Smarter, Better, Faster
On all the hard work you've done, and driving from the backseat
One thing I’m always saying to coaching clients when they describe a feeling of stagnation—they’ve been working on a project for so long and it’s not feeling close to done, or have been hanging out with the same problem in a draft for an uncomfortable amount of time, finding that their efforts to stare it down are insufficient1—is to remember that as writers, our expectations for our work shift higher with every draft. Constantly raising the bar for ourselves sounds like a good thing, and I do believe our desire to outdo ourselves is a fundamental drive for this line of work, but it’s also a recipe for making yourself feel perpetually inadequate. The feeling of stagnation is often a perceptive mistake most of all; we haven’t even noticed that we are trying to outdo whatever we just did with the last project or sentence or story, and the assist is to take notice, and even reward ourselves for making every next piece of writing harder for ourselves. Like much of our difficulties in writing (and arguably, in life), this is self-assigned homework. The crisis we imagine is happening with the work is really us trying to become better at what we do.
The antidote to such self-talk is perhaps the whole of Oliver Burkeman’s latest, Meditations for Mortals, sent to me by a fellow writer who understands this drive to always be smarter, better, faster. Every short chapter got under my skin, but I felt particularly seen by the one on finishing work, in which Burkeman notes that when we lose our initial set of illusions of how something might be and start to really see what it will be, we get discouraged, disappointed by the shift in perception and daunted by the obvious hard work ahead. We’d rather start something new. Indeed, when I’m in difficult days with the novel I’m often thinking in the back of my mind about short stories I’d like to start—and! I think, with no small amout of delusion, that I can easily complete. Though I’ve come to like revision more, I will always love generative work for this beautiful delusion of beginning. It’s so full of possibilities, of faith in the self to execute them. Decisions you don’t have to make just yet. But I forget that invetiably, the new thing will become the not-finished thing; it will get hard, too. In the end, I’d rather complete my current homework assignments than live with a pile of half-finished promises to myself. I’m capable, and excited by that challenge, if I can see it for what it is.
If. Because ironically, predictably, though I’m at ease talking another writer through moments of self-damnation to less hysterical ground, I’m not immune to being blind to the ways I shift the floor beneath my feet and complain about its shakiness. Recently, despairing once again at not moving at the speed I’d envisioned I would, I reached out to writer friends. One of them said, it sounds like you’ve already done a lot of hard work. When the whispers of self-defeat arise, I hear her saying that to me, and I say it to myself again. I’m saying that to you, as I’m certain it applies.
I think so much of what people don’t understand about the process of writing—including, perhaps most of all, writers themselves—is that writing doesn’t often feel linear or triumphant, that to be a self-motivated learner means there is only a fumbling through, that the oft-quoted E.L. Doctorow line about the headlights being enough— “Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”2 — is accurate, when things are going well, if your headlights work, if you are in the driver’s seat, and not, like in my anxiety dreams, trying to drive while sitting in the back seat, often without my glasses.
[Sidenote: aren’t anxiety dreams so bizarre? My other ones are about not being able to put my shoes on while also needing to leave immediately. And yes, I’d love to hear yours in the comments.]
In my waking life, I’ve had multiple times in the past few months where I feel like I’m driving from the back seat. Moments of doubt and confusion that feel like a crisis. Times when my novel’s completion, never mind its purpose, point, meaning, are beyond my imagining. When I forget all my hard work. Days when it’s impossible to remember why the book I’ve been working on in earnest for five years now captured me so much. Or, not that exactly. It’s that the book that captured me is no longer the book I’m writing. Because what we can see in the headlights is also what we’re holding, emotionally and experientially. A book, even one far from one’s own autobiography, is deeply shaped by who we are, what we know and understand about the real world and moment of time we occupy. The difficulty of a long project like a novel (or, say, human relationships) is that what we’re holding changes, often for the better, becoming more experienced and nuanced writers and humans as this time passes, which makes us better writers3, but difficult to get perspective on it.
My book is changing because I’m changing and for this the book is, hopefully, getting better. Smarter. Not any faster though.
Talk Soon,
Danielle
My advice for this is to work on some other part of things, or, as the young ones say, touch grass. Do anything else.
Sometimes this quote contains fog. It’s quoted so often, for good reason, it’s hard to find the original source, so forgive my approximation.
T Kira Madden’s In Process With… discusses this so wonderfully, fwiw.