Bullheaded

So I’ve been working on this book for a while, see? I keep saying three years, but I’ve been saying that for about a year, so somewhere along the way my disappointing admission has become something worse: a lie.

And yet I still can’t bring myself to take a break and do something else for a while, like write a new short story or edit some old work or write something for a performance (reading, monologue, etc.). I know it’d be good practice, plus the writers I most admire seem to work on several projects simultaneously. So what’s keeping me back?

My first answer: a misconception that for every minute I spend on a writing-but-not-novel-writing project, I would otherwise be working on the novel itself. There’s something sacred about the hours I get to spend writing or thinking about or drafting or erasing large chunks of the book, so the idea of somehow stealing from those hours for a project I’m less enamored of seems wasted, or rather like stealing from myself.

But I know that’s not entirely true. The whole reason to break out is because I often spend those available hours staring into space or cleaning something or reading someone else’s book or wasting time on the internet (putting the internet at the end there is misleading, because, honestly, that’s the most likely time sink of the bunch).

Sage just asked me whether I’d like to collaborate with her on a project, and immediately I had that knee-jerk reaction: NO! I cannot pull myself away from the book, which, no lie, I still firmly believe in and think will be worth all of the effort. But then she broke up my thinking by suggesting I do something other than write, like sketch. I love to sketch, pen drawings. I’ve always loved drawing. Look at my journals from way back. They’re chock full of figurines, psychedelic dreamscapes, naked women, signatures, still lifes, monsters, eyeballs, faces, haircuts, lists, lizards.

I’ve stopped making promises on these pages, but I will say Sage is onto something. Forget this lie of a limited creative balance. As with the proverbial distance that a stronger fondness makes, I’ll find myself yearning to get back to the novel when I’m doing my best sketching, and in the process jump straight into something good. Real good.