PART THIRTEEN: Bad writing day is like an ugly run
happens, stings, is gone
The story, scene or reflection is nagging…
You don’t want to do it sometimes, maybe not today…There is that story coming through that you thought of in the drive-thru, that nagged at you in grocery store, that got you making notes on a Post-It during a Zoom call. There it was again while stirring the soup, wiping the dogs paws, and brushing your teeth.
You have all the best excuses, most of them around priorities and time and everything in you is saying “not now”. But frustrated, you grab the first thing you can on the bedside table ( a coil notebook that used to be your eating diary) and a ball point pen you got from some sales kit, and you scratch down lines.
You don’t even enjoy the writing part. You’re not marvelling at the thoughts, word choice or the colour of the ink on the page. You’re just getting the damned thing down.
18 lines later you’ve put the details of your tenth grade teachers reprimand of you at gym class, in front of three classes of gawping kids, telling you you’d never amount to anything if you couldn’t do the breaststroke by now…and at the last line…"Hating her got me to the Olympics by 21.” Tossing the pad and the pen you flop down under a pile of blankets and say to the air—”There! Are you happy now, I wrote the stupid thing!”
Your ugly run is over. You didn’t want to do it, found all the excuses but forced yourself to effort through, even though every step felt so hard. And when you wake up the next day and step on that pad of paper on your way to make coffee, you’ll have a little smile, relief washing over you. You don’t love it but “better out than in, Donkey”
I loved when my client Alex Darby said this to me:
A bad writing day is like an ugly run.
She has a way of reframing tough experiences. Brilliant woman. And she should know. Listen in as Alex tells her story in Barcelona in 2022. Alex was working on a book, preparing for a talk on a Barcelona stage for a summit hosted by coach David Vox for his exclusive mastermind in 2023 (look for it…it is opening for applications now for 2025.
Lose the romantic notion that you will have an opening ritual, a perfectly set up desk under a window with a view of the Appalachians (insert your own landscape goal, mine is the cliffs of South West Ireland)…lose the romance and get her done when the nagging is there.
Elizabeth Gilbert reminds us…you don’t have to write brilliantly (on the difficult days) you just show up and keep writing even if the writing feels bad.
Your body is thankful and your training is maintained after the ugly run. Your writing self is relieved and your book project progresses on the reluctant writing days.
Write on…just that.
