A Chinese proverb states that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But when? No time like the present! Do it now!
One of the problems I (and, I dare say, many other writers) face is getting started. Once past that initial hurdle, the words begin to flow. There’s no guarantee that they will flow indefinitely or without interruptions, but I’ve learned that I must write while they are flowing. I must redeem the time. Now.
James Gifford, executive director of the Jesse Stuart Foundation, noted that Stuart “wrote furiously, like a man killing snakes.” Stuart had to get his stories down on paper, so he wrote quickly. He had “a tireless work ethic” and, as one critic stated, “wrote like a force of nature.” He wrote the 703 sonnets of Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow in only eleven months, 42 of them in one day while sitting in a church cemetery. But that resulted from his acting on his ideas.
Much of my writing requires quite a bit of research. Some of my knowledge comes from what I already know or have experienced, but most of it requires research because I don’t know everything that must be said on my topics. (As one of my favorite practical philosophers, Will Rogers, put it, “We’re all ignorant; just on different subjects.” And even in our area of “expertise,” we don’t know even a fraction of that!)
So I must read, dig, and study, mentally putting it all together into a coherent form around a solid skeletal structure before I can begin writing. But one of my greatest problems is knowing when to stop researching and start writing. The amount of information on almost any topic is seemingly endless. One source turns up multiple additional sources that I feel compelled to peruse, and those turn up additional information, which, in turn, forces me into still more avenues of discovery.
If I allow myself, I can get lost in all the information gathering and never get around to writing what I want to share. That’s when I must force myself to set aside the books and articles and online sources and get busy producing the end product. And that takes discipline.
And I’m not alone with this problem. Other writers also are more than willing to talk about what they’re going to write “some day.” They can tell us a lot about what they are studying or researching and planning to do “one day.” But they never seem to get to the point of acting on that information or those plans. It might be a family history, a book about some momentous event in their lives, or a novel that they’ve been cogitating for years. They find endless excuses for not taking that first step toward writing and publishing. So it never gets done.
Augusten Burroughs revealed to an interviewer for The Writer (April 2017) the cure for this debilitating condition: “Stop thinking about all the reasons you have not to write your memoir and what people in your family might think and just get busy writing it. . . . Stop thinking about writing, stop reading about writing, stop worrying about writing, and just actually sit in one place and write something.”
It’s as simple as that. And as one Patch the Pirate (Ron Hamilton) children’s songs says, “Do it now. Don’t delay. Don’t put it off till another day. Go ahead; begin it. Right this very minute. You’d better do it now!”
How about you? What writing project have you been putting off for whatever reason(s)? Now is the time to act on it. You don’t know what might happen tomorrow. It might never come for you. Take the first step of that journey of a thousand miles now. Today. In the end, you’ll be glad you did.
Copyright (c) 2018, Dennis L. Peterson