Make more tables
Every writer has a story that he or she will tell one day. Not necessarily the memoir that will embarrass her family or the tome he’s not yet capable of pulling off, but the story that, with a little more time, he’d be able to finish right. It’s the daily to-do’s that draw out project timelines.
The magazine journalist Lael Tucker Wertenbaker wrote beautifully about the press of obligations that aren’t really in “Death of A Man,” a book about her husband’s choice not to continue cancer treatment, their life together, and his inevitable death.
“I had balanced things well for a long time, but now I was allowing the parts to add up to more than a whole, the pressures to press, the worthwhile causes to take more and more time. I realized that I was weary and diffuse and neglecting all by cutting down none of what I felt to be obligations.”
It’s so easy to imbue tasks big and small with false importance, and so hard to let go of what you come to believe are obligations. And it’s those obligations that make it easy to say, I’ll write a little more after I finish my errands, when I get home in six hours. Slowly it becomes easier to stand up and walk away from your desk, and soon three months turns into six, turns into a year, and then TBD.
Reject obligations that you don’t need in order to live, and embrace art. Embrace picking up the mail every other day, or forgetting to paint the kitchen for years; choose not to binge-watch X or Y show or to read the book “everyone” says you should.
Nick Offerman — aka Ron Swanson — has a one-liner that might help: In early June 2015, Offerman, whose new movie Me and Earl and the Dying Girl had just premiered, shared with Jon Stewart how he wakens himself from time-wasting reverie…
He says, simply: “I should make more tables.”
Go forth, writers, and make tables.
Originally published at thebigroundtable.tumblr.com.
