I’m sitting in a Paul, having a mint tea, because I arrived an hour early for a drink with friends — I only picked up the message they’d pushed the time back when I arrived at the bar. So I’ve come in here, round the corner, out of the rain, to get some thoughts down in this notebook.
It’s about all this writing advice I’ve been sharing. On getting in, getting on and getting out.
Even if it’s useful, I realise it can feel a bit much.
Sometimes I feel loath to share any more advice, even good advice I’ve picked up from other writers, because what I need — that morning, that week — is to receive the right piece of advice myself.
Just one single piece of advice.
I know from trying to get better at chess, at playing guitar and at speaking French that the lesson I should be concentrating on today is almost always the one I received a couple of months or even years ago.
If I go back to my two most basic statements about writing, There are no short cuts and There are no wasted hours, I know what they mean. They mean the way for me to make proper progress in chess, guitar and French is to return to a more basic level and to do the thing properly.
With chess, I should play slower games, analyse them in greater depth, take notes on what I’ve observed and concentrate on not making the same mistakes again.
But I don’t — I play six one minute blitz games and hate myself for how crap I am.
Mostly people do things badly, or not as well as they could, because they do them in a rush.
Two quotes arise here.
First is the well known —
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
(Leaving aside the question of genius, we could translate this for most of us as, ‘Talent is a very high capacity for taking pains.’)
Second is from W.H.Auden —
The first criterion of success in any human activity, the necessary preliminary, whether to scientific discovery or artistic vision, is intensity of attention or, less pompously, love.
These seem the same thing to me.
You take near-infinite pains because to do any less for the beloved thing would be appalling.
To the expert, they’re not really pains, they’re just part of it — whatever it is.
I see this in many of my students. What you need to learn right now, I think, is the thing I told you the time before last but which you fully believe you’ve now breezed past. But I don’t want to alienate you by saying it again. But I’m going to have to.
Just because you understand a piece of advice doesn’t mean you’ve incorporated it into your skin, flesh, bones and marrow (as Zen monks say).
Perhaps to do so will mean a change in your self-image. Perhaps it will require admitting defeat or conceding failure.
If it’s a bad habit, you need to say I will never do that again.
And then you need to never do it again.
The me I am now is no longer capable of doing such a thing, of rushing, not unless I’ve lapsed into total self-forgetfulness (which happens to all of us all the time).
And so my advice for today, given to myself as much as to you, is to think back to the last piece of advice you registered with sinking heart as something you might just have to take seriously.
Isolate it.
Write it down.
Pin it up.
Commit to following it for seven days, without getting distracted by anything new.
I know what that advice will be for me.
(Making causality! — as if I have to worry about basic stuff like that.)
And maybe you’ve thought of your single piece of advice already — because it so profoundly pissed you off.
Who needs that?
But I do and you do and we always have and we always will.
We just return to the basics with a greater and greater sense of wonder.
I mean, duh.
I never forgot Dan Dickey: "if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."