#104 | No it can't wait
"Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished." — Neil Gaiman
"Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, 'It can't be done.'" — Eleanor Roosevelt
Neil Gaiman has a great writing tip. He sits with the blank page at his writing desk, and allows himself to do two things — and only two things — writing or nothing at all.
So, counterintuitively, Gaiman allows himself not to write when writing. He sits there and ponders and wonders and ultimately gets bored.
But Neil doesn't do anything else (no WhatsApp, no BBC news — even if Truss has just resigned!!!). He sits, and after a while, he writes a bit, and then when the sentence fades in his mind, he sits some more. And by doing this, he's written five best-selling novels (and received many awards). I'm sure there is more to his art than this hack, but, then again, perhaps not?
We only become good at things by practising a lot. I've seen Monty turn from a Grade 1 trombone player at school into Wandering Lex, a class musician (Spotify, Substack). In the future, people will say it's luck. But it never is. And in Mont's, or Neil Gaiman's case (and many others), it's sheer time sitting in front of the proverbial blank page and persevering when things look very shit and quite hopeless.
Important things are very rarely urgent. "Why bother?" people always say — “it can wait”. And things look even less urgent at the outset. They are the most 'not urgent' when they are barely a seed of something incredible (when no one else can see the potential). At first, do we think Neil Gaiman's writing was good enough to warrant his hours sitting fruitlessly in front of the blank page? Certainly not. Fortunately, we can do many of the most urgent things tomorrow and find time for the important things today. After all, the things we remember are those things we often forget to do because they are at the bottom of the list.
I took an eight-hour flight last week. I wasn't in first class (even after I begged for the upgrade), so I missed out on the Prosecco and the complimentary wifi. British Airways had a limitless selection of Heineken Zero — I had a dozen and was drunk with delight.
And thank god I had no wifi.
Without it, pressed twelve inches from my laptop, I was without distraction. My eight hours could have been eighty. I typed, pondered, and typed a bit more. The In-Flight Entertainment would flash on, but nothing else punctured my day. And therefore, I got a lot of important things done.
If we give ourselves time without distractions, we give ourselves time to do things that matter. You might do your first watercolour or your first run in a month. You could call a loved one. You can write that second page of the novel that no one will read, just like Neil Gaiman presumably did once as he sat in his garden, bored and lost for words.
My week in books
At war with the History of the Peloponnesian War this week! Has anyone read it? If so, how!?
Live well,
Hector