Recently, I made a pact with myself to do the bare minimum.

humanityinahandbag:

I used to go on writing sprees. 10k, 20k, whatever I could get out. And I’d walk away that day feeling proud and invigorated, and ready to take the world by storm the next day when surely I’d have the same results!

Ha! Hardly. The next day usually began with a sense of exhaustion followed by harrowing depression followed by spiraling mayhem and a prediction of a writerless doom. And I began to resent words. And writing. And what made it special to me in the first place. 

Actually. Scratch that. I do resent it. Present tense. Writing wasn’t (isn’t) fun anymore. 

Until I decided that I was going to do the bare minimum. 

Which means every day (except for weekends, which I have off) I have to write at least two pages. 

That’s it. 

What does that mean? 

It means every day, preferably after a walk with my dog, I have to sit down with my tea and write two pages. It could take ten minutes. It could take an hour. But two pages must come out of my system. Not 10k, 20k, 30k words. 

Two pages. 

But what happens if you’re on a roll and you want to keep going?

Too fucking bad! Two pages. That’s it. 

BUT WHY! IF YOU’RE ON A ROLL-

Reader, have you ever seen a guilty writer? The sort that go to Tumblr or their friends and says I haven’t written in so long because it’s so hard and i’m not good enough and I wrote 20k that one time but this time nothing will come out which means I’m losing my tallent, my drive, my future and and and and and-

(aka me.)

Turns out, that can’t happen if my limit is two pages. Two. Pages. I can’t look back and say that “one time I wrote 20k and this time I only wrote 1k so I must be a failure”. There’s no failing for two pages. 

Granted, the first day I did it was one of failture. I told myself it was nothing. Two pages wasn’t enough. Two pages wasn’t hardly anything. Two pages was trash. And then the next day, when I wrote two pages, the feeling dulled. And a tiny little voice in my head peeked around the corner and said huh! you haven’t written two days in a row in a long time! Wow! Good for you!The bare minimum allows me to sit back and say “I’m really happy with myself because I wrote two pages!” 

And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days. 

They’ve all been different little stories. Little snapshots of my life, day to day. Each of them is two pages. But two pages is manageable. Two pages is plausible. Lately, I cooked up a short story that’s bound to be ten pages. It’ll take me five days to write. Why?

Two pages. Period. 

And instead of staring down a huge number, I’m able to limit myself, stop where I am, tell myself I succeeded, before going on to live my life. 

I want to work on not being a guilty writer, one step at a time. And yes, one day I probably will extend that limit. Maybe when I want to write a longer book, and I’m ready to move forward, I’ll extend whatever I have. Because I’ll be ready, then, to move past limits. But for now? Two pages is just fine. 

I think I’d convinced myself for a long time that the bare minimum wasn’t enough. I have to do everything now! I’d chastise, in the midst of yet another apocryphal self-flagellation. I have to get it done or else I’ll be nothing but a failure! That might be the Speedy J-Walking New Yorker in me. Or it might be a human trait that we’re all too hesitant to talk about. Who knows. 

I’ve started to get on my own soapbox about it all, though. Shouting through a paper cone that the bare minimum isn’t failing. Doing nothing is failing. But doing the bare minimum? That’s something. Which, I guess, doesn’t make it bare or minimum at all. 

So yeah. Guilty writers, artists, students; bare minimum. That’s all you should ask of yourselves. Whether that’s a paragraph, a page, a sentence, a word. Put it down. Keep it there. Walk away. You have lives to live and sitting inside, vomiting your guilt onto a keyboard is certainly no way to continue it.