“One of the great cruelties and great glories of creative work is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and execution,” writes Maria Popova in The Marginalian.
Creative engineers, too, so I have learned. Their work can take 10 times longer than planned. And it’s a good thing the guys who put a man on the moon didn’t know the work that would go into that project.
But Popova is correct. If we knew how long a project that was so exciting in the beginning would take us, we might never start. So, the Muse gives us amnesia regarding that timeline.
Somebody also scrambles my brain regarding other times, but maybe I’m just unorganized.
You know how some writers try to dash off a book in a month? Well, good for them. (Sarcasm) Two years ago, I tried writing 50,000 words while the pink dogwood blossoms were on the tree. The tree beat me by four days, but blossoms were on the tree for 30 days, and I enjoyed every moment with them.
I wrote the 50,000 words that was my goal. That didn’t mean the book was complete or even readable. It meant that I had written a shitty first draft.
Now, two years later, the blossoms have again fallen from the tree, only this time, they went out in a blaze of glory along with the spring rain we had last week. Now the tree is gloriously clothed with green leaves.
And my memoir is almost complete, although each day offers up a new memory.
“When we dream up a project,” says Papova, “we invariably underestimate the amount of time and effort required to make it a reality. Rather than a cognitive bug, perhaps this is the supreme coping mechanism of the creative mind — if we could see clearly the toil ahead at the outset of any creative endeavor, we might be too dispirited to begin, too reluctant to gamble between the heroic and the foolish, too paralyzed to walk the long and tenuous tightrope of hope and fear by which any worthwhile destination is reached.”
(She’s the grown-up.)
If eight years ago, someone had told me that A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (public library) would take eight years, I would have laughed, then cried, then promptly let go of the dream. And yet here it is:
It has great entries addressed to young readers, but it doesn’t look like a book young people would pick up. I think it is more for adults.
I love Anne Lamott’s entry:
“If you love to read, or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing life. Period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people, but books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you will find your North Star, and you will find you, which is why you are here.”
That’s what I wished to convey in my memoir,
TIME TO STEP INTO OUR STORY
From
The Painter with a Pen
Jo Davis
