Deciding to blog daily comes with a cost. It’s another thing on top of a job, a personal life, a social life and a podcast. I knew I had to quit something to make it all work. So, I quit my novel. Maybe I’ll take it up again, in time, but quitting the damn thing was the best choice I could make. Without the huge, unfinished, nebulous project of a long-form piece of fiction hanging over my head, I freed up a great deal of mental energy better spent on projects with a more concrete deadline and payoff. Like this one.

Sometimes, you have to quit. In my own experience, knowing when it’s time to quit comes well after the actual time to quit. I started work on my novel in December of 2008. At last check, it clocked in at about 40,000 words of incomplete first draft. It’s been a sporadic process of inspiration, manic typing, burnout, recovery, inspiration, manic typing, burnout… and diminishing returns. If its not going to get done any time soon, and I don’t want to do it any more, why even think about it? Dump it.

Quitting things is far too often seen as a failure, unless you’re talking about quitting something that is obviously bad for you like binge drinking, or heroin. Even then, the folks who still do those bad things will likely look at you with scorn. Writing a novel isn’t like doing heroin, but it’s damaging in its own way. As Dorothy Parker said, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” She should know.

The reason we associate quitters with failure is that quitting is often seen as, like failure, a permanent state. We tend to associate quitting as a concept with things like walking off the job or dropping out of school. Rare is the company that’ll rehire you after quitting, even on the best of terms, and we know what happens to kids who drop out of school. Even though the culture is filled with stories of quitters who go back and pick up where they left off, we view them as outliers, and question their plausibly. How many times has Homer Simpson quit the power plant, anyway?

If you’re looking to quit a project, know that it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can start it again when you’re ready—if you’re ready. There’s a lot to be said for commitment, but as much as that’s valued, quitting should be valued as well. It’s another form of commitment, re-evaluating your life and focusing on a new priority. For me, it’s daily writing for an audience. For you, maybe you should quit your blog and write a novel. Maybe quit designing websites and learn iOS programming. Quit basketball, and take up baseball—or not. If the returns of what you’re doing are diminishing, dropping it for another thing may be the ticket. If it doesn’t work, you can try your old thing again with renewed vigor. What do you have to lose?

This is a follow-up, of sorts, to my post on knowing when you’re succeeding. Instead of going out to those who wonder if they’re on the right track, this one is for the ones who feel the need to take other people down. It’s not aimed at anyone in particular, just at the general mass of people who bring the hate on the Internets. And, to those people, I have a question. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

Much has been written on the psychology of trolls, even by me. I want to put that aside for a bit. Here’s the thing: all the time you invest into the whole enterprise of trolling, attacking, and insulting—every piece of negativity that you put out—whether aimed at a specific target or otherwise is time better spent creating your own thing. So, why aren’t you doing that?

As someone who’s done both, believe me, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s easier—a lot easier—to tear down rather than build up. It’s easy, and it’s fun. The frustrated reactions of an increasingly flustered victim in their attempts to defend their work, themselves, and any potential victims of collateral damage make someone feel good. Powerful, even. It’s a goddamned rush. It’s endorphins and hormones, and the thrill of it all that keeps you coming back for more. Kind of like pornography, really. It stimulates the same pleasure pathways in your brain as sex, but has a much weaker payoff. And it decreases the more you do it.

Still, some of us are simply wired to take the easy payoff. The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is a good example of this. The experiment is simple. The researcher offers a marshmallow to a child, with the caveat that if the child can resist eating the marshmallow in the time it takes for the researcher to leave and come back. If the child can, they get _two_ marshmallows. Those children that can hold out, according to some follow-up research, go on to be more succesful as adults than those who can’t. [1]

By contrast, actually making your own thing is hard. Very hard. It’s full of false starts, detours, dead-ends, and often will end in failure. The payoff, however, is immeasurable. There’s nothing quite like finishing something, stepping back, and saying, “Hey! I made that!” [2] You become protective of what you’ve made, which is what the sort of people who attack creatives feed on.

However, this is shouting into the void. If you’re the sort of person who likes to tear down what others spend their time building up, no mere rambling essay on a blog will convert you. The only thing that will, is when time and repetition take their toll, and the thrill goes out of the whole damn business. That’s when you’ll look for an out—though it’s far better to start now.

There’s a certain fetishization of creativity, now more than ever. Molly Flatt in her essay, “The Cult of Creativity” explains how:

The amorphous concept of ‘creativity’ has become the unquestioned MacGuffin of our times, and anyone who doesn’t demonstrate it – or at least a willingness to cultivate it – is in danger of being labeled a conservative desk-monkey unfit for the creative rigours of our fecund social media world.

