Your Book and the Beauty of "Right Now"
imagining your future self can help you get started
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A book is a major undertaking, a big goal. When you think of the goal, the journey itself may feel impossible. When that happens, think instead of that single step. A series of single steps will get you to your goal.
“Your own positive future begins in this moment. All you have is right now. Every goal is possible from here.”― Lao Tzu
Imagine your “own positive future”—a completed project, a body of work—and begin now. Right now. Here. Wherever you are at this moment, take out a pen or speak into your phone’s voice recording app or place your hands on your keyboard, and write something down.
If the only thing you write is, “I’m starting now,” then you are already ahead. You have already started. It takes only moments to start. Do it now.
Don’t wait until tomorrow to begin writing. Don’t wait until next week. When you wait, you will find yourself, months or years down the road, wishing you’d started sooner. It’s like those signs you see on freeway interchanges: “If you lived here, you’d be home now.”
We are all, for better or worse, creatures on a linear timeline. Imagine the timeline of your life as a giant calendar, each day marked with a small box. Five months from now, barring catastrophe, you are going to be at a certain spot on the calendar. No matter what you do with your time between now and then, about 150 days will have passed. If you begin writing 500 words a day today, you will land on that spot on the calendar with a manuscript of 75,000 words. Or you can land on that spot with 1,000 words or 5,000 words or no words.
I am writing this post on June 6, 2023. If you had begun writing 500 words a day on January 6, you would now have a manuscript of about 75,000 words. I’m not just speaking to you. I’m speaking to myself. If I had begun writing 500 words a day on January 6—all of it on the same book rather than on various projects—I too would have a manuscript of about 75,000 words! I know this. And yet…
Again: imagine your positive future, and begin right now. Your goal is possible from here.
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Really like this positive post because it emphasizes doing and doing leads to more doing. One possible thing or sequence leads to more possibilities that can lead into some kind of trajectory. I can self activate and get 35 pages. A test reader might say, good, go for 100 pages and go for 250 pages by the end of the year. If I have a beginning I can battle my way to a middle and a conclusion and retool and retool til it takes a good shape. What will happen? If I know too much, there goes surprise. A novel is like a life, either meticulously planned or go with the moments, try to get some good ones and then retool, rewrite and maybe retool again. As long as the mind is engaged and asked, it will offer solutions. Readers ask Stephen King how his new novel will end. He says he doesn't know till he gets there. This post wonderfully says just get oneself out on the road and start the journey. Because it's a timeline and you end up somewhere no matter what. Imagine a positive future and work towards it day by day, page by page, significant moment by significant moment and that positive future will gradually become real. These writer motivating posts are pure gold. Looking forward to the next one.