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July 1, 2009What is it about startingthat stops me?HEY, THAT’S A GOOD STARTfor a column. (I just started myself from stopping!) Doesn’t it sometimes seem that starting a project can take more time and energy than the project itself? I expend far more ectoplasm avoiding my taxes than the few hours it takes to do them. I take both extensions, to August and then October, wasting in months of stress and dread, the energy I should be using to get it done in one afternoon. A few hours in February vs. ten months of avoidance and delay. Silly. OK, no one wants to do their taxes. But there are projects we very much want to do and just can’t get started on. Projects that require creativity on your part, effort and skill. Input from you, not just work. And if it’s ongoing, well, there are untold opportunities to put it off. Even all day, every day. Unless you cut yourself a break and give yourself the day off. “OK, I’m not going to work on the Project today.” Then you might even enjoy what you’re doing instead. THE ONLY THINGI’m avoiding right now, with this column, is cleaning my house, but as the bumper sticker would say on the car I’ve never owned, “I’d rather be writing.” Still, there are plenty of other writing projects I could be making progress on, as soon as I get around to them. Starting to start, the warm-up, makes up most of the time of starting—just working up to it, entertaining the image of yourself actually starting the project, imagining its completion in the future—then owning that image, then becoming that image and actually starting. As William Faulkner put it, the “retrograde overcoming of primary inertia,” is probably the biggest stumbling block to creative endeavor around. As I mentioned in One is Never Alone, my assignment in life is filling blank space—the blank space of that which is not yet written. The less you write, the more the space expands, and you may become overwhelmed by what still needs to be told. My God, there’s so much to cover! How can I ever fit it all in one lifetime? But anyone who is about to start something is faced with a similar blank space; at some point, you just have to have the impulse to do the work. You have to want to do it more than you’re afraid you’ll suck at it, or fail at it, or disappoint yourself. CHOREOGRAPHER TWYLA THARP,in The Creative Habit, Learn It and Use It For Life names five “habitual demons that invade the launch of every project: 1) People will laugh at me. 2) Someone has done it before. 3) I have nothing to say. 4) I will upset someone I love. 5) Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind.” I DON’T WORRYabout No. 1). People will react however they want to my writing. 2) Someone has done it before—but not like I’m going to do it! I’m the only one who can write my own book. 3) Don’t worry about this one. 4) Upset someone you love—that’s a biggie. Writing about living people, or dead, is touchy territory! 5) I first thought I wasn’t worried about this, either, but this is core to failing yourself. That your project is not as good as you envisioned, perhaps only you will ever know. Others might think it’s a bestseller or a Broadway smash. But did you fulfill its potential? WRITERS WHO DON’T WRITEEver know someone who wants to write but never does? Having once written, or thinking of yourself in some capacity as “a writer,” or really intending to get started on that project, don’t make you a writer, I admitted to myself a couple years ago. That was when I sold my house in Portland, quit my job, and later sold my San Francisco flat, all so I could lie on my butt with my laptop and my cats. I’ve always wanted to paint. But I’m always writing and never painting. That makes me a writer who doesn’t paint, not a painter who doesn’t paint. You can’t be “a writer who doesn’t write.” Writing makes you a writer. Show me the pages! OF COURSEI’m talking to myself. This column’s so easy to toss off and the end is immediately in sight, whereas there’s a heavy-duty amount of plodding, of just keeping at it, sitting day after day, about long-term projects. You need routines, discipline, persistence, goals and deadlines—but mostly you have to want to do the project. Otherwise, why are you doing it? I’m talking about self-generated, creative projects, not cleaning out the closet, but when I do something like cleaning out the closet, I think of it not as a chore I dislike, sorting clothes, but as giving myself more space to breathe. Identifying a larger framework for the task puts in perspective why you are willing to endure getting it done. Of course I’m talking about myself. All of this by way of starting to start to finish my book proposal as soon as I get back from my July 4th weekend of Pacific NW Idol shows. The waxing gibbous moon settles into the upper left-hand corner of my bay windows, to gradually travel diagonally down across them as I write. Good company. BY THE WAYI did not write my last Short Attention Span poem, “Vogue,” about Adam Lambert. It’s years old and about “Vogue”-style models of beauty, these rail-thin waifs who look like they could cut glass with their hipbones. I would not describe Adam as bony and angular; the imagery was female. I was not referring to Adam as the “sex-bitch queen of temptation.” Madonna’s “Vogue” was out at the time (dancing in poses) when I wrote it, and since both modeling and vogue-ing involve posing, I used it to complement the theme of celebrity tantalization–an image that’s held out to you which you can never claim for yourself; however, since I updated the poem to include verbiage from the column, I can see where one would assume it was about its beautiful subject. Needs work either way. THE BUNIONAlso by the way, Mad Magazine beat me to The Onion/Bunion spoof seven years ago! This column has agitated me. In fact I’m about to have a first-class panic attack. Can you tell I’m starting to stop? Well I just did.
The author says, better get started before time stops you ------------------------------------------------------------ Want me!
Start stopping not starting copyright Alexandra Jones 2009 |
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