She also mentions the “over 335 million results” on Google for “become more creative,” and Amazon listing “11,468 books with the word ‘creativity’ in the title.” I know I’ve read more than a few of those web sites and books, and only a precious few have actually helped. Once again, I have to quote Merlin Mann: “Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.” No matter who they are, anyone—myself included—who says they can make you more creative is talking out of their rear end. Creativity isn’t the fluffy, magical gift-of-the-muse. It can feel that way, because when inspiration—another loaded word—hits, it often comes out of what seems like nowhere. Science doesn’t back that up. John Cleese provides a great explanation of how creativity really works, and grounded advice on how to be more creative. It’s took long to summarize here, but the quote to take away from it is this: “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

Here’s the thing: humans are innately wired to create. It’s why there are 17,000 year old cave paintings in Lasceaux, and why make lolcats and rage comics today. The creative instinct is innate and it is essential for human survival. Without it, we never would have figured out to make spears to hunt animals with—or each other, for that matter. Some of us are naturally better suited to certain creative endeavors than others, anyone can still be creative. The inherent difficulty doesn’t justify the fervent worship of the idea of creativity, or the sheer lunacy of people who claim “Oh, I never could do that” when they see creative work. It’s not that you can’t, it’s just that you didn’t. The flip side of this is the line: “Oh, anyone could do that.” You see that one tossed at modern art a lot. Maybe anyone could do what Mark Rothko did, but Mark Rothko did it and you did not. There’s valid reasons to dislike Mark Rothko and related abstract expressionist works, but claiming “Oh, my toddler could paint that” is not one of them.

The worst part is that a lot of other creative types get into the game of making creativity into something mystical. Everything I read that connects creativity with some spiritual mumbo-jumbo makes me want to retch on a very specific level. The people who peddle that crap are often either trying to peddle more “you can be creative too” junk for people to buy rather than actually be creative, or artists with their head too far up their own ass to provide practical, grounded advice. I will make an exception for Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art, which has spiritual mumbo-jumbo, but tempers it by hammering the point that the spiritual part doesn’t happen unless you actually sit down and do the work. [1] When it comes to the idea of the “muse,” Stephen King got it right in On Writing.

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer… He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level… You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair.

It’s fair, but it’s far from pleasant. Writers and artists often live in an abusive relationship with their art. No wonder so many of the best of our ranks fall to drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, or suicide. Never trust a so-called artist or writer who brags about how easy it is to do their work, because they’re probably terrible. It’s not easy to do creative work, but if you do it long enough, it does get easi_er_. Even someone at the top of their game has those days when they look at the page—blank or otherwise—and says “I can’t do this today.” They go through the litany of abusive self-talk to themselves. What separates the artists from the non-artists is that when they miserable, angry, abusive self-talk is over, and they’ve convinced themselves that they suck, are the worst possible person in the world, and that they should burn everything they ever made, sell their worldly possessions, and live like a hermit in the mountains, licking lichens off rocks to survive, they sit down and start to work anyway.

Why?

You might as well ask the sun why it rises, or ask the sparrow why it returns to Capistrano. Ask the salmon why it swims upstream to the place of its birth to spawn. It must be done. It’s an innate, deep, internal desire that is as essential to us as breathing. It takes priority over everything else, because to us, it is everything. Like sharks, if we stop moving, if we stop doing the work, we die. No matter what form of art we do, the only thing that is worse than doing the work is not doing the work. No matter how miserable the process is, it’s preferable to the alternative of not doing it. There is, of course, the option of changing what you do, but it’s still doing the work. It’s still being creative.

The only practical advice worth giving to anyone who “aspires” to be creative is this: just sit down, take a block of time, and do the thing you want to do. If you have to buy a book, buy one that talks about the actual nuts and bolts of the thing you’re trying to do: a textbook on iOS programming, or Piano for Completely Inept People. Whatever it is you want to do, the only thing that will make anything happen, creatively speaking, is sitting down and doing it, and the motivation for that has to come from within. It’s there, in all of us. Make the time, play around, make mistakes, and beat your fists against the wall in frustration. No book will do that for you.

Monday night, I undertook a long, arduous journey from my new home in Jamaica, Queens. I took the subway far down Queens Boulevard to the distant neighborhood of Astoria. [1] There, I made my way up to Broadway, and over to the Astoria branch of the Queens Public Library. There, in a basement meeting room split incompletely by a divider with a stuck door, I sat with about a dozen writers wielding various implements. On the other side of the divider, a woman was teaching a class on American culture for new immigrants. Every few minutes, the room shook and thundered as the M and R trains passed below us. Under these conditions, my fellow writers and I sat, and did nothing more than bang out words for a full hour.

