to think this one through a little more.)

I had to list twenty wishes, and the further I got the deeper and less specific they became: to be close to God, to live meaningfully, to be loving, to be joyful, to live creatively.

And then I had to list five grievances with God. That felt against the grain, but as she says, God can take it. The DDJ cast a long shadow there, too.

Then there was a great deal of image-collecting – images of what I’d do if I were 20 and rich, 65 and rich, could live other lives. This was quite fun, as I’ve mentioned.

Julia Cameron asks some rather probing questions about self-sabotage. Too often God offers us something and we demur, thinking if it seems too good to be true, it is – or it’s a trap.

“The question is ‘Are you self-destructive?’ Not ‘Do you appear self-destructive?’ And most definitely not ‘Are you nice to other people?'” (p. 99).
This is an important distinction. Not that being a writer (or any other kind of person) is an excuse for being unkind to others, but that others are responsible for their own lives and you are responsible for yours.

Putting other people’s priorities ahead of your own may make you out a really nice person, but it also means that what is important in your own life is neglected.

There is no credit in mowing your neighbour’s lawn if your own is threatening to take over your house.

So, taking responsibility for my own life, I had to list my favourite creative block, my payoff for staying blocked, and the person I blame for being blocked. (Uncomfortable self-scrutinisation, anyone?)

I soon decided my favourite block was tiredness. Then I had to draw a cartoon of myself “indulging in it”. Not being over-endowed with artistic ability, my cartoon was somewhat less elaborate than this:

The payoff was harder to figure out. The payoff for the DDJ is obvious – pay, leading to a roof over my head and food on the table. But what’s the payoff for being tired? Or rather, what’s the payoff for letting tiredness stop me writing?

It isn’t rest, because I find it very hard to rest when I know I should be doing something else. It might be the knowledge that I didn’t fail (because I didn’t try) but it feels like failure anyway.
Perhaps it’s avoiding poor-quality work. Or avoiding that feeling of facing the page and knowing I have nothing to give it. Perhaps it’s just the path of least resistance, inviting pity, framing myself as the victim. (Poor thing. She’s so tired.)

I wasn’t sure who I blamed – could be anyone from me to Capitalism. I don’t know that having someone to blame helps. Well, it might make you feel better (though I doubt it) but it doesn’t help you get out. And out is exactly what I want to get.

I still don’t know what lies before me. Rationally speaking, there is no more cause for hope than there was a month ago, or a month before that. And yet, the flame of hope is kindled in me again. A tiny little wavering blob on the wick of my soul, but there it is.

Don’t nobody breathe.

June 4, 2013

Bird By Bird

by Anne Lamott.

This is so not your usual book on how to be a writer, but I did find it enormously encouraging. (Don’t take my word for it, read it yourself. Really.)

For example, that feeling you get when you finish your first draft (at last! hurrah!) and then look back and realise it’s so bad you now live in terror of dying before you can fix it, because people might think you honourably disembowelled yourself from the shame of producing such putridity.

In short, Anne Lamott says it’s ok to be pathologically self-doubting and insecure as a writer. She even suggests that this is quite common among writers, along with such traits as hypochondria and melodramatic tendencies. (Moi?)

She’s witty and funny and erudite and casually well-read (“I scuttled across the screen like Prufrock’s crab”) and really easy to read.
Most of all, she is encouraging.

The flailing first draft, she says is “the child’s draft… let it romp all over the place”.

No-one will see it. Unless you die before the rewrite. (Try to avoid this.)

And as for all the shouting and hissing in your head (not the characters, but the voice Julia Cameron identifies as the Censor), Anne Lamott recognises this can be more than one voice. And here’s what she suggests you do with them:

That’s right.
Shrink them down to mouse size and plunk them in a jar. Let them squeak as much as they please in there – you’re not listening.

Another interesting suggestion: “write a book back to V.S. Naipaul or Margaret Atwood or Wendell Berry or whoever it is who most made you want to write, whose work you most love to read. Make it as good as you can.”

Who would that be for you? On the most-love-to-read side for me would be perhaps P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie and Terry Pratchett. (Sir, Dame & Sir. What does that tell you?)

Have you ever experienced that anguished jealous ache of reading the perfect sentence and not having written it? Who did?

Crucially for those of us who frequently enjoy the writing less than the having written, Lamott points out that you do actually have to want to write – wanting to be published is not going to cut it. (Publication is not the answer, whatever the question of your life.)

Perseverance is tremendously important: “God is not a short-order cook”. She quotes E.L Doctorow: “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I wondered a while back whether each step we take, momentous as it may seem, is only to pull us up to where we can take the next.
I wonder it now more than ever.
I wonder what’s just beyond the headlights.

[Disclaimer: once again, I borrowed this book from the library – nobody paid me and I paid nobody. I consider this makes me a maximally unbiased reviewer. Others may differ.]