I went to the archery range today. Next to me was a teenage girl. Her dad drove her, set her up and then walked around on the hill next to the range, pacing and fiddling with sticks. Occasionally, he’d say something to her. Motivation or guidance or chastisement. I’m not sure.
She stood there, ten yards out from a five foot pad leaned against a pile of hay bales. The rain from yesterday made the field slick with mud. We all rise above it on square shooting pads, laid out in ten yard increments from the targets. Only when we go to retrieve arrows do we squansh down into it.
She fires her six arrows and sets her bow down on a stand and slips over to the target and pulls them all out and goes back and does it again. She’s doing this over and over again at a pace that, to me, seems hurried.
And she’s horrible at it.
At ten yards, even a halfway decent shooter could occasionally get all six clustered within a two foot circle (“Hey, Google. Set a reminder to see if I can do the thing I’m suggesting is straightforward.”). She’s got shafts running up and down the length of the pad. There’s one sticking out of the bales. It’s a mess.
I’m bad at liking things. I don’t care about political candidates or teams or fandoms. I have a lot of things that I like, but those things never break through. As they grow, they push against the bounds of fanaticism and are pushed gently back down, like growing against a rubber ceiling.
I used to love things and care about them and get in arguments over them. At some point, that all got to be too much. I like the things I like and if someone else hates them, that’s kind of okay. I don’t need to be right about legislative policy or ethics or why this band is good or anything.
The closest I get to heroes are probably musicians and authors. Even then, I know it’s not worth holding on too tightly. I love Cormac McCarthy, the Beastie Boys, Guy Garvey from Elbow and probably some others. They’re people whose work inspires me to do better things. There are a few smaller folks I get into.
Paul Dean is a video game journalist and the cofounder of Shut Up and Sit Down, a podcast about board games. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything he’s written on video games, but he’s fascinating. He did a series for a few months of him playing a video game called Spelunky and just talking about life. Now, he’s recently finished up a series on emigrating to Canada. Also lovely.
Inspiration is difficult and I think Paul summed it up nicely in a speech he says he never gave. In short, inspiration is the kind of thing that ends up pushing those already in motion (most of the time). People can be moved to action and I’ve seen it happen, but more often than not, their trajectory is merely shifted.
One of the difficulties with writing or music or movie making or any creative thing, I suppose, is the time you spend enjoying the thing you aspire to is time not spent achieving it yourself. Every book I read or podcast I listen to is a chunk of time spent being inspired and not making a thing.
Imagine if every time you ate lunch you fretted about never living up to your potential as a chef. That’s how musicians and aspiring authors often feel. Especially those at the beginning of the journey.
When I first started writing, I didn’t have a group to work with. I still don’t. I don’t like groups of anything and the idea of having someone slog through my work and my having to slog through there’s seemed off putting. I know now that’s not really the way it works. It’s like being on a golf team, or something, where you help each other and there’s a lovely camaraderie to it.
Without a group, you’re left looking for inspiration in books. Here’s a peek behind the old publishing curtain – the authors you’ve heard of are usually very good at what they do. Especially anyone who’s done it for a long time or who did it a long time ago.
McCarthy is a perfect example. First novel published in 1965 and his last book came out in 2006. He’s a good writer. Married three times, so maybe not great at everything, but a good writer. That’s not fair, he’s more than a good writer. I think he’s one of the greatest authors of the last X00 years. Pick a number.
When that’s your inspiration, though, good luck feeling adequate. You can go back and read Outer Dark and think, “Oh, well this isn’t the best book ever written” and feel a little better, but it’s still not like reading the story your buddy Paul just got accepted into the regional lit mag. There you can see the line between you, the aspirante, and the published author.
What you can get from that kind of inspiration is just a reminder to go write something. It’s not going to be the thing that people read and call the next Moby Dick, but it might be the thing they read and call the next thing you should work on. Having that, a little something to work on, a little raw scrape on your knuckle you can’t stop rubbing, having it means getting better.
The girl at the range will be incredible. She’s out doing it a million times. I’m going to see her in three months and she’s going to be shooting tight clusters from 20 yards. In six months, she’s going to be pretty consistent from 50. It’s better than I’ll be, for sure.
She has that raw edge that she can’t keep from rubbing. She’ll wear the rough spots completely smooth and you’ll be able to polish silk with the results.
Having good heroes and inspirations can help. Being good about inspiration is just as important.
I would love to be better about inspiration. I’d love to have a hero that I not only look up to, but that I look to for guidance. What would MCA do?
Blogging is better than nothing. It may all be nonsense. It may all go unread (currently rocking two visitors in the last 30 days). It may be mediocre writing. I’m hoping it makes it easier to find inspiration. I’m hoping, in six months, I’m consistently near the target.
UPDATE (Kind of, I’m editing this before I publish it, so I’m only updating the draft.): Here’s me from ten yards. I think the two foot thing was reasonable.