Another Brick in the Wall

I’ve spent the entire morning beating my head against a brick wall.

Not an actual brick wall, of course, but a figurative one. A brick wall made of my own perfectionism and stubbornness. I do this so often that it’s amazing my figurative head isn’t completely flattened, dented in after thousands of contacts with bricks formed from unreasonable expectations and held together with the mortar self-recrimination.

This morning, I’ve been trying to write. (Spoiler alert: it hasn’t been going well.) I’m trying something new. I’m staying home from work every Thursday to write, to work on bigger, more creative projects for Legion, and to see if being outside the office one day a week is more conducive to the type of work I love to do. Or the type of work I used to love to do before this morning crapped all over my dreams.  

I know myself well enough to know that if I’m going to be successful at home, I need to set goals – specific targets for what I want to accomplish each Thursday. A few months ago I read Stephen King’s On Writing and in it, he said that he set a word goal every day and that he didn’t quit writing until he’d hit it. Sometimes, he’s done by 10 a.m., and sometimes, it takes him until late in the afternoon. But he doesn’t stop until he’s hit his allotted number of words. And if it is good enough for Stephen King, it is good enough for me, so my first goal every Thursday is to write 2000 words and I don’t allow myself to work on any other projects until my word count is complete.

The first week was amazing. I cranked out 2000 words in no time – and then kept going. By the time I broke for lunch, I had 2562 words on paper, edited and ready to publish on my blog. I was on fire! I was a success! This writing thing was like falling off a log and I was going to CRUSH MY GOALS EVERY WEEK.

Anyone want to guess how that worked out for me? This morning, I sat down and pushed through the first 909 words, but I wouldn’t exactly call it easy. It took me about 90 minutes and I don’t LOVE what I did. It’s serviceable, and it will get used on Legion’s blog somewhere, but it ain’t Shakespeare. It ain’t even good Lacy writing. It’s sufficient.

But then things got really rough. About two hours ago, I started working on a piece (maybe a blog, maybe some part of a future book, maybe a total piece of garbage that I hate with a white-hot heat.) After 120 minutes of pretty-much non-stop typing, I have 132 words. One hundred and thirty-two freaking words after two hours of pain, suffering, typing, deleting, weeping, gnashing of teeth, rending of clothing and complaining to Brian, who is very patiently listening to me whine while he works at his drawing board across from me.

I’m reasonably sure I wrote about twice my 2000 word goal, but those words were deleted and cursed, cut and pasted, trashed and re-written over and over and over again. My hands are cold, my fingertips sore, my back spasming, my self-regard in the toilet, because everything I wrote sounded like total nonsense. It was rambling, mindless, over-written, too personal, too stiff, spelled wrong, grammatically incorrect, poorly punctuated drivel. The whole writing session culminated with me storming out of the studio in tears, declaring that the entire work-from-home thing would never work for me because I’m an impossible moron with the vocabulary of an eight-year-old and the narrative structure of….well…see? I can’t even finish a metaphor anymore, that’s how terrible I am at this.

Enter Brian. He, in his usual calm and measured way, asked me if my goal was to WRITE 2000 words, or to have, at the end of the morning, 2000 words of perfectly edited, publishable work. I looked at him like he was crazy. Who wants 2000 words of garbage? OF COURSE I wanted 2000 perfect words. I’m Lacy. I want – nay, I EXPECT – everything I do to be perfect, all the time. If everything I wrote wasn’t perfect, how on earth could I expect for my Thursdays to be perfect? There is no space here for lousy work.

So then, the follow-up. He asked if, since I couldn’t get 2000 perfect words, if I couldn’t just work on something else I had on my project list and see if an idea came to me. And this is where my stubbornness kicked in. I was ABSOLUTELY NOT going to stop writing until I hit my word goal. I’d be letting myself, and Stephen King, and all the other writers in the world who hit their word goals (with what I imagined was perfect work on the first draft, every time) every day when they sat down to work. And they did this every day of the week, not just one day like little old loser me. I was going to keep grinding until I got there, no matter how late or how miserable it became.

At this point, Brian wisely gave up, and let me angrily make protein shakes. (I’m not allowed to stop to make lunch until my word count is met.) He returned quietly to his drawing board (where, because one should never suffer alone, he, too, was struggling with a creative block) and let me take my frustration out on the blender. (Side note: blenders are great for masking growls of frustration and impotent rage.)

And as the bananas and protein powder were being pulverized, I realized he was right. The piece I’d been working on wasn’t working because it wasn’t ready, and me trying to force it was just going to frustrate me further. I had to realize that sitting down to focus one day a week does not guarantee that the great ideas are going to flow at exactly that time. But I have to keep trying. And sometimes that means abandoning something that’s not working and picking up something else. Keep writing, yes, but don’t keep beating the same dead horse.

I chugged my shake and sat back down, and in 15 minutes, I cranked this out. This long-winded whine about the struggle of creative work bumping into my own ideas about how everything I do should be perfect, and work the first time, and that I can “power through” anything. And now 1101 words into it, I can quit writing for the day, and go do something else. Thank God.