Dear Reader,
I always have a new writing goal. Word counts, pages, timed writing sessions, notebook scribbles. I do writing challenges with friends, buy planners to be more productive. And sometimes it works! I streamline my tasks, I get the words in.
But even when I meet my goal, I decide that it must have been too low of a bar, so I set a new, more difficult goal. I think if I achieve more, get published where I want, then maybe I will be happy. Once I “make it” I will be satisfied.
But therein lies the issue: I will never be satisfied. My nature is such that there will always be more words to write, more goals to reach. This discipline is what has helped me stay motivated to write for so long. But honestly, it’s exhausting.
Taking a short break while on maternity leave made me realize just how burnt out I’d become. It was so nice to not be thinking about meeting a goal for once. I could read, snuggle my baby, get all the chores done, and I didn’t feel guilty that I wasn’t writing. For a short time, I thought maybe it would be easier to just quit. Maybe then I would finally have balance. But then I recalled something I had been thinking about a few years ago. I’d thought: I hope I will always be writing.
In the Pixar movie Soul, the protagonist is a middle school band teacher who longs to make it as a jazz pianist. He finally gets his big break, an opportunity to play with a big name musical group, when he dies in a freak accident and has to navigate the afterlife for a second chance.
After he finally performs with these musicians, he walks out onto the street which is oddly quiet after the loud applause of the concert hall in the previous scene. He turns to the famous saxophone player and says,
“Now what?”
She replies, “Now we do it all over again tomorrow night.”
“I just thought I would feel different,” he says.
She then tells him a story about a fish who’d been swimming around looking for the ocean. At last, another fish tells him that actually he’s been in the ocean the whole time. “This?” the fish replies. “This is just water.”
Then the saxophone player gets into her taxi and drives away. The pianist reflects on his life: playing, teaching, and enjoying music. He had been “swimming in the water” his whole life.
Amy Poehler talks about something similar in her autobiography Yes, Please!. She writes about her early days of doing stand-up comedy before she ever made it big on SNL and starred in movies like Baby Mama and on the well-known television comedy Parks and Rec. She says, “You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.” Not only that, but if you don’t love what you do, the rest is irrelevant: the accolades, the achievements.
Whatever happens, I will always be in this process, the “doing” of writing. And frequently I have to remind myself that the doing of the thing is the thing. The purpose of writing isn’t to reach a word count, or even really to get a book deal (though that would be nice!). I write because I must; it’s what Sue Monk Kidd calls my “necessary fire.” I write because I love the process: the magical moment when the words on the page become something other than ink and paper (or pixels and glass lol), when the mundane becomes alive. I do it for its own sake. And if I’m not doing that, then I will never be satisfied no matter what.
Join the conversation
Whether you’re a writer, a musician, or some other kind of artist, how do you teach yourself to love the process?