The importance of just showing up

The best method I've found to break through inertia, and why it works for me. Plus, thoughts on collaboration and giving things a try.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

After our Creative Hour last Sunday, writer Kelly Hearn posted this comment:

I was reminded tonight the importance of just showing up/bum in seat for the writing process. Came to my first Sunday Creative Hour and was a bit frustrated by how little I got down on paper. I was struggling with structuring an ‘arc’ for a new writing project. Got up from desk, had a glass of water and took a shower where the arc landed instantly ☺️ Sometimes what looks like stuck is just limbering up? 💃🏻

I loved this, because it really gets to the heart of why our group writing sessions are helpful. I’ve been hosting them since June 2022, and they’ve become a real comfort – but like Kelly, I don’t always find them enjoyable in the moment. The beginning and end, when I check in with you about your writing, are a total pleasure, but the middle fifty minutes, when we write in silence, can be gruelling.

This is because I often use the sessions to galvanise me into facing something that I’ve been avoiding, which means it’s not unusual to spend some of that time feeling deeply annoyed that I have to do it, and finding the work itself really difficult (which is why I was avoiding it). Sometimes it’s torture just to stay in my seat.

John Steinbeck knew something about this feeling. In a letter to his editor in 1951, he wrote:

I feel just worthless today. I have to drive myself. I have used every physical excuse not to work except fake illness. I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water. Really childish.

Isn’t that familiar?

I said last week that a group online writing hour is the best method I’ve found to make myself persist until the breakthrough happens. Here’s why it works.

1. It’s only an hour.

If I’m full of dread at 4.55pm, then at least I know that by 6.05 it will be over, and I can go and do something else with a clear conscience. An hour feels like a manageable amount of time to commit to doing something even if I hate every minute (which in practice, rarely happens – I usually see something shift before the hour is up). If it’s going well, then you can keep going or you can put it away with confidence that you now won’t mind returning to it. If it isn’t, then at least you can be proud that you’ve tried.

2. I feel accountable to someone other than myself.

When I interviewed the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld for the In Writing podcast in 2020, she gave advice on productivity, which included ‘scheduling [writing] and treating it like it’s an appointment with another person’. I knew exactly what she meant by this, because unless I commit to doing something with or for another person, I find it hard to motivate myself to do it.

Rather than engage my imagination in pretending there’s someone else involved, however, I’ve literally turned writing into an appointment with other people by hosting Creative Hours. Once I’m there and can see you all at your desks, I feel duty-bound to get on with it.

3. It’s not distracting.

Friends often ask if I want to come with them to the British Library or other nice spots in London where writers congregate. Much as I like the idea of working at the British Library – which is really beautiful – I tried it once and didn’t get much done. There are too many people to look at; I was cold and uncomfortable; I couldn’t lounge around in tracksuit bottoms, and you’re not allowed to take snacks and coffee into the reading rooms. It takes me an hour to get there, and then you have to check your coat and bags into a locker-room before you go in. The whole thing was too much hassle for me, and too distracting.

The nice thing about the Creative Hour is that we’re all on mute during the writing part, and I’m still at home and usually wearing a tracksuit. It’s the perfect level of sociability, but it doesn’t interfere with the writing set-up that works for me.

4. It’s comforting.

I really like seeing you all there. Writing is usually so solitary – it’s heart-warming to see other people engaged in the same work at the same time. There’s a team aspect to it, and it’s easier to go on when we’re all in it together.

5. It ticks an unavoidable period of agony off my to-do list.

This brings me to Kelly’s point.

Sometimes in writing, there is no way through a door other than to bang your head against it for fifty minutes. The head-banging is part of what needs to be done, and the sooner you do it, the sooner you’ll reach the more rewarding work. During a Creative Hour I can’t give up (because you can all see me), and so I eventually find, as Kelly did, that things start to flow.

I’m hosting another Creative Hour this Sunday 24 March at 5pm UK time (here’s a timezone converter in case you’re elsewhere), and the next two on 14 and 28 April. I hear so often from friends who want to write but aren’t getting around to it: if that’s you, turn it into an appointment with other people.

If you’d like to join us you’ll need a paid subscription, which is £6 a month or £60 a year (I can’t see how Substack converts this to other currencies, but Google tells me it’s around $7.60 a month or $76 a year in US dollars, and around 7€ or 70€). You’ll then receive, on Sunday morning, an email containing the link to join.

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In the last year or so I’ve had the thought that, as a writer, I’d like to try collaborating with a creative or creatives in a different field: visual art, or theatre, or music, or film, etc. I haven’t figured out what this would look like yet, whether it’s suggesting a project to someone I admire or organising some kind of collective, but it keeps coming back into my mind. I’d be really interested to know whether you’ve done anything similar – working as a writer alongside other kinds of artists – and if so, what your experience was.

In the past I might have shied away from experimenting with this because of uncertainty about how it would work and what the goal would be. Now I feel more inclined to try things. I was thinking about this yesterday, chatting to someone who spent years in the music world before retraining in something else. Now in his forties, he’s making music on the side, but releasing it feels different now – because in his twenties, he thought it might take off and change his life. Of course it still could, but I know what he means: as you get older, the chances of making a big splash with your creative work do seem to shrink, or maybe it’s just that you have more realistic expectations.

I think it’s amazing that he’s doing it anyway, because whatever the outcome, doing something that you find interesting and rewarding is still better than not doing it. When obsession with outcomes falls away, it leaves us with the pleasure of the work (or play) itself, which is worth spending our life hours on. What else are we going to do with them?

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I’m looking forward to Sunday’s session. Until then, good luck with your writing this week.