“Days without any creative work are lost days. An artist, a real artist, would work.”

I mentioned yesterday that I can’t resist the $1.99 Kindle deals here and there, and over the weekend, I saw Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks was available for $2.99 and I simply couldn’t resist. I love books of journal entries, letters, notes. I gravitate toward the stuff of life, possibly because I find it more interesting than most fiction. And the quote above is from her. She’s something like 19 or 20 at the time she’s writing that. And around 19 or 20 was when I started to feel that way. My friend Zack’s dad is a painter, he taught at Tyler School of Art, and Zack and I at that time were musicians who were in the process of starting to paint and write respectively ourselves. Zack’s dad was no-nonsense about what it took to be successful in the arts. You had to work. You had to sit down every day and do it whether you felt like it or not. It’s why I’ve always had a low tolerance when I hear a writer complaining about having to write. I get it. When you’re at a loss for words, when you’re not sure where to go with a current project, when you’re unenthusiastic about the prospect of sitting at your desk, writing can feel like a chore at best. And sometimes, you do need to step back, take a break, refresh the reserves by telling yourself you’re not going to work. But I’m not there right now. I took a week off in August. Since then I’ve been trying to work. I’ve set myself a schedule where I do creative work in the morning (right now it’s usually a short story), revisions in the afternoon (I’ve had a draft of the book I’m about to shop around ready since June, but I’ll likely be looking it over and fine tuning it until I find representation), and then in the evening, I look at my agent query pitch and reassess whether my cover letter, synopsis and samples are where I want them to be. In short, it’s possible that I’ve hit a wall today because I’m overtaxing myself, and I either need to take the pedal off the gas or need to simply focus on one or the other of those tasks.

Today, I ended up dropping the morning creative work. I woke world-weary and bone tired, which is strange because I got to be by 10:30 and opened my eyes at 7:10. Though of course, we’ve been training my son out of overnight diapers (he’s been potty trained since he was a toddler, but boys can often wear overnight diapers until they’re six or so), and I did wake about 20 minutes after I went down to his alarm going off, signaling that he’d started to urinate, and I had to get up to make sure he got out of bed and finished in the toilet. And my son was in that dazed phase of deep sleep into which he falls early in the night where, if I wake him up like this, he pees, and then comes back to the room, and as I’m trying to get him to change and get the alarm reset, he cackles maniacally. The first time it happened my wife was on vacation with our daughter, and I was alone in the house with him, and he just started laughing like that in the dark house, and it freaked me out something fierce. I’m more used to it now, but it’s still kind of unnerving. I got back to sleep relatively quickly after that, but there’s this spike of wakefulness on my sleep tracker early in the morning that might have been him waking again (my wife took that shift) but I don’t remember being up. Got eight and a half hours last night and nine the night before and both mornings I didn’t feel tip-top. Some people respond to that by suggesting you might have had too much sleep and others might say that, since we sleep in 90 minute cycles, I might not feel so rested because I woke in the middle of a cycle, but I’m not sure I buy either of those. Sometimes, it’s just midweek, you know you have to get up and go to work, you have meetings scheduled you don’t want to attend and work you have to catch up on and you simply don’t want to get out of bed, and that might have been me this morning.

Then again, I also didn’t want to work on either of the new projects I have going. The first is a story about aging, more an essay or maybe a story. It’s what I woke up and worked on yesterday, and reviewing what I had on the page so far, I could see potential, but I wasn’t necessarily enthusiastic about figuring out how to make it work. The other project I have going is about an office spat between two employees applying for a supervisor position where one is trying to undermine the other, an office-war type story, and while I like what I have so far, I’m not highly enthusiastic about working on that one either. Of course, I’m ignoring my own advice in not forcing myself to sit and stare at the page and see what comes. I have a post it note on my desk that I wrote a long time ago that I keep around. It says: “Sit down to write. Face what’s on the screen + accept what the day offers up to you. Don’t be afraid to write badly. You can make it better later.” Good advice, right? I mean, you can’t revise from nothing, and with the exception of one or two pieces that came out fully formed and were published that way, almost everything I’ve ever completed and published required several drafts. So pushing yourself when you don’t want to write can yield dividends. It’s like working out in that way where, even if you don’t want to do it, it’s probably good for you in the long run. But I just didn’t want to get out of bed this morning, so today is that dreaded “day without any creative work” Highsmith was aware of even in her youth.

