Kafka was right!

I don't imagine I need to convince any of my readers that the King of Hearts Fallacy is just that: artists do not just start, go until they reach a finished product, then stop.  Never.

They never do that.

Ever.

But just in case you've been beating yourself over the head because you haven't made progress on your fantasy novel or your prog rock opera or your book of cocktail recipes, here are a couple of journal entries from Franz Kafka:

JANUARY 20, 1915: The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

JANUARY 29, 1915: Again tried to write, virtually useless.

JANUARY 30, 1915: The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

FEBRUARY 7, 1915: Complete standstill. Unending torments.

MARCH 11, 1915: How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am powerless.

MARCH 13, 1915: Lack of appetite, fear of getting back late in the evening; but above all the thought that I wrote nothing yesterday, that I keep getting farther and farther from it, and am in danger of losing everything I have laboriously achieved these past six months. Provided proof of this by writing one and a half wretched pages of a new story that I have already decided to discard…. Occasionally I feel an unhappiness that almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity and of the existence of a goal to which one makes one’s way by undergoing every kind of unhappiness.

[lifted from Open Culture, to which you should subscribe]

Bless his heart, right?

So here are the takeaways from dear Franz:

• TASK AVOIDANCE/ABANDONMENT: Set it aside.  Come back to it later.  Work on a different chapter, or on something else entirely.  Or abandon it: "a new story that I have already decided to discard."
• RITUAL: How do you get into that work space? Do you have a time and a place?  And do you work while in that space? 
• ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS: I think the main thing I get from Franz here is don't do nothing.  Write something.  Do morning pages.  Write letters.  Compose scales, for pete's sake.  Create crap.  Do it wrong on purpose.  Pro tip: How do you know you're doing it "wrong"?  What would be "right"? 

If nothing else, whine into your journal.  Hey, it worked for Franz.