Show up, Chop Wood, Build Your Writing Muscle
Here’s a story I heard in elementary school that has stuck with me, that I often think about when I’m writing:
A kid goes to an old man, known in those parts to be wise, for advice. “The other kids pick on me,” he says. “How do I get big muscles so I can be more intimidating?”
The old man, who’d been napping in the shade of a tree when the kid came up, settles back and pulls his hat over his eyes. “Well now,” he waves his hand in the direction of a cord of wood. “Why don’t you chop some of that wood for me and let me think about it.”
So the kid chops logs for a while. He stacks a pile of firewood against the house and goes back to the old man and asks, “Have you thought of a way I can get muscles yet?”
“Nope,” the old man says. “Better come back tomorrow.”
Day after day the kid shows up asking for help, and the old man thinks about his question in the shade while the kid chops wood.
Finally, after several weeks, the kid gets sick of it. “Look,” he says. “I’ve chopped this entire cord of wood for you and all you’ve done is sleep. Do you know how I can get big muscles or don’t you?”
The old man lifts the brim of his hat and looks at the pile of wood, and back at the boy with surprise. “What?” he says. “After all that chopping, you still don’t have any muscles?”
Of course you knew where this story was going, as soon as the kid picked up the ax —
(you also remembered the story was from elementary school, and not a grisly tale of elder-cide, right?!). Of course you did.
Okay, the moral of the story is clear —
Show up, chop wood, achieve goals.
When it comes to writing, this may be one of those metaphors that sounds simple but isn’t easy — we’re all busy. Hacking time out of our busy blah blah can be very blah blah blah. (Penny Zang’s article about this very topic is much more informatively written: https://medium.com/@pennyzang/making-time-to-write-a-time-saving-technique-ef8964f583f8)
But the thing that sticks with me about this story is the message that to build my writing muscles I just need to show up and chop wood. I promise myself the writing can be terrible. I set the tiniest increments of goals imaginable (I actually wrote the first draft of a novel in five months, with just a goal of 500 words a day. You could do it with fewer words per day, and more time). I come at it all so sideways, so nonchalantly, that the muscle-building almost does itself.
For me, the muse is an old man propped against a tree, waving me towards the wood pile.
He doesn’t tell me that I have to produce a mountain of work in record time, or that I have to arrange my words into a fabulously decorative pile like you see in the Alps. He just says, “Start chopping and lemme think about how you can become a great writer.”
And while he thinks, I work.
