Creative bandwidth
I should be further along by now.
This is the song of my clients this August. For the past couple of weeks, I haven’t gotten through a session without someone beating themselves up for lack of sufficient progress. This is, of course, all measured by their critics.
Because these writers have restructured novels, been to conferences, outlined significant portions of books and yet. It is never enough somehow.
What else has been going on?
Both fascinatingly and frustratingly, the inner critic is the supreme champion of compartmentalizing. It can conveniently forget that you had the flu for a week when clicking its tongue when reviewing your word count. It is tone deaf to context.
When you feel the urge to bemoan your progress, please ask yourself the following question:
Have any of the following occurred recently?
Birth of new baby
Any children under five living in your house
Hurricane damaging property and/or knocking out power
Major health scare (self) with or without surgery
Major health scare (family member) with or without surgery
Job loss
Job promotion with huge new responsibilities
Moving house
Insomnia
Huge work project / demanding schedule
Going on holiday for non-restful reason (helping anyone with above issues)
Traveling that involves jet lag
Excess adulting (tax audit, home repair/renovation, major appliance failure)
Still waiting for a new visa after trying to get an appointment for 9 months
Oh sorry, that last one was all me. But still. This list sounds sarcastic, but I am in total earnest. I have had a boatload — BIG boat not rowboat-size — of students and clients insist that their progress is pitiful, despite having multiple items on this list in play.
“No pain, no gain” is not helping you. Promise
We have somehow been programmed to think that when we’re unhappy with our results, the best thing to do is to give ourselves a hard time about it. So many people believe they are fundamentally lazy and can’t be trusted to get anything done without yelling at themselves 24/7.
Please, if I convince you of anything today, know that this is not helpful.
Our creative selves are quite delicate. Think new butterflies with paper-thin wings crawling, blinking, into the sun for the first time. If you saw such a creature, would your first instinct be to yell at it like a marine:
“Goddamn it! You should have been airborne weeks ago!”
If you want to yell at these guys, you might need to talk about this with someone. Because, as I have learned dealing with paperwork in Germany the past six years, some things take time, and if the system is overloaded, they take longer.
What is taking up bandwidth now?
Before you bemoan the amount of writing you’re getting done, look at the rest of your schedule over the past few weeks. Go back a few months, even. Look at the big picture, because your critic won’t bother to.
If you are still writing despite having many other things on your plate, please give yourself a pat on the back for your effort instead of yelling at yourself for not doing more.
We are motivated by feeling successful, not by being called failures
If you want to write more than you are at the moment, then look at how much you have gotten done despite all the other things clambering for your attention, give yourself some credit and then look at reevaluating what is most important now.
We often want to accomplish tons of writing, while also putting hundreds of things ahead of writing on our priority list. Sometimes life does this automatically in the form of the events listed above. Just as you cannot make time, you also can’t pretend you’re writing in a vacuum.
Our creative energy is limited by how much stress we’re under, how distracted we are, how much sleep we’re getting, how well we’re eating and our general health. This is a fact. The critic will tell you that a “real writer” can overcome all these things, but if you look closely at the writers who have done this, they tend to either have spouses who just sorted their lives out or be alcoholics who numbed themselves to life’s stresses. Neither is a viable long-term solution. Spouses and livers will ultimately revolt on this plan.
Better to learn to celebrate the progress you do make within the context of your life at the moment.
If you want to write more, move it up the priority list
Writing tends to be important to us, but not urgent. Unless you have a pub deal, no one is waiting for your finished book. (And even if you do have a pub deal, extensions do happen.) Things we see as urgent jump the queue all the time. But sometimes, something gets labeled as urgent that really isn’t. Social media scrolling, I’m taking to you.
To increase your writing progress, make a list of everything you have going on right now. And I mean everything. Best to do this in a digital format as you’ll need to rearrange the order. Put the items in priority order. Things like “take care of children” that are non-negotiable go at the top, and optional items like “watch new Netflix show” go lower.
See where writing falls on the list based on all your responsibilities. Is it likely you could have gotten more written with that many items ahead of it in the queue?
Now the moment of truth: what needs to change to move writing up the list? Do you need to cancel some plans? Actually leave work on time instead of feeling virtuous for working late even though no one has asked? Share your writing goals with your family and work together to find more pockets of time for your project?
This is the way to get more done. The butterfly will get airborne when its wings are ready.
You’ve got this.
Please share what you’re moving below writing on your priority list in the comments. Sharing this may start a ripple effect of permission for others. Let’s do it!
Thank you for this! I love what you write about your inner critic being "tone deaf to context". It doesn't see everything else going on that's using up your energy. I've found the spoon theory really helpful as someone with long-term depression, as a way to be kinder to myself and work on changing the toxic productivity mindset.
When I need time to write, I tell people I have a meeting. Nothing sounds more urgent or important than a meeting. And no one ever asks, "What kind of meeting?" It sounds like a trick, but really, isn't writing as urgent and important as A Meeting?