This is my study leave, and I’m supposed to be working on two writing projects. But I made no progress today.
The big project I’m supposed to be working on is a series of stories for children about religion. I know the approach I want to use — an approach where I don’t try to reduce the other traditions to platitudes that fit into our own religious schema, but instead retain something of the strangeness and unfamiliarity of other religious traditions. I have primary and secondary source materials lined up. I even have something of a general outline. But I just didn’t get started today.
I’m also supposed to be revising a collection of children’s stories that I put together last year for the religious education program here at the Palo Alto church. I’m supposed to be correcting typographical errors, fixing a few factual errors, and adding a couple of stories that got left out by mistake. But I just didn’t get started today.
What I did do is this: I finished reading a book. I responded to an editor who had some questions about a short essay I wrote. I read a science fiction magazine. I worried about another article that seems to have been swallowed by another editor’s desk. I read the newspaper. I made extensive notes on proposed writing project that, although it is on the topic of a religious or spiritual practice, has only a tangential connection to my church job. I read a professional journal. I did laundry. I sat and thought. I sat and didn’t think.
A month ago, I made a beautiful schedule of how I was going to organize my study leave so I could finish both writing projects in two short weeks. I’m usually pretty good at sticking to writing schedules. When I’m not good at sticking to a schedule, it usually means there’s something missing in the overall plan for the project, and I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on right now. I even think I now know what the problem is. But in the mean time, I have made no progress, and I’ve already lost two days of work.
I dunno. It sounds to me like you are making plenty of progress. Anyway, hang in there.
AH, Dan. Sounds like my week. I think the key is this: those “beautiful schedules” become the work. Once we make them, it’s as though we have done the work of writing itself. And, they are so beautiful, to actually implement such a schedule seems like a kind of sacrilege.
Right now, i don’t have an answer to this problem either. My beautiful schedule — for writing, riding, health, reading — sits in my notebook, taunting me. Stupid schedule. Go away. I just want to read blogs. Feh.
I’ve been thinking a lot about useful down time–mind if I mine this experience for my next sermon? Would that make you feel like your no-progress day had been of some use?
Other than the worry, all those activities sound productive to me. Especially the part where you figured out what the blockage was about. Good luck unblocking.
The existence of a firm deadline imposed by someone else (such as the due date for submission of a paper to a journal) makes one’s mind work much more efficiently than simply one’s own desire to get some writing done.
Dad
Dad –
Ah, but one must still have the *desire* to submit the paper to the journal, no? It’s just a trick of the mind (on the mind) to choose an external deadline to achieve that focus. All real motivation and focus comes from within. But sometimes we just have to fool ourselves a little.
Whatever works, that’s what I say.