Now Get Back To Work

That’s where I get lost. Not in the doing of nothing, but in the doing of everything.

“‎Introduce a little anarchy,” Jokers says in The Dark Knight. “Upset the established order.”

So I did. And here I am. On this black roof, searching an abyss. And this is a story of how it came to be, and how I got wrapped up in this nightmare.

……

Now that could be the lede in yet another attempt at fiction. Maybe I could actually finish this one, I think to myself, optimistically.

The issue is that I never know where the book is going, and I get lost in the weeds. I can’t keep the story straight over the many months I bleed it out.

Maybe if I put more time in at each session, I’d stay immersed and not feel like I have to review my own work just to see what happened last time. Maybe, instead of taking time away from writing THE thing to write a DIFFERENT thing, I need to stay focused on ONE thing?

And maybe I’m making excuses, and this is just the sort of business all writers are forced to overcome if they want to be great. Perhaps that’s why King does it the way he does, Pressfield does it the way he does, and before he shot himself in the face, Hemingway did it the way he did, instructing future followers to “stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck … That way your subconscious will work on it all the time.”

Why Japanese author Haruki Murakami explains his routine as, “when I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4 a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10 kilometers or swim for 1,500 meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9 p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

I’ve studied these greats and more. Some things are shared amongst all. One is the work. Not how they view the work, as with all great and flawed and ungreat among us, the work is consumed differently. But the thing that separates the significant from the common is no matter what they think of the work — hate it, procrastinate it, love it — they still do it.

Picasso painted. Proust wrote. And Bach composed. And as Vonnegut would say, “so it goes.”

It’s the work that draws me. Work is my testimony. The doing something. This is why, I believe, we come up with labels like ‘type A,’ and we create personality tests to help us more tightly understand ourselves. A method so that we can better understand how we complete the work, not if and when. The work is there, in our soul, and we can feel it. We call it purpose.

“Perhaps you have experienced flashes of strange insights, moments of deep clarity,” Wim Hoff says. “Or maybe you have sensed an energy within yourself that you couldn’t quite identify. That’s your subconscious knocking on your consciousness’s door. It’s part of who and what you are. To connect with it, you first have to learn how to deal with your body. Then your mind. From there, you get into your spiritual body, and then finally, you get to know your subconscious and seek to answer life’s big questions: Why am I here? What is my purpose? And if your neurological muscle is sufficiently developed, all of your faculties should be ready to serve you. You will possess the ability to walk with your spirit consciously. Your subconscious becomes aware, the unseen becomes seeable, and you at last encounter and, in time, gain control over your senses — all of them.”

When we don’t follow our purpose, we follow something else. We carouse and medicate and ruin our lives. And sometimes, when we follow it, we do the same.

And so it goes.

But the issue in finally finishing something like the novel I started above isn’t the will to do the work. I have the motivation like everyone else on the planet. The trick is finding the trigger. The thing that unlocks the ability to do the important work without being tempted by the other work.

That’s where I get lost. Not in the doing of nothing, but in the doing of everything.

The on-demand internet makes it worse with the knowing of everything. If I have a question about something in the morning, I can’t leave it be without becoming an expert about it by the evening. Then I’ve forgotten it by the next day.

So I study the greatest of all time to see how lovers of the work managed to do just one job.

If I were to flashback to the beginning of the story I started above, I’d introduce a relationship character to my protagonist — a Joker to my Batman. Someone who would motivate my main character to search within himself and discover the lurking shadow Jung described. The dark side of his personality. The projection that has the potential to destroy who we are created to be. The thing that could steal our ability to do the only thing we were made to do; our work.

Not your work. And not his work or her work, but the work we were created to do. Work we call our own.

Then, after sufficiently freaking out my so-called hero by showing him the demon he’s always one step from becoming, I’d introduce Two-Face, the shapeshifter of the story, the real antagonist.

And so it goes.

I try to imagine the page as a sea. The more I type, the more the words fill the page, the closer I get to the Island atop the horizon. What’s on it, I do not know, and I do not believe I will ever get to it. Or maybe death is getting to it, and I’m closer than I think. No matter. The point is the typing. The rowing. The working. It wasn’t always, but it is now. And every time I force it, I get a little farther and learn a bit more. And what is that if not for wisdom, and what is wisdom if not for experience combined with education?

Do it for you, I play in my head until it hurts. Then play it some more.

“Write to please just one person,” Vonnegut demands. “If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

So I do. And I try my hardest to ignore the world and all the gifts it gives everyone else and not become bitter by the pain and unfairness of it all. Hoping with a mad, ludicrous sort of ambition that my testimony will become clear, and that whoever won’t stop knocking at the door of my mind finally comes and says,” good job.” And, of course, “now get back to work.”