Practicing patience

My freshman year of college, I became friends with an older student. (He was old enough to buy beer, which made him a very good friend indeed.) He lived in a nondescript apartment downtown, above one of the local businesses, and the only thing I remember about the place was a poster that depicted two cartoon vultures perched on a dead tree limb in a desert. One vulture is saying to the other, “Patience my ass. I’m gonna kill something.”

I’ve thought of that poster many times over the years. Most recently its message came to mind as I was editing a recent Friday Five interview with writer Allison Field Bell. Her excellent list of advice to writers includes the recommendation to take a more patient approach to the craft — to not get impatient like the vulture on that poster from so long ago, but to spend appropriate time with your work.

In case you missed it, here’s what she said:

Don’t worry about publishing right away. Give it a good five to ten years before you focus your energy on submitting your work. The important part is in the writing. Let yourself write and write and write.

— Allison Field Bell

Did you catch that? Give it a good five to ten years…

Huh?

Whoa. The hungry vulture in me rebels.

I’ll admit that over the past twelve months — my first full year of retirement, and the first year I’ve more fully focused on the writing life — I’ve been in a rush. I’ve been feeling like I’m behind and need to catch up. Need to get stuff out the door. Need to get published — that form of validation that stamps me as a certified author.

Yes, I write shitty first drafts, just like every other writer, but I revise those into less shitty second and third drafts, set them aside for a while to let them marinate, revise again with fresh eyes, and so on. But I admit to getting in a hurry at times. I tend to think that once a story or essay is good enough, I’m ready to submit it to one or several publications.

Not very patient of me, is it.

Slow down to speed up?

I’m thinking I should pay more heed to Allison’s guidance. Because without fail, whenever I see one of my pieces of writing in a literary journal, either in print or online, I discover ways the piece could be improved, whether it’s tightening a sentence, cutting an adjective here and there, or even fixing a typo.

There’s a concept popular in organizational leadership known as slowing down to speed up. While the concept is intended to help busy CEOs and other executives achieve balance in their lives and reduce expensive mistakes — the antithesis of tech culture’s move fast and break things ethos — maybe the concept can help writers, too.

As Allison says, don’t focus on getting published early in your writing venture. Just focus on the writing. I’m trying to take that approach as I work on my first novel.

But also, I’m 64, and may days on this planet are dwindling — a reality I try to ignore. But the fact is always there like the praetorian guard who whispered into Julius Caesar’s ear, Memento mori (thou art mortal). So I feel like, if I’m going to make a mark in the writing world, I’d better get with it.

Babette’s lessons

Like any other mortal, I don’t know the day or hour, or even the month or year, but I could also be like Babette Hughes, a writer who turned 101 last year. According to her bio on Amazon, “she still writes with a fluidity and grace of a woman half her age” and calls her latest book, Lessons in Evil (her ninth, published in January 2024), her “crowning achievement.”

Last August, she shared her eight lessons for a long, happy life with CNBC. Topping that list: “Don’t ever believe you’re ‘done'”

“People give up on their lives much too early,” she says.

When your mind focuses on what the culture teaches us — that we’re done when we get past a certain age — it gets into our sense of self. If our sense of self is to be alone and sad and useless when we are 70, 80, 90, whatever, we believe it. And that’s really dangerous. 

People have gifts that they may not know they have, and it may take a lifetime to find them. 

– Babette Hughes, writer, age 101

Clearly, Babette Hughes is heeding her own advice. And I, a mere pup at 64, ought to do the same. All I need, as Guns N’ Roses put it, is a little patience.

Photo of two vultures via Pexels.