Some of it also had to do with an inability to focus. My daughter had to be at school early for her first day training as a safety monitor. I love that she asked to do this, that she volunteered, that we didn’t need to urge her. I like that she wants to be involved with things, and for a kid, she’s pretty responsible and conscientious, so I think she’s going to be a good safety monitor and I’m proud of her. In fact, as I was walking her to school, I had that swelling sense of pride in her that made me a little teary, though I held that back until I was walking home and by myself. With her, I simply told her that I was proud of her, and let her go. Actually, I stood there for a few moments while the instructor began, because I wanted to listen to what was going on. But then I realized I was the only parent standing there, and I worried I was helicopter parenting and figured I should drift away and let things be. Obviously, I was lingering because I was trying to control the situation. I was’t trying to make sure my daughter did everything right or anything like that. I was simply curious as to how they were going to be trained. But I also realized, I can just ask about it when she gets out today and my daughter will tell me all about it.

But then, of course, I had to come home and walk my son back up to school a half hour later, which broke up the morning in such a way that I couldn’t really focus on writing. And so what? I miss a morning of creative work. Some days are like that, aren’t they? The morning, itself, was beautiful. The moon was still out as I walked my daughter to school, and she pointed it out, “Look the moon’s out. It’s not full yet but it’s almost full.” And again, when walking my son to school, he pointed up, “Look it’s the moon!” And I appreciated that they both noticed, that the siblings bear the similarity that the moon being out in the morning fills them both with wonder. Though I guess that’s true for a lot of kids. It was also cooler out. Not cold, but I needed a jacket to be comfortable. And that’s the weather I like, jacket weather in the mornings, short sleeves in the afternoon, sweaters in the evenings. It’s Stephen King weather, I thought, as I stepped outside. I’m not sure why but the September transition to autumn always reminds me of Stephen King, like I’m living in Stand By Me or Cujo. Like my neighborhood has temporarily turned into Castle Rock. And this is my happiest time of year, the time I feel most grateful to be alive.

Still, I can’t say that it’s easy to go a day without doing creative work. I got back from the second drop-off and went straight into office work, checking my two work email accounts, responding to the most pressing messages straightaway, then catching up on a special project I’m leading but have fallen behind on. Then, there was a meeting with colleagues in the UK that was set to help clear up what was essentially a misunderstanding on email, and I was a little nervous heading into it simply because you don’t know if the email misunderstanding is going to carry over in the face-to-face meetings, but I was in luck and I was able to clarify what was going on with my project and assure the other parties involved that I was not currently nor did I have any intention in the future of overstepping my bounds, which ultimately was the best outcome because I think it’s going to help propel the project forward, and I know this is all a little vague, but who’s going to get specific about their work life on a blog. Suffice it to say, it was a productive morning, but at the same time, whenever I don’t get that creative work in prior to starting in on my office work, the work I get paid for, there’s always that nagging sensation that I’m not really me, that on this particular day, I didn’t attend to what was most important to me. Though even that’s deceptive because what’s most important to me is my family, and in tending to my kids, getting them to school, making sure my daughter was on time for safety monitor training, I was tending to what was most important to me, so perhaps I should figure out another way to phrase that: there’s a certain need I’ve had for as long as I could tell stories, and that’s been to write, and since those days when I was 19 or 20 and Zack’s dad was telling me I had to work to be an artist, I believed him, and since I wanted to be an artist, I’ve had to work for a day to feel complete, and I’ve pretty much been working every day since I was 28 and decided to give this writing thing a go. So it may not be more important than my family, but it’s integral to my sense of self, which in turn allows me to be present. So there you go, after rambling like that I’ve figured out how to put it: if I don’t attend to writing first thing in the morning, I spend the rest of the day distracted and feeling like there’s something I’ve left undone, and this means I don’t give the aspect of my life that’s most important to me, my family, my full attention, so writing is integral. Make sense?

Anyway, yesterday I mentioned I listen to podcasts, and I tend to listen to a wide variety of subject matter, but several of them are podcasts about mindfulness and/or meditation, and yes, I do take a lot of the information on these podcasts with a grain of salt, because even if they’re podcasts geared toward self help, they’re also trying to sell me something and keep me coming back for more. But the part that applies now, that I keep hearing over and over again, is that reminder that mind states are temporary, that just because I didn’t find the time to work this morning, it doesn’t mean I should despair and think it means I’m not going to work on my stuff tomorrow or Friday or never get to work again. It means, simply, that I was tired and distracted this morning, and it was okay that I missed it, and tomorrow morning I’m likely going to feel different and maybe I’ll want to work on that essay/story about the perils of aging or an office war, or maybe I’ll get sparked about another idea I’ve had simmering on the back-burner for a while, or maybe I’ll remember some story I wrote a few years ago that didn’t work at the time but that I figured out how to make work today because that’s happened before, too. And that’s what I mean when I talk about how you can’t revise from nothing. Even if what you’ve put down strikes you as not working, even if it seems like utter nonsense, sometimes saving those pages, having them around for a while, can spark something a few years down the road.

You never know what you might be able to use.