Dispatch from The Quest: Scott Reynolds
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the second week of Prep. Today’s dispatch: Scott Reynolds on “building habits that lead to success”:
October 15, 1988. Both legs injured, barely able to run, Kirk Gibson steps in to pinch hit for the Dodgers in the bottom of the ninth. He worked legendary A’s (and Red Sox) closer Dennis Eckersly to a full count. When the Eck predictably threw him a slider on the next pitch, Gibson took it yard and hobbled around the bases and into legend. It was his only plate appearance of the series. It was the first time the phrase “walk-off home run” was used (coined by Eckersly himself).
October 19, 2004. Curt Schilling had a tendon in his ankle sewn up to his skin to prevent it from hitting his bone. Then he pitched seven innings and got the win, forcing an improbable Game 7. By the end of his outing, blood from his surgery had soaked through his white sock, turning it red and making it the most on-the-nose metaphor in baseball history.
Late September, 2012, I got mad sick and did my work anyway. October is for heroes. September is for people like us.
This post is about powering through. This has been an absolutely miserable week. I’ve had to cancel so many things this week because I’ve barely been able to walk from my bedroom to my living room without coughing up bits and pieces of lung and/or pancreas. But I couldn’t just lay in bed and watch Netflix and lament my lack of soup delivery options. I had work to do.
When you’re a kid, in school, you can take sick days. When you work an office job, you can usually take sick days. When you’re doing what you have to do to make it as a writer and comedian, you gotta be more choosey about those sick days. Even if you don’t leave the house, you might still have to work.
I’m working on this script, and I have a schedule to keep to. I’m working on a stand up act for this week. Five minutes on a show with a national headliner. I’m working on my freelance job so I can keep paying bills and not having health insurance while I see if this comedy thing plays out. I’m working. It’s a hustle.
So even though I didn’t leave the house for four days, I got up in the morning and plopped myself in my chair and worked. Then I took a nap. Then I worked some more. Then another nap. Not everything was great. What I turned in this week for my Quest stuff was less complete than I wanted it to be just because I didn’t have all my neurons firing right at any one time this week. But I did the work, and I have a jumping off point to build on for next week. I worked a little slower on my freelance stuff than I normally do, but I got it done. And I hacked and coughed my way through my five minute set a few times, just to make sure I had it memorized.
I have been reading this book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and while it’s a little new agey/religious about things, it also makes some real good points, one of which is the thing that kept me working this week.
The whole idea of the book is that there’s an invisible force called resistance that wants to keep you from achieving your calling, whether it be writing, art, diets, whatever thing is what you want to do but what you aren’t currently successfully doing. And this resistance is a major asshole that will throw anything at you to get you to abandon your pursuit. Talking character archetypes, it’s both nemesis and trickster. And one of the things that will manifest this resistance is being ill. Being ill makes it super easy to say “oh, poor me, I’ll just put it down and pick it back up when I feel better.” And that’s where you lose momentum and resistance starts to beat you back. The only thing harder than starting is re-starting after you’ve stopped.
So while I’m not necessarily into the mystical side of things, the message hits home. I don’t want to lose momentum. I’m the king of losing momentum. What I need to be doing right now, both in The Quest and in my other endeavors, is building the habits that will lead me to success. That means playing through the pain sometimes.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Or, put another way, when life gives you promens, promenade.
Check out this Business of Screenwriting post: Act Two blues. When I’m writing the middle of a screenplay, resistance just seems to rear its ugly head. Weird, at least via my powers of perception, but true. It’s like we write a story wherein the Protagonist confronts all sorts of challenges to complete their Hero/Heroine’s Journey… and some of that energy transfers over into our lives. On the bright side, that enables us to connect with the experience of the Protagonist in a more personal way. But it’s still a challenge.
And yet, we keep writing.
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch from The Quest.
About Scott: Brooklyn based writer and comedian who bailed on software to focus on writing words that humans could read. Twitter: @scottadhoc.
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