I have been reminding myself recently to not get frustrated over my slow progress writing fiction.
It has been a dream of mine since I was a kid to be a writer. In grade four I managed to turn a two-page story assignment into an epic that was at least ten pages long. I am not sure now if it was ever finished, as I remember hiding on the top floor of our house the morning it was due in a frantic last-minute attempt to finish.
Yet I have to remind myself that I still have a lot to learn about how to tell a good story, and that I do have a day job, after all. I am not going to publish a book overnight.
And yet, I get frustrated.
If I can lean into the frustration, though, it is a good opportunity to focus on mastery.
The need for mastery was first drilled into me my first summer tree planting. Tree planters are paid by the tree, and since prices averaged ten or eleven cents, it was in our best interest to plant fast. Yet speed without proper technique (by which my foreman meant planting a tree in a single fluid motion before striding three steps to plant the next tree) and the ability to read the ground (to find the best spot to plant the tree in) isn’t really speed. Sure, you’d be faster than someone who was slow and had poor technique, but the best combination was technique first and then speed.
I see this too with indexing, both in my own career and in some of the new indexers I talk to. Since freelancing is (usually) for employment and income—and for some people, they do not have a backup source of income—speed is often seen as key to success. But attempting to go fast without mastering the basics is usually going to lead to greater stress and more time wasted trying to fix errors made in haste. I do believe that newer indexers are capable to writing great indexes—it is just going to take a little longer, most likely, and that is okay. Taking the time is part of making a new skill second nature.
Bringing this back to writing, part of my frustration is that I can see that I have a much higher mastery of indexing relative to writing fiction. This makes sense, because I have spent most of the last nine years focused on indexing. I realize that I need to put the same time and focus into writing as well. And yet I wish I could just transfer mastery from one domain to another and bypass the work. Especially as making time for writing is, well, another issue.
Still, mastery before speed.
I have to keep reminding myself of this order. I can see how it got me through tree planting and then indexing. Now, I need to put in my time with writing, to accept this time of learning the craft and becoming grounded in the basics. Speed will come soon enough.