My main focus in the five years since I started The Complete Flake has been battling that fat bastard, Resistance. For me, it’s resistance to writing. It is such a huge barrier that sometimes I forget about simply going around or under instead of through.
Think of the word itself: resistance. The harder you push, the harder it pushes back, right?
But what if you didn’t have to push at all?
Sometimes we are simply resisting tedious or hard work that could be far easier with the right tools. Or so I thought.
Some people might think mixing cake batter by hand is a fun bit of exercise but let’s face it: if you only have a bowl and a wooden spoon, you are more likely to think it’s too much work and decide to do without the cake. If you had an electric mixer, you’d be eating devil’s food cake right now.
In the olden days (pre-computer), writers used a contraption called a typewriter
Before that, they wrote by hand — with quills! Some still use the old tools (if not quills) but most of us feel absolutely stuck without our laptops.
When I started full-time vandwelling eighteen months ago, I thought I would have no problem writing with my Chromebook. I was wrong. Now, let me assure you that I love my Chromebook and do almost all of my writing on it — when I have internet.
But on the road, that connection is not always reliable. With a Chromebook, you need to be online to save your files because Chromebooks are almost completely cloud-based. They have no hard drives.
A bigger problem was that I could no longer use Scrivener, my favorite writing and editing tool. No hard drive = no way to install software.
I had underestimated how disabling the loss of Scrivener would be to my writing process. So the first order of business was to get a new (used) laptop, then to install Scrivener.
Did that, and guess what? I have hardly used it at all. Back to square one: Resistance
If you have the right tools and you’re still not doing the work, tools are not the problem — Resistance is
I was using my lack of Scrivener as an excuse.
Last summer and fall, I did write the entire first draft of my memoir with just the Chromebook, and in spite of numerous obstacles.
But after that, I floundered. I really believed that without Scrivener the revision process would be so horrible that I couldn’t face it.
Well, the draft has been sitting untouched in Scrivener on the new (used) laptop for over four months now and I still haven’t faced it.
Clearly, having the right tools is not the whole solution.
Clearly, the solution is what my anti-Resistance guru, Steven Pressfield, recommends:
Stop being an amateur. Go pro
Or, as my stepdad used to say to my everlasting annoyance, “Grow up!”
I have the right tools. It’s time to get to work.
What have you been resisting? Maybe I can help.
