I am often stupefied by the exorbitant amount of projects that I have in my life.
Whenever I step back and take a look at the big picture, my reaction is predictable: my depression instantly flares, my internal interrogator attacks, and my confidence quickly plummets. It's all so very productive! This scenario is a common response to both large projects (like finding my life's meaning) and other smaller projects. And because my "smaller projects" include paltry tasks like: building a conference for 200 people, answering hundreds of emails, writing a ground breaking book, and creating new curriculum... I guess the overwhelm is understandable. Tomorrow I'm looking at the frightening task of starting a book and finding myself really really busy with other things to do (and somehow all of them are seemingly more important!) besides sitting down and knocking it out.
Sound familiar?
I know I can do it; I'm just blinded by the size of the task at hand. I also find myself "forgetting" to clean my monstrously messy kitchen, finish my 5x5 ft painting, and excavate important emails from my inbox. This behavior appears when confronted with abstract tasks as well, whether it be deciding how to schedule my work weeks, committing to school goals, or outlining my future "Save the World!" plans.
Amy Morby (remember her?!?) recommended this book to me as a much needed kick in the pants to start writing. Anne Lamott's brilliantly simple suggestion to take it "bird by bird" applies in countless ways. I need to start focusing on taking it day by day, step by step, book by book, post by post, and work day by work day... trusting in myself enough to know that the larger picture will unfold as I enthusiastically put in the work.
Anne is both spot on about the writing process and funny as hell. Proof:
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"Often when you sit down to
write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your
childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of—oh,
say—say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier. It’s hard to get
your footing, and your fingertips get all red and frozen and torn up. Then
your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive
relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and
they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery
breath, leering at you behind your back.
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What I do at this point, as the
panic mounts and the jungle drums begin beating and I realize that the well
has run dry and that my future is behind me and I’m going to have to get a
job only I’m completely unemployable, is to stop. First I try to breathe,
because I’m either sitting there panting like a lapdog or I’m unintentionally
making slow asthmatic death rattles. So I just sit there for a minute,
breathing slowly, quietly. I let my mind wander. After a moment I may notice
that I’m trying to decide whether or not I am too old for orthodontia and
whether right now would be a good time to make a few calls, and then I start
to think about learning to use makeup and how maybe I could find some
boyfriend who is not a total and complete fixer-upper and then my life would
be totally great and I’d be happy all the time, and then I think about all
the people I should have called back before I sat down to work, and how I
should probably at least check in with my agent and tell him this great idea
I have and see if he thinks it’s a good idea, and see
if he thinks I need orthodontia—if that is what he is
actually thinking whenever we have lunch together. Then I think about someone
I’m really annoyed with, or some financial problem that is driving me crazy,
and decide that I must resolve this before I get down to today’s work. So I
become a dog with a chew toy, worrying it for a while, wrestling it to the
ground, flinging it over my shoulder, chasing it, licking it, chewing it,
flinging it back over my shoulder. I stop just short of actually barking. But
all of this only takes somewhere between one and two minutes, so I haven’t
actually wasted that much time. Still, it leaves me winded. I go back to
trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch
picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments.
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It reminds me that all I have to
do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame.
This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right
now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my
hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running. I am going
to paint a picture of it, in words, on my word processor. Or all I am going
to do is to describe the main character the very first time we meet her, when
she first walks out the front door and onto the porch. I am not even going to
describe the expression on her face when she first notices the blind dog
sitting behind the wheel of her car—just what I can see through the one-inch
picture frame, just one paragraph describing this woman, in the town where I grew up, the first time we encounter her.
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E.L. Doctorow once said that
“writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t
have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or
everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three
feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing,
or life, I have ever heard.
So after I’ve completely exhausted
myself thinking about the people I most resent in the world, and my more
arresting financial problems, and, of course, the orthodontia, I remember to
pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my
story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange. I also remember a
story that I know I’ve told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get
a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time,
was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to
write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in
Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder
paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of
the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my
brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by
bird.”
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I'm taking her advice and running with it. What about you? Did you find any personal parallels?
