Trying is hard.
You’ll have heard all this before. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. We have all been indoctrinated with the myth of the epiphany. That, in one moment, everything can change. Books, TV, and films all tell us that our lives are linear, causal narratives. This is a convenient fiction. You are not the full stop at the end of a run-on sentence of existence. You are a rubber band ball of accumulated and accumulating experience, the lint you pull out of the dryer not the dry clothes. But you know that. That doesn’t stop you ending each night with the list of major improvements you will make to your life the next morning. Trying is hard, and it’s much comfier to aspire to a false ease than accept the true hardship of doing things.
Do you want to know why you never feel like you do well enough? It’s because you think you are special. You think you are the one person who can subvert the rules and be good straight away. If I could remove one thing from reality it’d be the Q & A section of any public appearance by a writer. To be more specific, if there was one thing I could simply stop ever occurring it would be the wholly predictable first question. ‘What advice do you have for aspiring writers?’ It seems like a normal question but the answer is always the same. Write every day and finish what you write. It’s good, accurate advice. The veracity or will of the advice is not the problem. Even the fact that it is always the same is not the problem. The reason that I dread its asking is because the person asking knows that is what they are going to be told.
A friend of mine did a survey for their honours thesis about various sundry things around artistic process and 90 per cent of respondents said they were writers. I cannot help but feel that a lot of those people are mislabelling themselves. Comic book writer and living symbol of the damage the Internet can do to one’s social skills Warren Ellis, when questioned about ‘writer’s block’ said “This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn’t a writer anymore.” If you are asking for advice on writing rather than doing it, you are not a writer. When the Qer asks the writer for advice, they are hoping to be told that there is some magic trick. Some one quick way to be good at writing. We all want that to be true. This doesn’t just apply to writing. We all want to be magically good at something straight away.
Clown-haired non-fictionist and the third Google auto-fill result for ‘Malc’ Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Outliers that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to become a true master of something. He talks about the Beatles’ years playing in Liverpool and Hamburg nightclubs and about how Bill Gates spent the evenings from the age of 13 to 18 on the single computer his school had. As much as you dismiss his claims as Louis-Theroux- arts-degree brain science for the lazy, Gladwell has a point. No one ever was good at anything straight away. No one is even good at walking to begin with.
You know how attractive the inside of your brain is. If you just fantasise then you can’t fail. But if you want to do something you have to do it. Over and over. You will fail. It will hurt but not as much as you thought. But you are smart enough to learn from your failures. Then you will get good. You know this.