I don't know about you, but sometimes I find that the most difficult person in the room isn't somebody else, it's ME. Especially when I'm in the room alone, because that's often the case when creative resistance appears.
Let me explain.
Yesterday, I did my fifteen minutes. Actually, closer to thirty. It was a great morning. There was a hint of rain lingering in the air from an early morning downpour. The bricks on the patio were wet and the geraniums were bright red in the cool morning air. My daughter slept late. I finished a revision on a story I am proud of. My little book felt within reach, possibly sooner than I'd been thinking. I considered whether I ought to send the current manuscript in to a contest next week. I made an extra cup of coffee. I felt encouraged by what I'd accomplished and by the loveliness of the day.
Then, the voices of resistance started in.
They go like this:
Who do you think you are with this writing thing?
Nobody wants to read a thing you've written.
Does the world really need another fourth-rate book?
You are wasting your time. Nobody will want this.
The energy you spend on creative work should be spent making a better life for your family.
Why aren't you busy making money?
You are an embarrassment. You are delusional.
This whole artistic endeavor is hopelessly childish.
And so on (and on and on).
The novelist Steven Pressfield coined the term resistance to explain the force of negativity that gets in the way as we create. To him, the goal of resistance is to keep the universe as it is. Same plain Jane. No new additions.
I can't help wondering if this particular resistance isn't coming coming from fear. Fear that if I finish the project, I'll be laughed at for making something so stupid. Fear that if I can't get it published, I'll have wasted my time. Fear that if I do get it published, people will judge me.
It's all absolutely true. Except it doesn't matter.
I have read so many stories that have stayed with me, changed me, made my world bigger, deeper, and more beautiful. Some were published in literary magazines--some illustrious, but many not especially fancy. The stories took their writers time to produce and took their editors time to select and revise. That's time and energy that could have been applied to selling real estate or making dinner or whatever else it was those writers had to do to get on with their lives. But they found the time and wrote the stories.
The thing is, I am grateful for those stories! They make my life richer and more delightful, and that all by itself has value. Will my stories do the same for someone else? I have no way of knowing. All I know is that I'm writing as a kind of reciprocation. Hopefully, these little works will find their way into other people's pockets, become something lovely, and maybe--in the absolute best case scenario--for a few minutes light up the world.
If not, I will have tried, in my own way, to say thank you to those gracious strangers who have given me their writing. The thing is, I can't know if I will succeed unless I try. Outcomes can't always dictate inputs because, while you can control some of the input, you have absolutely no control over what the outcome will be.
In my next post, I am going to delve deeper into the idea of creative work as a practice. (Cliche, I know. But cliche for a reason!)
Until then, I'll be trying to remember that resistance is just noise, running in the background. Noise that is better blocked out and ignored.
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