I find it hard to fully try to write fiction—though a drink of alcohol helps. The trouble is that since I’m unskilled at fiction-writing, and since I find it painful to notice my un-skill, most of my mind prefers to either not write at all, or to write half-heartedly, picking at the page without really trying. Similarly, many pure math specialists avoid seriously trying their hand at philosophy, social science, or other “messy” areas.
I find this only happens at things I care about and want to be able to do. For me, an example is poetry. Trying to write poetry is painful and fearful. If I just pick at it, without being really serious, then no matter what the results, I can’t be said to have truly failed at it.
Oddly, I find that “picking at it” without any metric of success/failure usually reveals that I actually can do it, it’s just that I’m terrified of failing. I’ve been trying to redefine a lot of my success/fail metrics so that such dabbling is considered a success, and failure is instead a lack of any progress/effort, and finding it’s helped my productivity in a lot of areas.
Now that I’d rather write badly than not at all, I do a lot more good writing :)
I find this only happens at things I care about and want to be able to do. For me, an example is poetry. Trying to write poetry is painful and fearful. If I just pick at it, without being really serious, then no matter what the results, I can’t be said to have truly failed at it.
Except, of course, that I have.
Oddly, I find that “picking at it” without any metric of success/failure usually reveals that I actually can do it, it’s just that I’m terrified of failing. I’ve been trying to redefine a lot of my success/fail metrics so that such dabbling is considered a success, and failure is instead a lack of any progress/effort, and finding it’s helped my productivity in a lot of areas.
Now that I’d rather write badly than not at all, I do a lot more good writing :)