The middle is where the work is

The banker shop at Wells is a long room with a north light, and in September the masons work with their coats on. I had been coming once a month for nine months. On the morning I am thinking of, Ellen Marsh spent two hours on a single moulding, and I took four photographs, and nothing whatsoever happened.

I remember standing there with a camera I was not using, thinking: this is the part nobody writes about. Not the commission, not the unveiling. The ninth month of twelve, in a cold room, with the interesting decisions all made and the work still mostly undone.

The excitement is not the fuel

We talk about creative work as though enthusiasm were the engine. Find the thing you love, the advice goes, and the doing of it will follow. It is a lovely theory and it survives about six weeks of contact with an actual project.

What I have watched instead, in workshops and at my own desk, is that enthusiasm is the ignition and something much duller is the fuel. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called the good state flow, and flow is real, but the honest version of his research is that flow arrives inside structure. It is a reward for turning up, not a reason to.

Anne Lamott has the most quoted sentence on this and it is still the truest: almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. The part people quote less is what she says about the second draft, which is that you have to be willing to be bored by your own material for a while.

Anyone can start. The interesting question is what you do in month four, when nobody has asked about it once.

Month four, and nobody has asked about it once

There is a specific moment, somewhere around the fourth month of anything worth doing, when three things become true at the same time. The idea has stopped being novel to you. Nobody else has enquired about it in weeks. And the finish is still far enough away that you cannot see it from where you are standing.

This is the point where most projects quietly stop. Not dramatically: nobody announces an abandonment. The file just stops being opened, and six months later you describe it in the past tense to someone at a party.

I have abandoned four books this way. I have also finished two, and the difference had nothing to do with the quality of the idea. Both of the finished ones were worse ideas than at least two of the abandoned ones. The difference was that in month four I had somewhere to be.

What a stonemason said about month four

I asked Ellen once whether she got bored. She was nineteen years into the same building at that point, which I thought made the question fair.

She said the boredom was not the problem. The problem was that people expected her to be building something, when what she was actually doing was keeping it. A cathedral is never finished; it is maintained by successive people who will not see the end of the job either. Once you understand the work as keeping rather than building, month four stops being a slump and becomes simply what the work is like.

I have thought about that sentence more than any other thing said to me in fifteen years of this. It reorganises a desk as much as a yard. If I am building a book, month four is a failure of momentum. If I am keeping a practice, month four is Tuesday.

Four things that carried me through

None of these is a productivity system. They are the four things that, looking back at the two projects I actually finished, were present both times.

1. A fixed appointment with the work, not a target. Two hours on Tuesday evening at a library table, whether or not anything came of it. The appointment survives a bad week; a word count does not.
2. One person who expects it. Not an audience. One. For the Fieldbook it was a bookbinder in Bristol who kept asking when. That is enough obligation to get you through a February.
3. A visible record of turning up. I keep a line a day in a notebook, and the line is often "sat down, nothing". Nine months of "sat down, nothing" is, it turns out, extremely persuasive evidence that you are in fact doing the work.
4. Permission to make it worse before it gets better. The middle of a draft is supposed to be worse than the beginning. If you require every session to improve the thing, you will stop in month four, because month four is where the improvements stop being visible.

(I did also buy three different notebooks in month five, which is what I do instead of writing when I am avoiding a chapter. I am not going to pretend that was a system.)

Back to the yard

The moulding Ellen worked on that September morning is about four inches of stone on a building most visitors will never look at directly. It took her most of a day. It will outlast every piece of writing I ever do, including this one, and she has no expectation of being credited for it.

I finished the book eventually, four years later than I told my publisher. The chapter it is best remembered for is the one about the ninth month, in the cold room, when nothing happened.

Nothing happening is not the interruption to the work. It is the work, and the people who get good are the ones who found that out early enough to stop taking it personally.