At some point on a podcast I was listening to a writer* said something which really - gradually - changed how I perceive things.
It’s not an observation or idea that sounds super profound but that’s almost the point - it’s the little things we just take for absolute granted which have the most power.
He was chatting with the hosts, also writers, about having good and bad writing days, and though he agreed that though there were days when he felt positive and days when he felt awful about what he’d produced, when he looked back after even a day or so - however long it took to be outof that relationship with the writing and look on it more objectively, there was no difference in the quality of what he’d written on a ‘bad’ day and what he’d written on a ‘good’ day.
At a glance that’s an idea I think most people would reject - one might think, “sure that might be the case for a professional writer but I really do have bad days” but I found the more I checked it out the more its true.
I started wondering about my own writing and realising that it was true - writing that I was sure was the clunkiest stupidest lines anyone had ever forced onto a screen was exactly as good as the stuff that had flowed and I’d felt pleased with.
I’m not very regular about writing so it’s easier for me to see the evidence in a regular creative thing I do do, life drawing, which really has the power to put me in a bad mood, because it’s a genuine challenge. Some nights I’m lighthearted and can find that zen flow of observational drawing, other nights I feel like I have a the manual dexterity of a toddler in my control of a pen.
So it’s something where my feeling about how well I’m drawing/have just drawn waver, and the quality of my drawings absolutely also wavers - and it’s never really occurred to be that those things can both be true without them actually correlating. But they don’t correlate. When I look back, I’m pretty consistent. My worst drawings don’t come from the weeks I felt worst about or my best from the weeks I felt best.
And it’s just one of those things which I think once it occurred to you it might be the case, it settles in and subtly changes your whole outlook.
It won’t reduce the times when you feel frustrated or angry or sad about badly you feel you’re doing on your creative thing that day. But it does make you less at the mercy of that feeling. It might even allow you to recognise those stormy or melancholic feelings about your work less as information that you have to take seriously and more as evidence of how much care and passion you feel for the thing.
* Man, I can’t remember. It was definitely a comedy writer. Chris Addison? Andy Stanton? Mat Baynton? Someone like that
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