The Right Words Won’t Let You Catch Them Right Away
On patience during a creative session.
I sit down at the kitchen table. It’s 8:30. Until 11 o’clock, I am strictly forbidden to walk away from it.
I have decided to write my first book.
This morning, I produced a total of 2,450 words. 2,101 are to be thrown away. The remaining 349 were written in the last 15 minutes.
Again this morning, I had to be patient. Whatever your project is, you’ll need patience too. Here’s why.
Think of your mind as a bowl of soup
I like the soup bowls that my parents use. From the outside, they look perfectly ordinary. Regular size. White. But inside them is a drawing, hidden when the bowl is filled with soup. You have to empty it, spoon after spoon, to see it appear.
This is what happened to me this morning.
It’s as if the words I needed resisted me. I wrote and wrote and wrote, but the words that came out were useless. They weren’t the ones I wanted. I knew I wouldn’t keep them. But I kept going.
Why?
Because I knew that to reach the drawing sitting at the bottom of the bowl, I first had to empty the bowl.
Every sentence I got out was a spoonful of soup that went away. I had to clear my mind of all the clutter so that I could get a glimpse of the truth.
It’s like when you look for a name for your cat. You’ll get people to brainstorm with you and everyone will soon start to throw out the most absurd names that come to their mind. Saying nonsense after nonsense is a way to clear your minds of everything that gets in the way, and only then do the first good ideas start to appear.
I wrote these 349 words at the very end of my writing session
I was a little desperate. I had been sitting there for over two hours and nothing good was coming.
I began to feel the doubts creeping up on me. Am I capable of writing something good? Is it really for me? Will I be able to do it?
This is what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance.
Because I know my enemy, I could tell his voice from mine. And mine was saying “Keep going!”. So, as tempting as it was to get up and go do something else, I stayed with my ass screwed to the stool. I had decided to stay there until 11, even though no more words would come out of me. I would at least have a small victory: that of having respected my commitment to myself.
All of a sudden, a sentence appeared in my mind.
I toyed with it for a few seconds, weighed its quality, and decided to write it down. Another one followed. It was as if the words were whispered into my ear and my only role was to transcribe them.
I wrote for another 15 minutes.
349 words.
They’re good.
The bottom line
I did not waste my time. Those two and a half hours led to these 15 good minutes. Without using them to empty my mind, I would not have reached the drawing at the bottom of the bowl. I would not have heard those 349 words that needed perfect inner silence and void to come out.
To create, you have to be patient. To put your ego aside. To accept that some days, everything flows as if you’ve been touched by grace, while other days nothing comes. Had I called it a day, I would have missed those 349 words.
All I have to do is sit down at the same time every day and stay there until 11. That’s my commitment. That’s all I have control over. Whether the words come or not is none of my business.
Whether you paint, make music, draw, dance, cook, or write, you have to be patient. Get everything out of your mind. When you’ve reached rock bottom, that’s when things get interesting.