Thinking about riding my bike has helped me understand my feelings about writing a bit better. So I’m going to use it as a way into talking about what I’ve been struggling with.
I love riding bikes. I am always stoked to get out and ride. I prep my bike and my pack, put water in my bottles and check my tires and away I go. I’ve never lost the sense of excitement and freedom that comes with getting on my bike and setting out. Even if I’m riding the same route I always ride, each ride has something unique to it.
I’ve come to find that that’s a similar feeling to when I get a story idea and I get the first chapter down, or the first few pages of a short story. It’s exciting to be working on something new. It’s an interesting idea, or it’s a unique character, or something else is thrilling, even if writing a story is the same process every time, one word after the other. Just like riding a bike is just turning the cranks.
No matter how beautiful the day, how stoked I am to be out on the bike, I always hit a point of pushback. It usually comes after my tracking app informs me I’ve biked my first mile. I’m not sure if it’s because I listen to music while I’m getting ready and while I’m riding, so even though I hit that mile after about four minutes of riding, it feels like it should be more than a mile because I’ve already listened to three or four songs. But usually, after that first mile, I always go through a period of wanting to turn back. Often, I notice things about the riding conditions I didn’t while I was getting ready: it’s not as warm as I thought; it’s too warm; it’s too windy; I’m tired from work; I can still hear the couch calling my name. But there is a point that I feel like I should turn back and go home. But one of the things that I learned when riding my bike to work every day for three years: just because you love something doesn’t mean you’re going to love it every day. The addendum: you’re also not going to love it the whole time you’re doing it.
After the pushback, there’s the zen. These days, pop-psych calls it the flow state and there are articles linked to articles in a neverending chain of what flow state is, how to achieve it, how to achieve it quicker and easier, etc. I just call it the zen. It’s the zen of doing, of being so connected to a task that you let it take over your entire mind. It’s like being in a trance when I don’t need to think about what I’m doing, I’m just doing it because I was made to do it. I usually enter this state around mile 3 or 4 when I’m riding, sometimes sooner sometimes later.
But I’ve been struggling with the pushback during writing for a long time. I get a new idea, and it’s exciting and different and I’m stoked about it. But then I get past the first chapter or the first few pages, and I start to sputter out. A lot of this comes from an unrealistic expectation I had (and probably continue to have): that because I entered zen when writing Clean Freak, which lasted through the couple of short stories I wrote afterward, I thought I was going to be in zen forever.
So I was unprepared for what it meant when I experienced pushback while writing and abandoned my first story after that. I thought that it meant that I had lost my zen forever. The continued struggles I had after that only served to cement that perception. I really felt like I wasn’t a writer anymore.
A month ago, I started a new short story, a diversion from Codename: Fairyland. I expected to be done with the story by now. I’m not. Judging by my notes, I’m about halfway through at 3,200 words. 6,400 words is a perfectly reasonable length for a short story. I’ll probably try to edit it down to under 6K when all is said and done. In the meantime, every writing session I finish, I think, “Geez, I’m not done yet?” in much the same tone of thought when I think exactly that when I’m out riding my bike after that first mile. But riding has taught me about the pushback, how to recognize it, and how to work through it.
Because I still love writing, even if sometimes I need to push back.
