This postYesterday I found this fascinating post on M’s blog, which I stumbled across via E’s blog:
Jumping the gap between 0 and 1 is tougher than 1 to 2, or 1 to 100. At that point, you’re building on something already there. It’s that initial jump where the urge to give into procrastination is strongest, where excuses can derail you easiest.
We’re all creatives of one discipline or another, so creation (or rather, subcreation) is something we each deal with on a near daily basis. And, for the most part, it’s ex nihilo. A blank page or canvas is terrifying in its possibility and your inadequacy to fill it.
That’s one of the grand secrets of the universe right there, folks. Zero to one. If you can do that, you can do anything. I can’t count the number of times during NaNoWriMo that I did anything I could to avoid getting started. It was the daily Everest. But once I wrote the first word, the first sentence, the rest came easy. (Well, in comparison to scaling the 0-to-1 cliff; some days were still tough going, but even then it was just a matter of pushing forward. But starting? That was the hardest part of every day.)
Why is it so hard to start? (And by start I should point out that I mean starting each time you work on whatever it is you’re working on — this doesn’t apply to just the first day of a project.)
Inadequacy is a biggie, as M states in that second paragraph up there. You’ve got this beautiful creation in your head, spiritually complete, and you’re scared you won’t be able to bring it into this world intact. Better to leave it solely a creation of the mind in its pristine state than to give it birth riddled with imperfections, right? Right?
Nope. Perhaps the analogy was unwise, since you can revise your writing and paintings and what have you into near-perfection, whereas with real children there often isn’t much you can do. And the question is much harder to answer, too. (I mean, I know what my answer would be, but that’s a discussion for another time. Or perhaps for the comments.)
Anyway, inadequacy also sets in when you don’t have anything subcreated already, when all you have is the desire to create but there are so many choices, so many possibilities. And you know that the chances of creating something lame are probably a lot higher than the chances of creating a masterpiece. Better to keep your 100% record of 0 for 0 than to try and fail, right? Right?
Again, it doesn’t take much educating to guess what I think. And I want to turn that into another blog post in the near future. But the real question now is this: why oh why is this flood of post ideas avalanching down on me now instead of last month when I needed it? ~sigh~