It was exhilarating and productive. I’d opted to use the hour to bang away at my novel, a project that has been going on in fits and starts for the better part of five years without so much as producing a complete first draft. As the room shook from another subway train, I remembered an idea I had for a scene where a character is attacked on the subway. So I wrote it—nearly 1600 words of it. Once it was on the page, I felt a great weight had been lifted from my soul. All I had to do was pack up my laptop, leave the apartment, ride the subway, go into a room with a bunch of other writers and no Wi-Fi, and then make the clackity noise for an hour. [2]

After a day of personal highs and lows, it felt absolutely wonderful to pick up this project, blow off the dust, and get back to work. A change in environment can accomplish wonders. In a room with a dozen people, half a dozen laptops, an iPad, an couple notebooks, and some scraps of paper, where all there was to do was write, I wrote. No nonsense, no bullshit, and no handwringing. There’s a reason this group is called “Shut Up and Write! NYC”. We introduced ourselves, sat down, shut up, and wrote.

Actually, we sat down first. Either way…

I picked up exactly where I had left off the last time. It felt like walking into your home after a long vacation. Everything was exactly as I had left it. The Scrivener file I keep my novel in was in the exact same spot, with the exact scene I had been working on last. As projects go, writing a novel is evergreen. As long as the file is saved and backed up properly, it’s not going to go away unless I drag the Scrivener file to the trash. My dog is not going to eat my first draft. [3] What “Shut Up and Write! NYC” did was force me to make the time for this project.

Other project haven’t been so neglected. I’ve written ten articles of various lengths for Sanspoint in the last nine weeks. I’ve been working on The Residents Project for Kittysneezes and, not only have I not missed a week since we started, I’m two albums ahead. We missed one episode of Crush on Radio since May, and that was only because two-thirds of us were simply unable to do it. But the novel… the novel hadn’t been touched in months, until Monday evening. Now it’s been touched, and it feels great.

1600 words is a great number of words to have produced. If you’re one of those lunatics who does NaNoWriMo, the required pace is 1667 words per day, which I could have done that night if I had another five or ten minutes, or just typed a little faster. It’s a respectable pace, and if I can do that amount in a mere hour, I can reach my goal of 50,000 words with eight days of one hour writing sessions. That sounds stupefyingly easy to do, assuming I make the time. I’ll be back at the Astoria Library next week for the next session, but that shouldn’t be the only time I do the work on this project.

Time commitments are difficult to make. My original plan on Monday was to try a fixed schedule of work. I added hour-long blocks to my calendar with fifteen minute breaks between: morning writing, job searching, my freelance copyediting, lunch, more job searching, more writing. On Friday, however, I received an offer to interview for a job on Monday, throwing those plans out the window. There’s nothing stopping me from putting them back on another day, however. Putting these things on my calendar is all about making the commitment to do these things in my copious free time, and get them done. “Shut Up and Write! NYC” helped make me make a contract with myself. Adding these work periods to my calendar and treating them the same way helps to avoid blue food in my refrigerator of my life.

If there’s a lesson to take away from the most productive hour of writing I’ve had on this novel since the night I started it, five years ago, it’s that making the commitment and honoring it is the only way to get anything done—and it helps when you’re surrounded by others doing the same thing. Thinking about it, this may be why many of the other creative projects I’ve been working on are going so well. They’re group efforts, and when you’re with others and accountable to others, you get fewer excuses. Public commitments are much harder to break than private ones, whether its updating a blog every week, doing 10,000 push-ups in a month, or just writing for an hour in a public space.

When I tell people I’m a writer the conversation often moves to the question, “Oh, what do you write?” Since I’m working on a novel, the response to my response is often “That must be hard,” or something along the same lines. In an attempt at wit I’ll often say “Oh, starting a novel is easy. So is finishing one. It’s that middle bit that’s hard.” Of course, the truth is much more subtle.

It is well known that many people are afraid of the blank page, and see it as a detriment to even starting to write. Personally, I’ve never had that problem. Beginning is always easy. It takes no effort to start a project. I could list enough endeavors I’ve started and never finished to fill a encyclopedia, if I wrote large enough. As for ending a project, well, almost every project you can think of has a state that can be considered the end, whether that means it’s actually done, or you just have to turn it in to the person who needs it. Deadlines may be rigid or flexible, but you can only blow past them enough times before it’s just over. Then again, David Foster Wallace wrote thousands of manuscript pages over twelve years for his unfinished, final novel The Pale King and was nowhere close to an ending. DFW may not have had a problem with the middle, but we’ll never know.

