Small wins (part 2)
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Small wins (part 1). The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
We were talking about small wins, specifically how small wins in one domain of your life can influence another. (I’d meant to phrase this as easy wins—their accessibility is more important, and more uniform, than their magnitude—so I’ll use that term for the rest of this post.)
The analogy appears to have its limits. Running, for example, is a set of repetitive movements built on a foundation of tailored physiological form and metabolic stabilization (using water, sugar, and salt). Once you’ve set up the platform, no invention is required to get from one step to another; it is not, in that sense, a creative process. So maybe an easy win in running—like completing a four-mile race on your way to a 10K, or getting through one session of hill drills on the boring treadmill at the gym—is building generic capacity, and that’s it?
Two thoughts: Much of what separates someone with good ideas and a command of the language from a novelist is that the latter kept doing the same thing again and again—usually with some fixity about process. Stable repetition is a core tool of the creative.
And secondly, you are always creating the will to keep going. Nothing about the next step is assured; if you’ve ever quit short of your goal, you know that. The psyche is not set-it-and-forget-it. To proceed further on the path, when it really stretches out and you’ve been there for a long time, is an act—both a varied and a sustained act—of invention. Some of those inventions may hold longer than others, so that you go 10 minutes rather than 10 seconds without a moment of internal doubt or rebellion. But sooner or later you’ll need another one.
The fiber in that inventive craft is the easy win. Easy wins of the past become the template for the ones you summon in the present. Once you know what an increment of progress looks like, you can find it anywhere—in getting to the next lamp post, in moving from one-fourth of the way through the course to one-third, in finding a low-energy fantasy (say, the Steinway Model D you’ll buy for your riverfront apartment when you win Powerball) that can hold the slack in your attention for a few minutes. This is where there’s no conceptual difference with creativity: The easy win is not incidental to the bigger one. It’s the building block. It’s the essential unit in the physics of creative momentum.
One more beat: I find myself wondering how this all relates to grief. Grief inverts the creative process, because you move from a decisive moment outward rather than climbing to a critical point. But if you take the endpoints out of the picture, the individual steps look similar. Whatever the degree of your discomfort, your task is to abide it. And abiding is building. The thing you build with is what you have abided before—what it gave you, what it made you.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.