Typing with my Eyes Closed

 

I’ve been putting off writing since I got home. I’d wanted to work on something while I was at work, but work was so busy, so packed full that there was just no way to get around to that. I had every second so full, I didn’t have time to finish my actual work work, never mind work on a personal project. Then once I got home, I just felt so tired and daunted by my word count goal that I didn’t want to work on it at all.

I remember reading this article a while back that said that if you’re struggling to meet a goal or feeling intimated about meeting a goal or something along those lines, that you should multiply the goal by a factor of ten. Maybe it was a factor of five. I’m not sure now, but it was definitely an outrageous multiplier. The logic behind it… I remember there was logic behind it. Or supposed logic. I can’t remember now if the idea was just to pump out so much stuff that some of it had to be good or if it was to help you push back the mental blocks or some other such thing, but I do remember thinking the article was interesting.

There might have been a few articles like that, now that I’m thinking about them. I seem to remember a sort of “phase” where that was all the rage in the “self help” world. One particular article was about making lists of ideas. Ideas for stories or products or pieces of art or whatever--didn’t matter, just ten ideas every day. The guy writing the article said that if you can’t think of ten, think of twenty. He said that if you double the goal, your brain realizes that some or most of those ideas are going to be total useless garbage, and in knowing that, you’re giving yourself permission to write down and process terrible ides. Maybe you don’t keep all the ideas, but you the more ideas you come up with, the more likely it is that one of them will be good. That’s just statistics.

Once you start practicing coming up with ideas, even if most of the suck, you’ll find ideas (in all levels of quality) come more quickly and easily--at least according to the guy in the article. I don’t think he’s wrong. One of the other things I remember him talking about (well… I think it was him that brought it up, it very well could have been one of the other amny, many self help writers/gurus I’ve studied) a study on a high school art class.

In the “study” half the class was told that their grade would be based on making one “amazing” piece of art (pottery, I think , in this case) so they had to make just one great thing, and the other half of the class would be graded on sheer quantity with nothing based on how well they made the pieces.

In the end of the study, the students who were graded on quantity rather than quality were the ones who produced better quality, more creative pieces of art. Allowing yourself to be bad at something, but continuing to fight for it over and over again is the surest way to improve. That’s part of why I’ve been pushing myself to write more I figure if I can write a billion things, one of them will be good and then I can go from there.

Even knowing all that, and knowing that I’m a better writer when I’m writing all the time, it’s still hard for me not to feel daunted by the goals I’ve set for myself. If Id’ been better through the last six months of hitting my goals, I’d be in way better shape than I am now. I did fantastic in the first few months and then Summer Break happened and everything just kind of hit all at once.

It don’t feel like it’s slowed down at all. Shit, I’m sitting here now, barely awake, attempting to open my eyes and look at the keyboard or the screen so I don’t fall asleep, but I’m about to slip onto the floor. Ah well, tomorrow is another day. And a day I’m not working, so that’s a plus.