Overcoming Resistance!

Getting our daily dose of Vitamin D amidst the Ent neighbors.

​


I have a goal.


I want to finish the second draft of my novel before my fiftieth birthday this September of 2024.

​​​
This desire feels about as elusive as something one would wish for before
blowing on a dandelion puff--a dream that will never come true.

But if I can accomplish this task, it would mean the dream I wrote down in my journal the day I turned eight years-old--clear back in 1982--

"to write a book of my own someday," might just become a reality...


​

​
Finishing the second draft would make my manuscript ready for beta-reading friends who could help me fine-tune my story with constructive feedback. I want to contribute to that feeling of hope that my own favorite books bring to me.



I want to write the book
​I've always longed to read. 



​

​Perhaps a bit of a nod to Jane Eyre, I Capture the Castle or Pride and Prejudice, but set in our own contemporary day--about families who struggle to raise children into decent people with values, all while living in this fallen, backwards world.


​

​

At present, my manuscript is a molten mess. There are gaps in the plot line, inconsistencies with my characters, and snippets of dialogue that live raucously inside my mind, but have never made it to the typed screen or printed page--YET. But they're starting to eek their way out, day by day, as written words. It's happening!



​

​So after a dark-night-of-the-soul about a month ago, when the financial repercussions of stalling my painting commissions for 2024 (to finally work on my own ideas and write the book I've been carrying around in my head since 2008) hit like a load of bricks through a glass window, my good husband helped me realize something important. If I want to write this novel, I've got to work through the pain, and prioritize it. If that means cinching-in our belts for the time it takes me to write this book, we'll do it. If it means staying home a little more this summer to work. I'll do it.

​

“When we experience panic, it
means that we’re about to
​cross a threshold.” 

(-Steven Pressfield, Do the Work)

​



Weeks before that "dark-night-of-the-soul" crisis, I suggested my husband Matt listen to Steven Pressfield's The War of Art with me in April. I'd already read this brilliant self-help book for writers and creators at least seven times (it's a fast 2 1/2 hour read or listen). But I encouraged my husband to check it out on his commute so we could discuss Pressfield's methods for overcoming resistance. Matt is practical. He's an engineer with an MBA. He's hard to impress. But I have to say, I think he was impressed by this book. How not?! It's packed with truth!



​

​
So during that"dark night of the soul"realization when I hung my head because eight months of the twelve (in which I'd decided to write my novel) had already GONE(!), I turned to Matt in despair of ever finishing the story my weary brain has lugged around for sixteen years.

And Matt responded with, 

"Do you want to write this book or not?" 
​

"I do!"



​

​

​
"Then do what Pressfield says, and 'do the work like a pro.'"

So every week day now, before I do anything else--before painting, phone calls, paying bills, running errands, getting groceries, gardening, whatever--I'm writing for my allotted two hours--to put in the work, and let the world go. 


And, guys, the ideas are blossoming!

​
Many of us do this prioritizing already while studying the sacred words of life in our scriptures each morning, and they are the light in the storm.


So why shouldn't I make this lifelong goal of writing a book a top priority as well?



​

"Forget-me-not!" Is what that childhood dream keeps pecking at the back of my brain...

​​

​
If I feel deep down that writing IS something I'm supposed to do--even a task I promised to accomplish before coming to this world, I'd better get it done. I'm already more than half-way there--to finishing this mortal life (not the book!), so this is the summer to make it happen! EEK!



​

And guess what? It's working! I'm sniffing out the the trail of ideas. I've now revised the
first four scenes of my manuscript, and am on chapter five.

Only took me sixteen years, five months and a crisis to get myself seated down to do it. Oh, boy. Now...can I get through the other eleven plot points in the next four months by the end of September to make my book readable before I become half a century-old and let another sixteen years slip by without getting my book down on paper?!

As Jedi master Yoda says, "Do or do not. There is no try,"right? Tune in this October to find out if I do...ha ha! Please, Self, choose DO!

​

"It seems to me that overcoming resistance is far more important than talent, or anything else--any gift--there are a million people who have talent. But it's a very, very few that can sit down and take it from A to Z." 

Click here to watch the above quote spoken in a two minute video interview with Steven Pressfield on MarieTV...



​

While staying with cousins at their cottage over Memorial Day, my sister-in-law, Rebecca, suggested I go write in "The Escape Hatch"--a tiny little two room cabin set away from the road where one can be alone enough to think. Bless the brilliant person who built that little sanctuary for thought and solitude. I spent one of the happiest writing stints of my life in those few hours. Bliss!

