Stay on the Bus: Patience in the Creative Process
Photo by Adam Kring on Unsplash
I’ve been reading (and loving) Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. A lot of what he talks about could be applied to the creative life, beginning with the fact that we do, in fact, have about 4,000 weeks total to live our lives. When you put it that way, it doesn’t seem like very many, does it? So the crucial thing is to do what’s most meaningful to you now. Don’t wait for some mythical time in the future when you will “have enough time” or have your life completely sorted, or know exactly what you want to do.
The hard truth is, “stuff” will always happen. You will always have things to do, people to deal with, problems to sort out. Many of these things will be unplanned – how many of us have tried to schedule a day, and had it gone perfectly as expected? And that’s just one day.
We might know this intellectually, but it can be infernally hard to put into practice. Hope springs eternal that today will be the magical day when we’ll have it all together. And maybe we will, for a day, a week, a month... but as creatives, we have to get used to doing the work, whenever we can, however we can.
This pressure to produce, to “ship the work” in the words of Seth Godin, can lead some writers to publish prematurely in this age when publication can happen at will on the internet. The busyness of life leads others to procrastinate until they have the perfect moment, the perfect work, to put it out into the world. (I fall into the second camp, for sure). No matter which camp you fall into, it’s easy to feel the need to hurry, to “produce;” to feel behind,
But Burkeman makes another point that is contrary to this desperate need to focus on the final product.
“In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time they take – is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from doing the work itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.” (p. 174)
We may have been told to focus on the process, not the product, but it is very hard to hear when we long to be published, to have our work read and recognized. And the world around us is ever more geared toward instant gratification. But good old-fashioned Patience has many benefits for the writer:
It takes time to develop real skill in your craft. It takes years of reading, absorbing, deliberately practicing, writing, and rewriting. The more you do it, the greater your appreciation for it, and for the writers whose work you love.
It might take many drafts just to figure out what we really want to say. Outlines work well for some writers, and for some genres better than others; but I find that with literary fiction, memoir, or just digging out the real themes of a novel, meaning may take several drafts to emerge.
We need to become comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing. Too many writers abandon projects because they don’t know what comes next, or they don’t know what they’re trying to say, or they don’t know how to translate what’s in their head onto the page (a failure of craft more than imagination). We all have some form of “not knowing, ” and that’s a good thing! It means we are stretching ourselves. We may need to sit with this place for a while. Or try various things and be comfortable with the fact they might not work out. As Burkeman says,
“We’re made so uneasy by the experience of allowing reality to unfold at its own speed, that when we’re faced with a problem, it feels better to race toward a resolution - any resolution, really, so long as we can tell ourselves we’re “dealing with” the situation, thereby maintaining the feeling of being in control.” (p. 179)
Writing is hard, and there are so many things we don’t have control over – whether we will be traditionally published, whether we will find readership, how our work will be received... it can be difficult to find the patience and fortitude to persevere in the face of what my friend poet Steven Cramer calls “the great yawn.”
Finally, there’s also the issue of “not knowing” on a existential level. Does my work matter? On the deepest level, why am I writing at all? Feeling disconnected from our why makes it much easier to throw in the towel on a project – or on writing altogether.
Burkeman suggests “Three Principles of Patience” to help us “stay on the bus” when we’re confronted with the desire to rush the work, or stop writing:
Develop a taste for having problems. There will always be some new “problem” that comes up, in the outer world or in the work. This is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. We need to accept that we’ll have illness, emergencies, distractions in the outer world; and all the challenges of not knowing that I’ve outlined above. Get used to working in spite of problems and uncertainties. To paraphrase Burkeman, the presence of problems in your life aren’t an impediment to a meaningful life, but the very substance of life. Grappling with them is literally what life (or writing) is all about.
Embrace radical incrementalism. Burkeman cites a study showing that academics who wrote in small increments of time – even ten minutes a day – were in the long run much more productive writers than those who attempted to write only in long stretches of time (who often, of course, never found that time, or were so paralyzed by the need to spend it productively, that it blocked them from producing much at all). I’ve often held this to be true: consistency over short periods is far better than inconsistent bursts of writing.
You stay connected to the work
You see the satisfaction of piling up pages
You create a habit of writing
He also notes the importance of stopping when your time for writing is up – even if you feel you could go on, even want to go on. Stopping builds the muscle of patience, and teaches you that the muse will in fact show up much more regularly if you don’t think of it as a random gift from the gods but a part of the daily ritual.
3. Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. In other words, real original work comes from the years spent patiently learning your craft. You don’t need to rush to try to find your original voice, or your original themes, or your signature style. These things will evolve naturally if you just “stay on the bus” and be willing to learn and grow. If you run around trying to chase trends or be original - “the next big thing” - you will paradoxically end up always trying to arrive, and never actually getting where you want to go.
And finally, I would say: Remember that writing is a lifelong journey. You may call various projects “finished” and move on to the next, but (hopefully) you will be writing for a lifetime. There’s no need to rush to some imaginary endpoint. Your writing will never be “done” and that’s okay.
Yes, that means you will most likely die before all of your stories make it into the world. Or maybe you will say all you have to say, and peacefully conclude your writing career. Either way, we have the dual need to do what we can today, and be patient with the process. That is the lovely paradox of art-making that we all must embrace.
And I would definitely recommend Burkeman’s book - an elegant exploration of time and meaning-making in the modern world.
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