Hey, so, progress is kind of weird, right? Linear time is, too. But it’s how we experience things, especially things like writing and reading, and it obviously influences how we perceive our progress in something as beautifully nonlinear as life (even if it feels like we’re always running out of time.) I was especially thinking about this today in regard to a few things, chiefly my brother’s newfound lease on a fresh start in life and my own tumultuous writing progress. Both are lenses, and admissions, that perhaps our experience of life, our progress through it, and our perceived productivity and its related self-worth may all not be quite as clear cut as it seems.
Respecting my brother’s privacy means not relating all the details of his current position, tenuous and fresh as it is. But watching someone uproot and change their entire life course over a two-week period is at once kind of terrifying (I am a planner at the end of the day, spontaneity has never been my strong suit (ask my failed improv auditions (but I was good at the kind of theatre that had me memorizing and preparing))), and inspiring. There’s so much we assume that we can’t change, that we can’t start over, because of the kind of sunk-cost fallacy that has us trapped in whatever it is we may feel trapped in. Sometimes an outside reminder is all we need to remember that there’s nothing holding us back from something like starting over.
I mean, I kind of started over halfway through college. It’s how I got into sommelier work, a reboot of the priorities I’d built so far. Nothing, really, in my life path had set me up to be manager of a restaurant, except whatever critical thinking and time management skills school had given me. First day on the job I had no idea what 86 meant, what open counts were, and had only carried a tray once (in the exam, I still passed). It was a career alien to my parents, to most of my family come to think of it, and the kind of rapid shift in priorities and resources that worries an academic advisor (or two, or three. I distinctly remember one of them informing me that it would be foolish to follow my passions.)
But, even so, there was progress to be made on every front. Passing the exams required for sommelier certification in quick succession, finding a job out of college, and then moving up, as it were, to better jobs along the way were all part of it. One gets the sense of a kind of path through life that at least feels as though progress is being made. There’s that old maxim, I forget what it relates to specifically, that if one is not growing, then one is dying. Maybe that’s why I’ve so tied my productivity with my own self-worth. It’s a perfectly healthy mindset, I assure you.
But now, two years into a job I adore and one year into the apartment that represents the first time I’ve really lived more or less alone, one gets the worry of stagnation stronger than elsewhere. It’s not a rational worry, of course. I’ve rearranged my furniture, resigned my lease, discovered new restaurants, and continue to construct a personal life and a professional career. The pace is just not as rapid as it was growing up. But life’s a long game, and there’s plenty of time left. I am, for what feels like the first time in a long time, genuinely happy with my lot in existence, and although it has done absolutely nothing for my existential absurdism, it has done a lot for how I view progress in life.
Writing’s another lesson here. The easiest way to measure progress in writing feels inherently linear: wordcounts. Since the start of this year I have written around 80k words of a new project, rewritten or added around 90k of the third planned book for Freedom and Control, have worked with betas on that second book, written an almost daily haiku, an almost weekly blog, and try for almost daily Instagram posts. That’s not nothing, and I still feel like I’m falling behind. But if we take a look at the projects underway for Freedom and Control, we see another example of how our perceived linear progress undermines the work actually being done and the improvement therein.
Part of editing and rewriting books is cutting out immaterial things, or reworking scenes and characters that don’t work. There are four drafts all sitting together for the series at the moment, and the advantage of having them all in front of me at once means, with the exception of the currently released A Place I Have Never Been, they can be edited in sync so the story holds together a little better. This was even done in the editing stage of A Place I Have Never Been. When a character wasn’t working in the following novel they were cut, and killed in the book preceding it. That meant I had to rewrite entire chapters they featured in, find new motivations for character interactions, develop new plotlines, scenes, locations, and, in some instances, leave a ton of “progress” on the cutting room floor. Backtracking is a regular part of editing, and sometimes chapters that happened later needed to happen sooner, or vice-versa.
Hell, at one point in the third book, I had a character’s third-to-last chapter become their introduction. Imagine what that did to the rest of the plot.
My point is, though, that none of that work or energy was remotely linear, and almost all of it was an intoxicating brew of frustration and excited creativity. Maybe that’s life, too. There’s always growth, and progress, but not all of it has to be building to something. If plot twists can happen in novels, and we can all admit that characters need not act rationally, then neither do we. Sometimes growth is tearing something down, moving it around, finding a new path and a new way, if not forward, than sideways into something new and exciting. Or just, something needed. Life’s your story. Write it however you wish.