This past weekend was the tipping point for the #100dayproject. We’ve crossed the halfway mark, and now we’re on the back end, the downward slope. That feels like relief, but I know I’m still squarely in the messy middle.
This is the hard part. This is where the trust comes in, that this is a worthwhile project and not a giant waste of time.
I’ve had a hard time believing that, especially last week. I found myself sitting down and writing terribly just to check the box and say I did it. My fingers moved across the keyboard, but it was a lot of: This is a bunch of garbage and I can’t believe how badly this is going and I don’t want to do this anymore.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
On a particularly bad writing day, I looked up the phases of the creative process, which I’d seen somewhere online years ago, sure I was squarely in phase 3. These are the phases:
- This is awesome.
- This is tricky.
- This is shit.
- I am shit.
- This might be OK.
- This is awesome.
And my suspicion was confirmed. I have been in phase 3, thinking this whole thing is pile of junk, and right on time. Phase 3 and phase 4 are what they are for a reason. They pop up in the middle of a project. The middle, which is a big old mess. The middle where it feels like you’ve lost your way and you want to give up.
You started off well—with confidence and direction and strength—but taking one step after another is wearing you down and your map seems to be wrong. This can’t be the right way. Maybe you took a wrong turn somewhere.
You look behind you and can’t see where you started. You look ahead and can’t see your destination. You’re tempted to call it quits and call a friend to pick you up on the side of the road. All you want is a hot bath and to sleep for a hundred hours in your snuggly bed.
Here’s the good news: the middle is a great time to assess, reflect, and regroup.
Even when you feel lost, even when you’re down in the weeds, there’s time to lift your head and look around. Then you can decide where to go next.
I say this because last week was such a giant slog. I toyed with the idea of quitting. I berated myself for writing so poorly. I felt so bone-deep exhausted, and not just from writing ten minutes every day.
WHEN LIFE GETS IN THE WAY
Earlier this month, my dad spent twelve days in the hospital. It was complicated and grueling, and rippled out in every direction. I kept writing every day, but some days I’ve been emotionally tapped out, after endlessly long conversations and hours spent at the hospital.
My daily writing became a place to record what was happening and process through it, though a lot of it was bringing up things I don’t really want to write about. I didn’t set out to write a memoir of my father’s illness, but it was all I could think about and all I was putting on paper.
As things started to wind down, I saw it as an opportunity to change course. I’ve written thousands of words about this experience, but I don’t want to get hung up there and spend the next fifty-ish days writing about only that. But because it was all I could think about for a couple of weeks, I struggled to figure out what was next.
What I really needed were a few good nights of sleep and some solid boundaries around what I’m willing to do or not do going forward.
I also needed a healthy dose of reality: phase 3 is a normal part of the process. If I persevere and endure this phase, I will keep moving forward (though I still hope to somehow circumvent phase 4). This why-am-I-doing-this, everything-is-crap phase is temporary.
REVISITING THE PLAN
It leads to a question I should revisit here in the middle: Why am I doing this again?
I went back to reread what I wrote at the beginning of the project in late January:
“I’ve decided to get back to my ten minutes of writing each day, to generate more spontaneous, in-the-moment work. Each day, I set a timer and write about whatever I’m thinking. I let myself be loose. I let it not always make sense or bunny trail off into weird directions. I use my imagination.
My goal is to blur the line between what’s real and what’s imagined, straddling somewhere between what I empirically know and what might be possible. Just like a poem, whose scope and capacity can expand in a hundred directions.
Day by day, we pick up the scrap pieces of our lives and try to make them into something lovely. The shapes might be uneven, but the hope is, these wonky, uneven shapes might become something. That someday, after all this labor and love, they might become art.“
This project isn’t about creating a perfect piece of writing. It’s about the process, not the product. This is an exploration, an inquiry. This is an endurance race.
And the goal is to finish, not necessarily finish well.
IT’S OKAY TO BE WHERE YOU ARE
In The Art of Slow Writing, Louise DeSalvo talks about how writers have to wear two hats: the manager and the laborer. The manager makes decisions and evaluates progress; the laborer does the work. These first fifty-ish days, I’ve been in full-time laborer mode, cranking out words without much thought about the bigger picture.
But that’s where I get down in the weeds, zoomed in so tightly that all I can see is one square inch at a time. What I also need to do is pick my head up, zoom out, and realize things are okay.
It’s time for that manager-self to step in. She has a map and a good head on her shoulders. My laborer-self needs to listen to her.
First thing’s first: It’s okay to be in phase 3.
Wherever I am is where I’m supposed to be right now. The middle, phase 3—this is all temporary. I can keep moving, even if I can’t see exactly where I’m going.
In World Enough & Time, Christian McEwan writes:
“If we are flexible and patient, if we are able to persist, there comes a time when the work itself begins to respond, when a conversation starts to develop between one’s project and oneself: each moment of clarity giving rise to the next.”
The longer we can hang on, the deeper we can go. Which is why finishing is so important. Not finishing with a perfect piece of writing, but with something that can later be polished and refined.
DeSalvo says it can take several “safe” drafts to get to where the work becomes original and interesting.
The first draft, no matter how messy, is only a starting point.
NUTS AND BOLTS
Thankfully, I’ve gotten a lot written in the first half of this project. As of Day 50, I’ve written 40,655 words on 66 single-spaced pages. According to my spreadsheet (where I track all of my writing sessions), I’ve spent more than 21 hours writing since January 31. That averages to about 25 minutes a day, much more than then 10 minutes I’ve been aiming for.
Not too shabby, I’d say.
Even if I end up cutting half of those words (because I was writing over and over again that this is stupid), I’ll still have a lot to work with. There will still be a lot to do when we hit Day 100.
By then, I hope I have enough momentum to keep going, to push beyond this season of generation into a season of revision, of re-seeing, looking at what’s here and giving it new life.
Even typing these words gives me courage, knowing that where I am, in this messy, muddy middle, is just the right place for right now.
A few weeks from now, I’ll be somewhere else. Something to look forward to.
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