I’m really not into looking at the past because it’s, you know, past<\/em>. It might be very informative to see patterns, but ultimately what matters is forming new and better patterns, so I’d rather just get on with that.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n And as for that twelve-steppy psychology of blame she uses, again, it would be terribly unfair to criticise my family or childhood teachers when, in fact, I’ve always received a lot of encouragement for my creative abilities. I remember my parents oohing and ahhing over early cartoons that I now realise could only have looked perplexing or wildly deformed — but that bolstering gave me the incentive to continue drawing, and now, even without regular practice, I can draw whatever I like.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The book’s author also uses expressions like “toxic friends.” Well, you know what? I’m big enough and smart enough to not have a life like that. And that’s a crappy way to regard other folk. If you want to do something, just get on with it and don’t make others wrong if you’re not saying “No” when you need to.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Finally, my beef with The Artist’s Way<\/em> and so many other things like it is that they make you feel good and give you all sorts of little creative boxes of chocolates and bags of bath-salts, but you still don’t end up doing the wor<\/em>k. It’s something to do instead of<\/em> writing or painting or whatever your thing is.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n That’s not to say that how you feel is irrelevant — feeling hopeless or doubting yourself makes it very difficult to do the work, so I’m taking time to create a positive mental environment and a state of mind that’s big enough for the task at hand, which really does help. But I’m reminded of Natalie Goldberg<\/a>‘s wonderful books, which first inspired me to start writing seriously by capturing all the “holy details” around me: that was good up to a point, but filling books with discursive pages of rambling and “Me, me, me” wasn’t giving me anything I could put into a book and out into the world for others. (No, because clearly “Me, me, me” is the domain of blogging.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n There’s a wind-storm banging at the windows of my imagination, saying, “But writing is different from cartooning! It’s serious, and everyone’s a critic. What if they hate this story?” Well, for one that’s not my past experience with my writing. But more importantly, I’m getting deeply into this story enough that other people don’t matter. I want to discover it; I want to know where it goes and what happens to these people.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n I’ve been reading about “modelling excellent behaviour”, and looking about for best practices in writing. Of course, what I’m discovering is nothing surprising. Whether it’s at four in the morning or after the kids have gone to bed, working writers spend some time during the day writing. I know from my past experience that it doesn’t even have to be much in order to get a book written. (My actual writing sessions were usually only an hour to three hours long.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Which brings me to another racket it’s time to close: the idea that I can’t switch gears, that I need to have endless stretches of time and solitude in order to write. Those are nice, but ultimately the shift happens in a split-second, when my brain goes from not committing to the work to committing to the work. So that’s<\/em> what I need to get a handle on, not the other luxuries (which also require a lonely existence, and I’m not about to go back to that).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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