Back in November, my five-year-old daughter started joining her brother’s driveway soccer games and asking to start going to soccer practice with him. After waiting a few weeks to make sure she didn’t change her mind, we signed her up twelve weeks of winter soccer.
Here we are, February 2, and it’s not going so well. As it turns out, Alma dislikes soccer. Or rather, she nothings it. A few practices ago, she stole all of the extra balls and put them in the goal so she could guard them like dragon eggs. Last week, she waited until the coach wasn’t watching and put the ball between her calves so she could waddle like a penguin. She broke free of their scrimmage to zoom around the gym, flying like a superhero. She’s got vim, and passion, but it seems not to be directed toward playing soccer.
Our position until now has been that she at least needs to show up. Soccer doesn’t matter to us, but follow-through does, and since she doesn’t actively hate it, we should at least try.
I changed my mind yesterday after listening to the author Becky Blades on the #amwriting podcast talk about her new book Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas.
The Beauty of the Start
Her argument is that we don’t do ourselves any favors when we tell ourselves to only do one big project at a time, or not to overcommit, or that we’re biting off more than we can chew. If we expect ourselves to only start the projects that we will follow through on, then it means we’re committing to safe, sure things, and not actually take the kind of creative risks meanderings that can lead to exciting projects.
My biggest takeaway from the podcast: All the fear is in the finish. The focus on the finish keeps people from starting. Deciding that you’ll only start what you can finish doesn’t mean that more projects get finished—it just means that fewer get started.
In writing, it’s important, and exciting, to have lots of projects bubbling away in that nascent stage of the pipeline. Have a notebook or a document where you jot down the ideas, a folder where you save articles related to it. Most will go nowhere. Some will become zombie papers that roar back to life five years after you start them. But keep them on a low flame in the background means that there is a possibility of that project becoming a reality.
Bonus: A New Word!
I often tell my clients to stop writing when they still have ideas, jot down a list or leave some breadcrumbs, and then to close the document. By stopping before you’re finished, your brain will keep working on the idea in the background, solving tricky writing puzzles for you.
Thanks to this podcast, I now know there’s a term for this neruomagic: the Zeigarnik effect! Zeigarnik and his colleagues noticed that waiters had better recall for unpaid (unfinished) orders then once orders had been closed out and paid for. (This Scientific American article even posits that talking about our ideas or overly creating notes or outlines, that takes away our need to finish a written draft). A related idea, the Ovsiankina effect, finds that interrupting a task, even a valueless one, creates a quasi-need to finish it. So if you interrupt your writing five minutes before you’re done, it creates an “itch” in your brain to come back and finish the damn thing. Try these at home—at least for some people, they work!
On Parenting and Soccer
On the home front, this means we’ve decided to drop the rope in the game of soccer tug-of-war, and not make Alma play anymore. As our dragon/penguin/superhero has made clear to me, no amount of showing up to soccer practice is going to make her love this game. But Becky Blades’ admonition that forcing finishes actually just will mean fewer starts stuck with me. If finishing this soccer season will mean that she’s more reluctant to try flute lessons, or roller derby, or acting, or swimming, it’s not a fair trade. Being open to new experiences sometimes means being able to say “this isn’t for me.” Even if soccer isn’t for her, something will be.
A Last Word—To Start is Also to Quit
What should be obvious here: giving yourself infinite starts means you also get infinite stops. Quit things that aren’t working for you. Shelve the projects that don’t spark joy. If you want to be a dragon and this writing project is making you pretend to be a soccer player, go find the project where you get to be a dragon. If you think about saying no to some projects as saying yes to others, then deciding to stop working on something for a little while just means that you are giving yourself the gift of working on what you are excited about—and that’s a great thing.
Write with us!
Want to get some writing done before Spring Break? Commit to writing every day for ten days, February 27-March 10! The key to making these writing sprints work? One is friendship and accountability (which is us, your writing group in Zoom writing sessions and on Slack). The second is spending the few weeks before the writing session doing all the research and reading and outlining you need so that all you do for ten days is write. If this sounds like fun, you can sign up here. And of course, invite your friends!