Get It Cooking
Nearly forty years into her career, Toni Morrison was asked how her writing routine had evolved over the years. “Well,” she said, “I learned over the last eight or nine books how to use my time better.” Early on, her tendency was to put off starting, feeling she needed to have the entire story figured out in her head before she could begin writing it. “I would just keep looking and looking and looking, letting the book be the one that ‘I’m gonna write one day.’” Over the years, she learned that no amount of preparation could fully anticipate what would happen once the writing began. Realizing that much of the book gets figured out in the process of writing it, “what I have learned to do is to get it cooking—to start the book as soon as I have even a slight sense of the narrative and the characters and so on.”
Getting things cooking, not waiting until everything is figured out—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Going To The Frontier Of Uncertainty And Confusion
For a long time, the actor Jeremy Strong held up his acting heroes and felt like a fraud by comparison. So for a while, instead of simply acting and finding his own way through the work, he went looking for people who seemed to have it all figured out. “There was a long period in my life,” Strong said, “where I sought out teachers, wanting to get the magic beans from them. I wanted to find the masters and apprentice to the masters.” At some point, though, “I realized that the masters—like all of us—are just on the frontier of their own uncertainty and confusion,” figuring things out as they go. “And so there is no kind of axiom that they can impart that’s going to unlock the mysteries,” Strong said. “There are great practical tools, of course, that you can pick up from the masters, because a lot of work, especially film work, is practical. But then there’s the element that only you can unlock by going to the frontier of your own uncertainty and confusion.”
Make Contact With Reality
After a successful exit from a company he helped start four years earlier, Jackson Dahl started thinking about what he might want to do next. A week passed. Then a month. Then a year. And what started as a brief break unintentionally became a year-and-a-half-long sabbatical, much of it spent trying to think his way into a fully formed, coherent future. Around the 18-month mark, though, instead of looking forward, he began looking back. At how he came to co-found that company. How he came to work the job he had loved before that. How his friends became his friends, how his favorite books became his favorite books, how his interests became his interests. The more he looked at the actual process that had led to some of the best things in his life, the more he realized they hadn’t been figured out in advance. Instead, they were the product of, Jackson once told me, “making contact with reality.” Doing things. Trying things. Getting things cooking and seeing what happened. “One metaphor I use when I think back on that period of trying to think my way into the perfect next move,” he said, “is it’s like I was holding a seed, desperately trying to determine what exactly the seed was going to grow into without ever actually planting it in soil and watering it.” Today, he said, “I’m not completely out of the woods yet, but I’m making progress. Before, as a mentor once told me, I was planning a roadtrip to Disney World and obsessing over perfecting turns one, two, three, and four, before even getting into the car. Now, I’m in the car and on the way.”
Don’t Try To Map Out The Whole 9 Innings
In my own period of desperately wanting to know what a seed was going to grow into before planting it, I spent almost two years thinking about writing online but was hung up on the idea that I needed a clear niche—that I had to figure out what exactly I was going to write about before I started. In a Google Doc I called “BLOGDOC,” I was drafting articles and essays, waiting for patterns to emerge that would help determine what to write about. When I told Ryan Holiday about this complicated way in which I was privately writing stuff to determine what to write about publicly, he said, “Just start. You’re trying to map out the whole 9 innings. Just throw the first pitch. You’re better off starting imperfectly than being paralyzed by the delusion of perfection.”
“That Won’t Work” Is Not A Way To Go Through Life
When John Mayer first had the idea for a third-person narrative song about a fictitious guy who builds a submarine, he thought to himself, “I’ve never been a third-person sort of narrative writer, ever.” He wasn’t sure he could figure out how to do it. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the idea, so eventually, he gave it a shot, creating what is my favorite John Mayer song, Walt Grace’s Submarine Test, January 1967. Mayer said it taught him this: “Don’t shoot ideas down before you try them. ‘That won’t work’ is the worst thing you can ever say. ‘That didn’t work’ is cool, but ‘That won’t work’ is not a way to go through life.”