Step by Step

The Projects Get Done

A common thread I have seen speaking to writers and other creatives is this situation that people get themselves into with a draft that never ends.

In music I understand the equivalent to be a song idea that is stuck in a loop and is never written out to completion.

How do we break free from this circular rut?

The answer is to keep going back to the beginning and staying focused on just the chapter or section at hand.

I believe what is often happening is that a work of art or any project is a stack of multiple ideas ontop of each other. As you keep adding ideas on, the tower starts to jangle like a game of Jenga.

The newer bricks might be causing the instability and forcing you to question the work in its entirety.

However, somewhere down at the bottom is a root or a foundation. This foundation might not be called Chapter 1 - it might be some sort of guiding thesis or idea that is driving this project forward.

Either way, the only way through it is back at Chapter 1. Go back to the beginning and make all the edits that you need to make. And check that off. Don’t start at Chapter 9, that’s where the wobbling work is happening.

And when you’ve checked all these edits off, now you must hand the work off for feedback or it can be posted online.

This occurred to me from playing classical music

If a piece is not playing well, you can spend all the time you want at bar 35, but a piece of music is played with coherence from the first note.

So all the work is done by continually going back to the beginning and seeing where your understanding is falling apart.

What gets in the way of this simple truth is our impatience. We want to move onto bar 35 because we feel that we have spent enough time on the first section.

Our ego demands that we are entitled even when we haven’t completed the work. Yet that impatience is precisely the habit that ruins our best intentions.

And another way of saying Step by Step is the phrase from Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: