Free To Do Anything, Part 3

Background: Part 1 and Part 2.

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses her own enthusiasm against her. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash.

–Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

That letter ignited a fire in me, and I was drunk on my rebellion. I loved the idea of being a writer, of pursuing my destiny, my passion.

“Passion,” says Cormac McCarthy, “sounds like a pretty fancy word.” He’s right. And once I sobered up, I still wasn’t doing my work. Sure, I made a few half-assed attempts, wrote a few stories on Blogger…and that was that. The fire had died.

So what went wrong?

Well, I’ve never had problems thinking big. I did, however, act small. I saw the final product, the results, the success–but not the blood or the sweat. I saw the 10 minutes it took to read the story, not the 10 hours of sustained effort, or the 10 days of focused revision. And certainly not the 10 years of life experience that lends perspective and wisdom to a story.

I was an amateur.

As soon as I learned the truth, that “easy reading is damned hard writing,” I was quickly discouraged. A month of getting back on my feet at my parents’ house turned into a year, while I went back to college at a mediocre University. Things were easy again. I had changed the circumstances, but not the habit. I needed to become a laborer.

So I decided to make things hard.

In the recent months, something has changed that’s difficult to put my finger on. I’ve become manic; dissatisfied. Even my subconscious clawed for my attention. It’s as if the fire that died left a few glowing embers that could only be fanned by maturity. I’m on my own again, staring down a blinking cursor in a field of white space.

I’m here to chronicle that struggle.