​

We've all seen or heard of bluebirds of happiness. Well, I now know there's a blue door of happiness...

​"There’s stuff 'down there' in all of us. It’s vast and deep and limitless. That’s the vein we need to mine as artists and as entrepreneurs. I’ve heard start-up businessmen say the two qualities they needed most in their initial ventures were arrogance and ignorance. You gotta be a little crazy (or desperate) to write or do what you don’t know. But there’s great wisdom and magic in that act. It demonstrates faith in the universe, in the Muse, in the source of all inspiration. And that faith, almost invariably, is rewarded by the cosmos and vindicated by events. I recommend it."

(Steven Pressfield, Writing Wedsnesdays, "Write what You Don't Know.")



​

​

​

​

“Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. 'I write only when inspiration strikes,' he replied. 'Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.'

That's a pro. In terms of Resistance, Maugham was saying, 'I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work.'

Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his. 

He knew if he built it, she would come."  

(The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, pg. 64, A Professional.)



​

Just sitting down to dig out a blob of shapeless clay (like my kids and their cousin dug from the beach last Memorial Day weekend) seems unimportant. But then hefting it away from the pit and sitting down to sculpt it into something cool, useful, lovely, or meaningful, is wondrous.

But it takes time to create, right?
The older I get, the more I am learning repeatedly, that coming back and sitting down to that mass of mud every day--refining my manuscript down, or fine-tuning a landscape--is where and when the magic begins to take shape. 

​
​

Look at those ancient old hands! Ha ha! They work hard for me.

Whenever resistance is beating me, and I'm giving-in to procrastination instead of painting a tricksy portrait commission I need to finish, I turn on the audio of The War of Art, to just "tidy up the studio."

Then without realizing it, by the end of chapter one, I've pulled out my oils palette from the freezer, and have started setting up my brushes.


​

I often think the wild palette splotches turn out prettier than the labored-over paintings.

​Reading or listening to 
The War of Art 
is like a Felix Felicis 
for creators.

The truth in Pressfield's words is empowering. Creators can overcome self-doubt when we understand the fact that resistance is real, and faces every one of us--in every field of work. But those who actually succeed just make themselves sit in the muck of practicing every day. Creating something great would be no great accomplishment if we had all the time in the world, and no opposition to overcome. Van gogh's works are masterpieces because he had so few resources, no money, no real home, no supportive wife (he did have his dear brother Theo who wrote letters of encouragement--one boon!), no serious patrons, and yet...

he painted every day anyway!



​

I can hardly wait to dig into this epiphany of a book my niece Lydia just gifted us. Ooh la la, YES!

Here are a few more juicy jellybeans of wisdom Mr. Pressfield shares in The War of Art:

Are you paralyzed with fear? That's a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.



​​

​After reading Steven Pressfield's book, my husband had a most excellent idea to help springboard me into creative writing double-time mode. Matt's plant was instigating a week-long forced shutdown. So he proposed for the two of us to have...

a "Freaky Friday Week"--
​
we'd swap places!


​

Isn't this engineer cute? He helps me think outside the box.

Because Matt would be home for the week, he'd do everything I usually do all day long
(drive the teens from seminary to school, wash the dishes, make admin calls for appointments, fold laundry, direct kids' chores, give support to our homeschooling daughter, make lunch, chauffeur kids to lessons), and basically be Mr. Mom.

While I would go to work from 8-5 like him, (but in my studio to write my book(!) and paint(!) my current series of Dirt, Tree, Sky landscapes. I'm so grateful my good husband had this inspiration. Because he did, I was able to complete my biggest-scale painting yet, The Daily Constitutional, which I've been wanting to complete for months,  as well as start another landscape and crank through nearly half of it.

The Daily Constitutional, 40"x30."

I love being a mom. Sometimes I can hardly believe that these opinionated, talented, smart, fun half-lings (actually 2/3 of them are now full-sized!), are my children! But I must confess that the prospect of having an entire week of just creative work time made me heady! Like my daughters, nieces, sisters-in-law, and I sing all the time now (after seeing again the Anne and Gilbert Musical in Prince Edward Island last summer), I felt as if:

​
"Someone handed me the moon!"


​

"Blue Moon" Phlox Divaricata (Woodland Phlox) at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, Boothbay, Maine.

​As Mr. Pressfield said best in his The War of Art gem:

​“Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don't do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.”― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle


​

​So, creative friends, give us what YOU'VE got!
Comment below and tell me about your latest creative project
​ so we can encourage each other onward together... 

Happy summering!
​-Emily


"Write a book worth the reading
or live a life worth the writing about.”
​― Benjamin Franklin