I was conflicted.
7 years old and that’s what I was, though the word wouldn’t show up in my personal lexicon for another several years.
I loved my grandmothers house, all full of crocheted doilies, porcelain angels and old record albums.
Except for the cellar.
Dirt floor. Creepy steampunk boiler. Spiders just aching to crawl up your legs and into your nether regions. And dark like no dark you’ve ever known.
Years later, long after my grandmother passed and my aunt had moved in, I went back down into that cellar. Older now, it looked nothing to me like the gateway to Hell that I remembered as a kid.
I’m still confronted with spooky basements, mind you. But this time they exist in my head. They still make me uneasy when I spend too much time there.
Not because of the spiders or the boiler or the ink-black dark, but because of something far more frightening.
Self doubt. Fear of failure. Fear of succeeding. Fear of falling on my face and never getting up again. Anything to keep me from taking my work to places it’s never been before.
Steven Pressfield, author of “The War Of Art”, calls it The Resistance.
Me, I like how John Mayer thinks about it.
“The inside of your head is a very subjective, highly interpretive, world,” Mayer says. Visit it the way you would visit the spooky basement every once in a while just to grab something out of the second fridge. Go in there, grab what you need, fix what you need to fix. Then get out of there and back into the more objective work—do things, create something, make stuff happen out in the real world.”
I love this story I snatched from Billy Oppenheimer.
When Hugh Howey began trying to write, it was disheartening. The gap between the writing in his favorite books and his own initial attempts was driving him crazy.
In an attempt to close the gap, Hugh stopped writing and started spending his time studying the craft.
He studied books. He wrote book reviews, forcing himself to analyze and dissect the writing. He interviewed other writers. He went to conferences and book festivals.
“For 20 years I did that,” Howey explained. “I spent 20 years not writing.”
Then, at the 2009 Virginia Festival of the Book, an audience member asked the mystery novelist Caroline Todd, “How do I write my first novel?”
Todd stood up, slapped the table, and shouted the advice that finally broke 20 years of not writing for Hugh.
“You stop talking about writing,” Todd yelled. “You stop dreaming about writing. You stop telling people you’re thinking about writing. You just write. You just sit down and you write!”
You spend less time in the boiler room and more time just writing.
To date, Howey has written and published more than a dozen novels that have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies around the world.
His Silo trilogy was adapted by Apple TV and became their #1 drama of all time.
Maybe you’ve been spending a little too much time in the boiler room lately.
Maybe you’ve been worrying about the spiders and the steampunk boiler that wants to eat you alive.
“Am I really any good?” “Am I nothing but a pathetic hack?” “Who am I to write a novel, a screenplay, to paint, to sculpt, to win an Oscar or an Emmy or a Cannes Lion?”
That’s fine. Go ahead. Ask.
As long as you remember.
“Go in there, grab what you need, fix what you need to fix. Then get out and make stuff happen in the real world.”
This hits it right on the screws. I've been living in the basement for so long that the bright light of the Upstairs World is actually painful and drives me back into the basement. I have a literal box full of index cards, scraps of paper, receipts with scribblings on them. At last estimate, something like 2,200 photographs I've only thought about shooting fill that box. That "20 years" thing is no joke, nor is it an exaggeration. And now, I'm trying to fight the panic worming its way through my brain from wondering if I'll live long enough to do them all. Gonna spend some time topside now...
Thank you for posting, Ernie.