Create Today

Transcript

Let’s talk about creating today.

I do remember watching interviews and documentaries about a curious writer Charles Bukowski.

They said he would write ten pages a day, that’s what he said himself in his novels describing his process. He would write with his hand and typewriter.

Punching things out and finding things out. At one stage in one of these novels perhaps in Factotum somebody asked him “Is it good what you’ve written?”

He says “I don’t know, I never know until 30 days later”

Of course its about that time that we start to understand and have enough perspective and enough distance from our own work that we can look at it objectively. We can start to see whether it’s good or not and we can take that and write a second draft. Get out some of the unnecessary pieces.

Of course Bukowski knew that he could never write something and instantly know it was perfect on the page. And for this reason he had that rule to write it and leave it.

There are a lot of people in this world that have that autoexigent tendency to where they won’t even pick up the pen or computer because they don’t know if what they’re going to write will even be good. Or they’re going to expect that what they’re writing has to be perfect.

Of course that’s a standard you are never going to meet. If you are mortal just like me, I assume only mortals listen to this podcast, I guess we will find out in the future. If you are mortal, then you don’t know that what you write is going to be good. And you don’t know if its gonna be perfect.

But you do know its gonna be something from you. If you can do that wonderful thing that Bruce Lee once spoke about in an interview, to express yourself without being cocky, that is martial arts. I don’t remember exactly what he said but the point is express yourself without pretense without trying to be someone else.

Many times we might write without entirely realize it, we are trying to be someone else or imitate one of the masters which is fine to do as an exercise but your voice is what you can really get. We find when we try to spend time entertaining and putting on this pretense it tends to be tiring to create.

Because in the cliche, trying to be something we are not if we express ourselves honestly and let those things come out we can create today and in fact probably spend at least 4 hours a day creating.

Not everyone has four hours a day to create, sit in a cafe and write but all of us have 5 minutes probably. They say that you set a goal for the bare minimum. James clear talks about in atomic habits.

Say you do want to write a novel, like Bukowski. Maybe not quite like Bukowski. Maybe you do want to write a novel. You set the goal just to write the minimum, perhaps one single line or four sentences and from that, not so suddenly you ease into writing into an entire page.

Before you know it you start to write five pages and you had no idea you start to lose awareness of the fact you were only going to write four lines. Very quickly things will be set in motion because you have that flow.

Now if you are looking for some kind of excuse, some kind of reason to get started and set aside your inhibitions and do that wonderful thing and paint that painting and write that prose. Begin that code, a new computer game. That pixel art. That song.

I am giving you an excuse, here it is, create today. Create today.