You Just Have To Do Time
The comedian Conan O’Brien once pointed out: scratch below the surface of any great creative work—anything that’s “a big smash hit that everyone thinks is genius”—and you’ll inevitably find dozens of lesser works that were created to get there. Louisa May Alcott was 14 years and six novels into her writing career before she wrote Little Women. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird required more than two years of rewrites—effectively a new cast of characters and an entirely new plot—before it became one of the great works of American literature. Hemingway said he rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms “thirty-nine times before I was satisfied,” but after his death, his grandson went through his papers and discovered there were actually forty-seven alternate endings. J.K. Rowling wrote fifteen drafts of the first Harry Potter book. A Game of Thrones was George R. R. Martin’s fifth novel, written 19 years into his career. “And so,” O’Brien said, “I’m a big believer in, you just have to do time.”
Doing time—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
What People Don’t Often See
Charlie Mackesy—the artist, illustrator, and author of the smash success, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse—describes his process as “making a mess on paper over and over and over again.” “People often just see an end product,” Mackesy said. “They don’t see the tens of thousands of messy drawings that didn’t quite work out.” Mackesy said his house is essentially a museum of his lesser work. “Honestly,” he said, “you can’t even get in the door because of all the drawings and the half-finished things and the finished things that aren’t any good. But you have to do them. You have to go through the process and make mistake after mistake to get somewhere. It is in that process, on that journey, of every mess we make, every messy day we live through, that we make what we make and become who we become.”
The Consistency Of The Work Over A Period Of Time
When Kobe Bryant was 12, he played a 25-game basketball season without scoring a single point. “I was terrible,” he said. “Awful.” Not a single point. Not a free throw, not a lucky bounce, not a breakaway layup—not a single point. When asked about that season, Kobe said it taught him to take the long view. “I wasn’t the most athletic,” he said. “I had to look long term. Because I wasn’t going to give up on the game, right? So I had to say, ‘Ok, this year I’m going to get better at this. Next year, that.’ And so forth and so on. And patiently, I got better.” Patiently, he repeats. “It was piece by piece. It was the consistency of the work. The consistency of the work: Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better. You do that over a period of time—three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—you get to where you want to go.” “It’s simple,” he said. “It’s simple math.”
Breaking Through The Psychic Wall
The great Joan Didion said she almost always dreaded sitting down to write every day. As she approached her office, she’d think, “Oh, I don’t want to go in there at all.” If not an enthusiasm to go in there and work through draft after draft until a book was done, Didion was asked, what did you have? “Blind faith,” she responded, “that if you go in there and work every day it will get better. Three days will go by and you will be in there and you will think every day is terrible…I keep saying ‘in there’ as if it’s some kind of chamber, a different atmosphere. It is, in a way. There’s almost a psychic wall.” An invisible psychological barrier, often disguised as the pressing need to run errands or to garden or to reply to a few emails or to get in the right mood or to abandon the project altogether. But if you push through that psychic wall, if you keep doing time, “on the fourth day, if you do go in there, if you don’t go into town or out in the garden, something usually will break through.” As Didion talked about her commitment to writing every day, whether or not she was in the mood, the interviewer recalled her once mentioning that—unlike so many who save it for special occasions—she used her good silverware every day. “Well,” Didion replied, “every day is all there is.”
Wow. There’s Just Nothing Good Here
Both the author Michael Lewis and the radio personality Ira Glass are today among the best in the world at what they do, but they had a long conversation about how that wasn’t always true. Talking about how long it took them to find their voices as storytellers, Lewis and Glass traded stories about their early work. A couple years into making the Pulitzer Prize-winning radio show, This American Life, one of the show’s producers, Alix Spiegel, pitched a story similar to one Glass had made years and years earlier, at the beginning of his career. Glass suggested that they dig up the old episode to see if they could salvage anything from it. After they listened to it, Spiegel said, “Wow. There’s no sign that you have any talent for radio. Like there’s no sign that you’re going to make it. There’s just nothing good in here.” Not only was she right, Glass said, but he revisited other episodes from his archives and was struck by how, even in his mid-30s—15 years into his career—there was still hardly any sign that he had any talent for radio. Lewis laughs and says, “I think we shared this quality, in that neither you nor I cared all that much if there was a sign that you were going to make it. You were just going to do it anyway.” “Yes that’s very true,” Glass replies. “Yes, I liked doing it and I was just going to keep going.” He was just going to keep doing time.
All The Usual Words Beyond Talent
James Baldwin was asked, Can you discern talent in someone? “Talent is insignificant,” Baldwin replied. “I know a lot of talented ruins.” And a lot of untalented successes. “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”