I did it.
“Untitled Gnome Project” is three pages and one day old. I knew I could do it…because I cheated a bit. I’d already written a page and a half months ago…but I still sat down and squeezed out another page and a half to make it a full three. Feels good, guys. And it took me an hour. I have an hour a day.
For those who go by word count, three pages (formatted the way I format) is about 1,000 words. 1,000 words a day for 90 days is 90,000 words, and that’s a mother fucking novel, yo.
I just read what I wrote today to Liz, and she said it sounded good. Already, it sounds better than what I’ve wrote before…which I understand exactly what she means by that: the point of continuing to write is to get better. It’s not to say anything I wrote before is crap, or that what I’ve written today is brilliant…no, it’s an acknowledgment of what I feel myself, which is to say that it feels like positive momentum. I am not staying static, and I’m not sliding backwards…I’m moving forward.
If you’re not familiar, there’s an awesome recording of Ira Glass talking about the gap between taste level and ability. See, if any of us decide to get into something creative like writing, or acting, or film, or whatever it is – we get into primarily because we have excellent taste, taste cultivated by a fascination and passion for whatever art form we’ve fallen in love with. But, then when we first start out at actually MAKING some of that art ourselves…we realize that our abilities are far, far below our taste level…and that can be crushing. Lots of people leave it at that and walk away. But what Ira Glass points out is that the only way to close that gap, to raise my ability to the level of my taste…is to stick with it. Keep working. Keep producing work. Keep writing. It’s only through lots of hard work that my writing will ever become as good as I want it to become. I can’t give up…it’s precisely because my writing isn’t good enough yet that I must keep going.
Credit for this wonderful, honest video goes to the better “Ira” in this world, Ira Glass, and to David Shiyang Liu.
Anyway…art is *work* you guys. Hard work. Even genius is hard work. It takes time, and it takes a lot of sitting with ourselves feeling down because we know what we just made wasn’t good enough, wasn’t quite right…but I have faith. I have faith that if I just keep at it, keep working…I’ll get better and better, and if I just focus on getting *better* things will fall into place.
Till tomorrow, you guys. Day two. Page 6.