For me, the middle is the tricky bit. That’s where the actual work happens—you hope. For my novel, the middle bit is where I’ve been stuck for the last five years. The words have come in fits and starts. I’ve started over, given up starting over, picked up where I left off, revised and re-revised what I already had, skipped ahead, went back to fill in what I skipped. I’ve done any other thing you can think of to either make the work or avoid it. So, the work remains, an unfinished building worked on sporadically when there’s something in the budget. Hard as it is, the only way out is through. It’s not a question of knowing what’s next in the story. The narrative is plotted out. I know how, where, and when it will and must end. I’ve written the ending. I’ve written it several times. (This is another brilliant way to avoid working on the middle.) The main events to carry the story to its conclusion are all there, in the outline, in my head, in chicken scratchings in notebooks and text files in nvALT. They’re just, for the most part, unwritten. For now.

“Write every day.” That’s the summary of 99.99% of books ever written about writing. It’s the gist of On Writing, Writing Down the Bones, The War of Art, Bird by Bird, No Plot, No Problem… and I’ve read them all. Much like Reading books on writing won’t result in you having a book of your own. Reading up on the writing habits of famous writers, like how Ernest Hemmingway sat at the typewriter every morning, revised his last five-hundred words, then wrote a new five-hundred words, won’t result in you having the same work ethic. Critiquing other people’s writing won’t result in you having writing to critique. Seeking inspiration in music, movies, nature, novels and short stories won’t result in inspired work. Changing your environment to write in coffee shops, bars, restaurants, public parks, and cabins in the woods won’t result in a change in your habits. Switching your writing medium to pen and paper, a typewriter, or a full-screen, minimalist text editor on your Mac won’t make the words appear on the page. I’ve done all of these things. All of then can help, but you have to do the work to have any results. Merlin has it right.

My writing workflow hasn’t changed a great deal since I wrote about it a year ago. The main difference is that I use Byword for iOS as my primary editor on my iPhone. I’ve looked at ways to modify my workflow, particularly when it comes to fiction writing, but—of course—fiddling with a workflow won’t result in the work getting done, either. What gets the work done is setting aside the time, making the commitment, focusing, and making the clackity noise, or whatever onomatopoeia suits your method of writing. This is hard. Steven Pressfield calls the force that prevents you from doing the work, any creative work, The Resistance, capitals intentional. Resistance comes from within and without. The majority of my Resistance is temporal. I have a twelve hour work day, social obligations to meet, chores to do, and fit in the occasional good night’s sleep. Either I fit my writing into those gaps, the very essence of my existing writing workflow, or I get nothing done. Then again, when I had more free time, I got even less done. The Resistance found new avenues of attack to keep me from writing the middle, all of which I’ve outlined above.

It’s monumentally hard, and even harder than fighting The Resistance is that this novel isn’t my only project on the burner. I have this site, my articles for Kittysneezes, and other projects all in various states of incompletion. This is the result of a terminal inability to focus on one thing for very long. Only hard deadlines, like I have for the ongoing Residents Project on Kittysneezes keep things like that from falling by the wayside. It’s a mark of personal pride that I’ve not yet done any “last minute” writing for that project, though I have done some editing and spit-shine on pieces that weren’t quite ready to go when that deadline came flying by. [1]

This essay began life in November of 2011, and—though coincidence—the day I picked it back up was the day the first episode of Systematic, a podcast hosted by the brilliant Brett Terpstra, dropped. He, and guest Mike Schramm both have their fingers in multiple projects, professionally and personally, and part of the show focused on how they choose which of their personal projects gets the attention it needs. The method, more or less, is based on need, desire, whim, and energy. This made me feel so much better to hear. When it’s time to work on their apps, they work on their apps. When it’s time to write, they write.

By necessity, this is the approach I have to take with my writing (and other) projects. As long as the work gets done, and on time, does it matter which work gets done? It’s liberating to know that I don’t need to feel guilt about choosing one thing over another. That I have to spread my attention around is something out of my control. I can’t control what flower the bumblebee of my attention lands on today, but as long as it lands on them all, in time, things will be okay. All I have do is know what has to be done, and do it, in time. All I have to do is find the time, and do the work. If I do, that middle bit will eventually be taken care of.