Finish something. Anything.
(preferably the book)
Last weekend, Ori got me a beech butcher block countertop to use as a wedging and work table for my ceramics studio. I’d been putting off getting it because I felt like I needed to be further along in my new studio in order to justify getting the slab, but maybe it’s motivational. I’ve gotten a bunch of things done, but I still have to get rid of more junk and organize what’s left. I decided that I’m just going to cut up a bunch of scrap 2x4s and 4x4s and put something together quickly, rather than trying to figure out how to make the prettiest, most perfect table. Something about the perfect being the enemy of the done. I know that feeling well. It’s a kind of procrastination anxiety. It happens in writing and also everything else. I can’t do the finished thing, because I have to do the perfect thing.
It’s been a problem most of my life. I know where I get it from.
My parents have been renovating a house down the street from them for over two years. The house is 750 square feet, maybe a little smaller. Everything will look perfect when it’s done, a tiny jewel box, every detail perfectly rendered. A level five drywall finish, my father says. This is what he wants. But we’re not there yet. I have no idea how long they still have to go. Whenever I ask, there are more things, so I try not to ask, even though I want to know everything.
A little over a year ago, I demoed our bedroom ceiling and walls. There had been a leak on the back wall of our house, before I got our roof fixed, and the water slid into our wall and ceiling. After I demoed I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fix it properly. So I took a long time and worried instead of working on it. In the meantime, we slept in Ori’s office. It was not ideal: in the front of the apartment, a place where fire trucks came by, lights, all sorts of noise and distractions, plus Ori worked there during the day, essentially pushing his entire life into one room. In the back of the apartment, where our actual bedroom is, it’s much quieter. Eventually, I just put up new drywall, mudded and taped, skim coated, sanded everything, painted. Is it perfect? No. It is not a level five drywall finish. If we ever moved, maybe I’d hire someone to skim coat again. But it’s done. We live in our bedroom. I have a little area I can use for my writing space. I don’t even think about how the wall or ceiling isn’t perfect. Mostly we just live here.
I’ve been really struggling this summer, trying to get anything done, and managing my feelings, mostly unsuccessfully. Somehow, there’s always something that needs to be done in order for the next thing to get completed. I suspect that I make these barriers myself, but knowing I make the barriers doesn’t really help either. It’s true in the manuscript, too, of course. Recently, I dumped everything into one word document, thinking that I’d sort through and start to rewrite, but it’s been nearly two weeks and I’ve barely touched the thing. It feels too big, unwieldy, in that one document. Too many words and none of them the right ones. I think I need to be brave and start my revisions, but I’ve been making other things. This table for the ceramics studio. Stripping the door to the ceramics studio, which is no longer going to be the ceramics studio, but maybe just storage, or a little wood shop area. I got rid of so much basement stuff, with more still to go. I decided to gut the one room in the basement that we didn’t gut originally. It has a false floor. I have no idea what’s beneath it. It sort of scares me a little. For a while I thought it’d be my studio space, but now I’m not sure. If nothing else, getting rid of the subfloor will raise the ceiling height a little, make it a little easier to move around in there. And I can finally figure out what the subfloor is hiding beneath. I’m not sure I really want to know this, not now, but I may go there anyway.
I keep saying I have to do x in order to do y. Maybe I need a fancy track saw (I do not, incidentally, need a fancy track saw, but I spent a week on YouTube evaluating all the options). I got citristrip to strip the door to the room with the mystery subfloor. Do I need to strip the door? No. Do I need to gut the room? Also no. But I think I need this in order to have the space ready for ceramics, later, even though I’ve since decided to use a different space. So I strip the door. It is nowhere near as satisfying as I hope. (Ori says, “You really just need to finish your book. That’s my opinion on citristrip.” He is now finishing this project.) I mark the scrap lumber I want to cut up for the table; cut it with my circular saw. I move more tile out of the basement, unsink screws from random joists. I’m finishing something. It’s not the book.
In the book, I keep thinking I need to make it just so. That in order to even get words down, I should be in the right frame of mind, to get into writing mode, even though I’m feral and leaving coffee cups everywhere anyway—I am, of course, already in writing mode. I know that idea of being in the right frame of mind is old, magical thinking left over from graduate school and before, but I fall into these traps sometimes. In the required creative writing pedagogy class we all took in order to teach, my professor asked us what kind of work we needed to be doing in order to get to writing mode. To pay attention to where we were, how we felt, what kinds of things we did before we wrote. Maybe we listened to music, or read a book, or went for a walk. I like having clean sheets and a clean kitchen. So I change the sheets, and I load the dishwasher, and then I start writing.
In the meantime, Ori is stripping the door and keeping us in coffee. It’s okay. Nothing is perfect. The butcher block table and the ceramics studio will all come. I just need a draft first.
Lately, reading/rereading:
-Severance: a novel, by Ling Ma
-The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, by Jeff Goodell
-A Calendar is A Snakeskin, by Kristine Langley Mahler (currently available for preorder)
Oh I feel this so much. I’m also trying to finish a manuscript. And house projects, though thankfully my partner manages most of that. Sometimes the writing feels like it’s going well sometimes not so well and often I feel both at the same time. Lately I’ve just been trying to get my butt in the chair and do SOMETHING with it, even if it’s moving two paragraphs to a place where they fit better and tweaking a sentence or two. It feels like progress.