Book Update #3: Slow and Unsteady

If you grew up anywhere but the deepest jungles of the Amazon, chances are you know the fable of the tortoise and the hare.

Just in case you never heard this cautionary tale, or you forgot, I'll recap: boastful, super-fast hare goes around gloating over all the woodland creatures about how zippy he is, being cocky and, in general, a braggy pain in the butt. Slow, wise tortoise challenges him to a race. Over-confident hare kicks the tortoise's butt in the first leg of the race, then decides to take a nap under a tree because he's that confident in his abilities. Tortoise keeps chugging along towards that finish line, and by the time the hare wakes up from his power nap, the tortoise has already won. The moral of the story is, sleep is for the weak.

But seriously, the point of this story is to teach kids that it's better to make steady, slow progress on whatever you're doing-- and, of course, avoid being a braggy mcbraggerson. 

I never quite absorbed that point.

In my mind, the moral of that story was, "If you're good at stuff, you can easily take naps and still win, just set an alarm."

I have never been a slow-and-steady kind of person. I tend to attack projects in quick, intense bursts of energy. Remember in school, when the teacher would assign a big semester-long project and be all, "This is not something you'll be able to do the night before and get a passing grade."? 

My response, every time:

I always saw this admonishment as being aimed at the slackers and idiots who lacked neither the brainpower nor the iron will required to research and write a 20-page paper on the history of Greek literature in one all-night session. I am the freaking queen of leaving things until the last possible second. I am also pretty good at determining when "the last possible minute" will actually occur several days after the official deadline.

The problem is, though, that outside of school, most things that matter? Yeah, they can't actually be accomplished in one burst of caffeine-and-panic-induced energy.

Writing a novel, forming and maintaining relationships, home improvement projects, finding and furthering a career, growing a garden, raising a kid... none of that can be done all at once. Those are tortoise jobs. For a natural hare, all of those things are daunting. They're counter to the way I'm used to operating. So friendships fade, plants wither, flames flicker and go out, because I gave it my all at the beginning and then had to go take a nap.

That's the place I'm at in my novel. I really pounded that trail at the starting line, and got to almost 80,000 words before I found a nice shady tree to nap under. Now I've woken up and I'm back on the trail, but my pace is much slower. I manage a couple of paragraphs a days, and that's all. It's a sad, hungover limp, almost a crawl. But it's good for me. I have to learn to do this. I have to figure out how to be the hare and the tortoise, to work with my initial bursts of enthusiasm and the ensuing exhaustion. 

I do have one huge advantage over the fabled hare: this race isn't finite. It's not a zero-sum game. I don't lose just because some dedicated little tortoises get there before me. The goal is still there, waiting for me. Winning is always on the horizon, just as soon as I get my sad little limping hare-butt across the finish line.