The Practical Free Spirit

Some of you will remember that after many tribulations, I decided to leave last year’s novel unfinished, at least in the short term. So a question that I’ve been necessarily invested in is this: What do you do after a failure? How do you move forward?

Luckily for me, I knew exactly what project I wanted to work on next, and I spent several weeks brainstorming, researching, and outlining. But making the leap to actually putting words of the novel on the page took a surprising amount of discipline.

So I was fascinated to read Megan McArdle’s recent article in the Atlantic entitled “Why Writers are the Worst Procrastinators.” While the article ends up waxing on parenting techniques, it also postulates that the reason writers procrastinate so much is because the fear of not meeting a deadline has to become greater than the fear of having the end product suck. Basically, we procrastinate because we’re afraid of failure.

I’ve definitely noticed that I’m more afraid of writing than I usually am. As a consequence, I’m allowing myself longer periods of time to get the writing done (building procrastination time into my schedule, as it were). I’ve also begun listening to music while I write. I’ve always preferred silence while writing, but now I’m trying to distract myself from worrying that the writing won’t go well, and music helps divert my focus from thinking about failure to thinking about the work.

The funny thing is, for all that I’m worried, the writing is actually going just fine. I’m writing a rough draft, so there are going to have to be many revisions, as always. But I finished the first act earlier this week, and so far I feel like I have a good handle on what I’m trying to accomplish. There is none of that feeling of floundering around in the dark that I had with last year’s novel, but instead simply a striving to write to the best of my abilities.

Apparently, this is the way to go, embracing the challenge instead of obsessing over how the end result will turn out. As with so many things in life, staying in the present seems to be a helpful idea to keep in mind.

What to do differently… Photo Credit: Mufidah Kassalias via Compfight cc

So what really happens after a failure? We figure out what went wrong. We decide how we want to go about the next attempt differently. And then we go for it, all the while knowing this could be a failure too, but trying to stay in the present and revel in the process.

Because this could also be the time that everything clicks together and we create something that works.