The Myth of the Ultra-Fast Flat Abs Solution
The Myth of the Ultra-Fast Flat Abs Solution
New year! New you! Or, like, whatever. It's also a random Thursday in a regular month. NO PRESSURE. If you are someone who likes to take the new year and embrace it as a restart and refresh, that's cool too. I do a bit of a mishmash. I try to renew and refresh every darn day (NO PRESSURE, right?).
Here's what I know about myself: I like syllabi, but not lists of demands. I work better when presented with a list of suggested outcomes than with a list of must-do items. This holds true whether someone else is giving me the list or I'm writing it for myself.
I also know that I am incredibly impatient with my own progress. With my renewing and refreshing. It takes so long! I am definitely the person who does 20 crunches once and then is mad that I don't have flat abs.
Creativity takes SO LONG. Making books takes BASICALLY FOREVER. It can be hard for an impatient writer like me to see progress being made (the most recent episode of Nina LaCour's podcast talks about making charts of visible progress, so you can see exactly what you're accomplishing, and I'm thinking on that a lot).
Part of being a writer is having an imagination, and the downside to this is that you can picture the book, the brilliant completion, the stack of hardcovers to be signed, the awards, the speeches, the sash across your torso in a pageant you didn't even know you entered. And then there's that time travel whooshing sound and you're standing in your dusty living room with no books and no words on the page and you're not even sure you have a working pen.
The key to success in this business is in what you do next. It's in the act of writing, again and again. The reason so many people fail is because it's HARD. It's hard to push yourself through the mud every time. It's hard to write cruddy words and then write more cruddy words and stay motivated to write even more. Sometimes it's hard to even find the working pen. A lot of people give up.
It cracks me up that the NY Times published a 20 minute workout, and then 10, then 7, then a FOUR minute workout, and then finally they were like JUST DO ONE REALLY INTENSE MINUTE OF EXERCISE. A huge part of me wants to do one intense minute and be done forever. But you're never done. Same with writing. You can write for an intense minute, and that's great. But you have to keep writing for many minutes, whether they are intense or slow or meandering or take you in a new direction, and you have to do it consistently, in order to make a book.
Who Do You Want to Be
So rather than come up with any specific measurable goals (I'm sure those S.M.A.R.T. goal lists work for many people, but they are anti-motivational for me for some reason), I've decided to focus on one thing: who do I want to be? What image do I have of future me? A lot of this was nudged along by the Future Self meditation in Tara Mohr's excellent book Playing Big, but mostly it comes from a few years of trying different paths and seeing what feels right for right now.
And the thing I want to be (career-wise) is someone who writes a lot of books and is immensely proud of every one. I know this should be obvious to me, but it took some thinking: the way to write a lot of books is to actually write them. I am someone who is good at procrastinating writing by doing other writing business tasks, like making videos or bookmarks or, um, this newsletter. But none of that matters without the books. The writing has to come first.
This also means less time on social media. When I think of Future Me, she is someone who engages and all that (like, I'm not deleting all my social media) (yet) but not someone who stares and scrolls mindlessly.
I don't have any books coming out in 2020 (which is ok, I had four come out in 2019), and I'm honestly very excited to take my time and work on new projects that have been waiting for me to write them.
Have you gotten Two Dogs in a Trench Coat Enter Stage Left yet? One of the Amazon reviews gave it five stars and says "it also included some basic education about plays" which was not exactly my goal, but it's not wrong either. So if you've been wavering because you're wondering how much play knowledge you'll gain, let me assure you: SOME. You'll acquire some play knowledge.
Join me on Saturday, February 1 at Portland Stage for a musical performance of No Boring Stories! (Don't worry, I'm not the one singing.) (But I will be signing afterwards, which is practically the same word.)