The Grasshopper Sunday Edition: Not Feeling It?
There are going to be days when it just ain’t happening
I’m writing this first section on Wednesday. I typically do the Sunday Edition as it hits me, but what hits me today is that I’m just not feeling it when I think about writing. That’s fairly rare for me and I’ve learned to let it go because it will return the next day.
But what is this it, I’m referring to? Motivation? That’s a word I associate with self-help books and articles and I am sick to death of them, though I think I might have used the word as the theme in another issue of The Grasshopper. But, given my lack of enthusiasm, I’m too lazy to look it up in the archives. Maybe tomorrow.
A lot of times, if I have not written that day, I feel like something is missing. So I write something I know is likely to be crap (hopefully this is not that!). But I’ve trained myself to write everyday and to enjoy it.
That may sound odd to describe it as training but that is exactly what happened. In those self-help books I despise, at least at the moment, developing habits is a popular topic*. For example, years ago I taught myself to always make the bed as soon as I got up, before I do anything else. Now I can’t help it, except when I’m in hotel rooms where I never make the bed.
*Secret to developing a habit: Do it every day for 24 days. Or was it 21? Or…?
So, if you’re not feeling it one day, either start a newsletter and write something meandering like this or go watch Jeopardy, which is what I should be doing right now. More to come on this.
There is a thing called ‘free writing’, a technique to break creative logjams. I have not tried it but the technique sounds simple. You just set a timer for a certain amount of time, ten to twenty minutes or so, and write constantly until the time is up. You don’t worry about content, quality, punctuation, etc. Just jam it out there.
This isn’t that far from how I work normally, though I don’t time myself. If I’m writing one of my opinion/observation pieces I write a title and subtitle and then launch into it about as fast as I can type until I’ve reached a conclusion. These almost always are somewhere between 500 and 1000 words.
Then I set them aside without reading them and go make a coffee or something. I’m guessing the typical timeframe is 30-45 minutes but my sense of time goes out the window while I’m working.
Later, I come back and clean it up, fixing typos and awkward sentence structure, and it gets published. It is very similar to the blog writing I did as a marketing guy except I know this is getting read, or not, almost in real time (most of Medium’s stats have a day’s lag but you do see views and reads in real time).
Since I’m kind of dealing in motivation, or lack thereof, in this issue, I’m going to be a little mechanical in talking about my approach. I try to publish everyday because a lot of that stuff is time sensitive and to make money and keep readers, I need to keep things flowing. So being unmotivated isn’t really an option.
Probably my best solution is to get out and take a walk, even when the weather sucks, like it does today. It’s cold, damp and slushy outside, my least favorite Rochester weather, but I still got a mile in this morning. But any action that gets you out of that ‘not feeling it’ mode works. Meditation and cooking are reliable things for me that occupy the mind and get it going again.
Btw, drinking is not one of those things. When I was playing music, we played in a lot of bars and clubs and I learned early that it was definitely a bad idea when you’re doing something creative despite the many myths about drinking and writers, many of which are true.
You don’t want to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, who drank himself to death right in the middle of what would be a favorite novel of mine, The Last Tycoon, if it were finished. What a shame. He was 44.
Sources
One of the topics that I am interested in is what is going on in China. I wonder what the average person thinks about their political and economic situation. CNN publishes a great newsletter called Meanwhile in China three times a week, that gets into the journalistic details that, as a non-journalist, I can’t access.
The writers are mostly young journalists with a Chinese connection and they go pretty in depth. Here’s the odd thing. I stumbled upon this resource by accident and when I went to look for a link to share, it was a struggle to find it on CNN’s website.
Which is a horrible mess with those hideous blocks of ads for quack cures and weird gadgets that seem to populate news sites everywhere. These young writers are creating an important source and their employer makes it hard to find.
There’s no excuse for that, but seeing as it’s CNN, it is not surprising. They have a new CEO who is revamping their overall approach to the news (more conservative), but I doubt this kind of thing is on his radar. But China as a topic tends to attract a hardcore group of avid observers, so-called China Hands, so I’m sure it gets read by those.
I’m not one but I can see the appeal. It’s a weird place.
So, this is one of my more random Sunday issues of the Grasshopper. Not exactly free writing, but in that territory. See you next Wednesday, thanks for reading, and to those who bought me a coffee, double thanks! That is such a nice thing. M