Tag Archives: failure

The seven stages of writing⤴

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Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”

I used to agonise over how I wrote, because it seemed to be so disorganised, so messy, so … inefficient. And then, at some point in my thesis write up, I realised that there was no point in worrying about the things I could not change, as Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer advises. It was then that I started to realise that this was just how I wrote, and to make a virtue out of it. But one stage of my writing still troubled me and tripped me up. At some point in any writing project I undertake I would become convinced that I was not able, and never would be able, to finish it  – either because my writing was rubbish, or the topic was trite and boring, or because I was not authorised to write about it – the reason would vary, but it always happened. At this point sometimes I just gave up, but when it came to my thesis write up there was no way I was not going to submit it. I’ve written before about this writer’s block, and how I don’t find it easy to let go of my writing and publish it, but as time has passed I have realised that this despair that I feel is actually just one of the stages of my writing. And although that doesn’t stop the feelings from occurring, it is helping me to overcome it. So here are my seven stages of writing.

Excitement I have an idea …
Boredom But it’s taking too long …
Despair Ugh, this is hard!
Fear Maybe I just can’t do it?
Hope Oh, maybe if I look at it like this …?
Relief Actually, it’s not that bad!
Pride It’s done!

There’s still more to tease out about this whole process, of course – but this idea has been percolating for a long time now and it’s time to let go of it.

An anti-climax⤴

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I didn’t have high hopes for GISH – I didn’t know what to expect. But I had hoped for some sort of collaborative creating and remixing with some like minded people. So I paid my $25.01 (why the .01, I wondered) and waited to see what the challenges would be like.

GISH is a week long event, and this year it ran from 30th July to 6th August. So on Sat 30th I logged in from my PC. First I tried to update my profile, but the web pages kept crashing, so I gave up on that. Next I headed to the Teams tab, expecting to find a chat room or a forum, but there was just a list of names with links to email them individually. Meh, I assumed the captain would be in touch.

And that was pretty much it. I scanned through the challenges and picked up a couple I could do alone from my desk (many of them either specified a specific location in the US or required interaction in busy places, neither of which were possible for me), and wandered off to do other things.

During my busier than usual work week I occasionally wondered why nobody was getting in touch – was I missing something? I checked the Teams tab again, but there was still nothing there. But apparently I was missing everything, as I found out after the event had ended. It turns out that there was a ios/android app, and that’s where my team were chatting. Somehow I’d missed mention of it on the web pages. I know this is all my own fault, and I could have got in touch with the captain (who I did not know), or other team members, but there it is.

And I can’t help feeling a little sad that nobody thought to ask me where I was.