Sit Your Ass Down and Write - Part One

Last year I started writing my first novel. Fast forward to the present and I'm only 50 pages into a very rough first draft. Without going into details, I'll tell you that I have two main characters, two men with extremely different career paths and backgrounds, who nonetheless are very close friends. One is in his mid-30s and the other is around 50. It's a big brother/little brother relationship. It's a "bromance", a road story where a vintage muscle car serves as their chariot through a long, strange trip through the open road towards Death Valley, one of the hottest places on earth. That's all I'll tell you about the story, as half baked as it is at the moment. Today I finally came up with a working title, "I'm Driving As Fast As I Can." I may throw that title away, but in the meantime, don't steal it.  I came up with it during one of my daily walks through the neighborhood. Now that I think of it, "I'm Driving As Fast As I Can" is an ironic title because clearly, I'm not.

I thought that Writer's Block would be an inevitable setback, but I've started to believe that writer's block may not be a problem for me at all. Instead, I often fall victim to another syndrome that's very common but less explored: Resistance.

The author Steven Pressfield has written extensively about Resistance in his books The War of Art, and The Artist's Journey. He explains in his very appealing, no-bullshit style, that resistance is the big, seemingly impenetrable wall that we put up to keep us from achieving what we're certainly able to achieve. In other words, it's our lazy, fearful ego that prevents us from getting out of our own way. Resistance manifests itself all too quickly and easily. It's every second spent on Instagram, Facebook, and PornHub. We all fall prey to it. Our current situation of self-isolation promotes it. A dating app just sent me a notification, and right away I knew it was just Resistance in a convenient, made-in-Silicon Valley disguise.

Pressfield's books exhaustively explain how this pervasive enemy is the biggest hurdle to me sitting my ass down and putting words on the page. There's no life hack or easy trick to defeating it. You just have to sit your ass down and, so says the title of one of Pressfield's books, "Do the Work."  I know this, you know this, but there Resistance sits in the corner of whatever room you're in while you sit at your desk and attempt to "bleed", as Ernest Hemingway so eloquently put it. My job is not to give Resistance what it wants. I have to get on with it.

What if I finish the first draft of my book? Will it be any good? I don't believe it matters, not yet anyway. It's probably none of my business whether it's any good. All I know is that it's there in jagged pieces in my brain, constantly reminding me that's there, waiting for my pathetically resistant self to alchemize it. PornHub can wait.