Quote of the Week

Patience

“It’s fair to say that patience has a terrible reputation. For one thing, the prospect of doing anything that you’ve been told will require patience simply seems unappetizing. More specifically though, it’s disturbingly passive.” 
Four Thousand Weeks Time Management for Mortals 2021 by Oliver Burkeman

Patience is a necessary component of creativity. Our lives are comprised of an ongoing series of problems that we need to solve, from the simple “I’m hungry, what am I going to eat?” to the more complex “I’ve written my main character into a corner, how the hell am I going to get her out?”

Many of our daily problems are easy fixes that require very little time or energy to solve, but when I write a character into a corner I often need to step away from the manuscript for a day or three, or even longer, and do something completely unrelated before the solution comes to me. I have to practice patience. This is antithetic to the writer’s creed of “You must write every day if you want to be a ‘real’ writer.”

In essence, I was judging myself according to the standards of productivity that are impossible for me to meet. This is a fairly recent lesson for me. I bought into the writer’s creed and suffered from anxiety and a fear that I’m not good enough whenever I couldn’t put down words. When I learned to accept that this is how I’m wired and accepted MY process, I developed patience with myself and my stories. If I give the process enough time I eventually come up with a solution that lies beyond the obvious and the story is the better for it.

Patience for the win.