The Myth of Daily Progress

When I was in college the local paper was the Charlottesville Daily Progress - a hopelessly chipper name for a newspaper but one which I think reflects the way we all wish life worked. In the thirtysomething years since then, I haven't encountered a lot of daily progress in my life. I plod. I trudge. I put in the hours. And I endure long periods in which it seems as if nothing is happening - there's no progress at all, much less something measurable and daily.

This is true in all areas of my life.

But the flip side is that after weeks or months of this plodding, just at the point where I am most frustrated and most certain that none of this work is leading to any real payoff, I hit a period of rapid and almost effortless progress. A little blip of time - it never seems to last longer than a week, but is more often just a single day - in which it seems I am reaping the results of all the work I plowed in earlier.

Last Wednesday was one of those days. I was at the studio, dancing with Max and all of a sudden ("all of a sudden" as in "we've been working on these steps for weeks") everything clicked and I began dancing better. It's like in one day, in one lesson, I got drastically better. I know I wasn't just dreaming it - several other people commented on it too. And the next morning after a night of furious dreaming about dancing, in which I went through the tango routine over and over in my dreamstate, I woke up full of ideas for revision for the novel.

What is this? Why do we so rarely get real daily progress and instead get this bumpy learning curve?

I suspect it has something to do with the fact anything we're learning requires a kind of blind loyalty to the process. Periods of time in which it feels like you're wandering the dark and not getting any better. Perhaps this dark night of the soul is a necessary part of the creative process - that if creative work was more like bricklaying (i.e., full of evidence of daily progress) we would be more convinced that it is a result of our will and work and cleverness and not respectful enough of the fact that there is something more emotional and mystical about the process. We'd forget that creativity is the result of more than just putting in the hours.

You still have to put in the hours. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. You have to put in the daily hours but you have to put them in without any expectation of daily progress. It's a leap of faith. The time at the computer when it seems like nothing is happening is the primary sacrament of this strange religion we've all chosen...and the result is the periodic Wednesday when it all clicks, when one step seems to follow the other swiftly and effortlessly, when the ideas are coming faster than you can write them and when it seems, for just a matter of hours, laughably easy.