Yesterday I was on a call with a student and she was telling me about how she’s waiting on a new laptop so that she can finally get started writing. She said she doesn’t feel comfortable with the PC she currently has because it’s old and slow. I feel for her. I hate slow computers too. They should be outlawed.
If you, like me, have dealt with this issue, or you are currently waiting on the “right” tools, this article is for you. I’m sure we can all relate to some degree, but it can become a catastrophic problem when it stops us from creating.
I’m going to come right out with it:
If we’re concerned about the tools we’re using in order to just get started, then most likely there’s a much deeper, far more serious problem at work.
When I was a kid my father got me a guitar for kids for Christmas and then signed me up for lessons to learn how to play it. I went to the lessons for a few weeks and did not improve at all. I may have actually gotten worse!
Not realizing I simply had zero interest for playing, I thought it was because I needed a better guitar. So, about a year later, I got a more expensive guitar and, well, to make a long story short, I still didn’t get any better. I took guitar lessons for years and I’m kind of ashamed to say, I’m still not all that great at playing the darn thing.
Let’s fast forward a year or two from when I received the guitar.
In my basement room I had a little typewriter on which I wrote a wonderful short story. According to how well it scared my sister and her friend, and how it so concerned my teacher (after I used it for an assignment), I feel it was a pretty good story and did what it was supposed to do. I was a big fan of Stephen King back then, so you can imagine where my mind was at when my sister asked me to tell her and her friend a scary good night story for an upcoming sleepover. Oh yes, may I please!?
That little typewriter was really just a toy intended to be used to learn how to type and I typed what turned out to be an effective story on it. For whatever reason I never used the typewriter again and I didn’t write another complete story for years (and I mean, years).
Really, I only wrote the story because I was asked to and the idea of scaring the crap out of my sister and her friend was obviously very appealing to me. I didn’t for a second doubt that I could do it, even though I had never written a story before. Being so eager to please, I never once considered how good the typewriter was, and for that matter, that I didn’t have any actual typing paper. I ended up using loose-leaf paper. (Hey, the paper was handy. What else would you expect from a kid in the eighties?)
Here’s the thing about tools for writing, they really don’t make us any worse or any better as writers. Yes, they can help, but the creativity, the confidence, and the audacity, are already within us. When we are unsure, filled with doubt, and can’t seem to create anything we care about, we may become convinced we just need better tools. This is a trap.
It’s not the tools.
For reasons that are too long winded for this article I stopped writing for a long time, and I eventually became riddled with doubt. In my twenties I became convinced I needed a modern word processor to get back into writing and I spent a small fortune on one of the newest things then = a computer! You want to talk slow? It took thirty minutes just to load. I spent so much money on that tool and never wrote anything worthwhile on it.
Many of you may know that I finally did write my first complete book and my tools for writing it were revolutionary: a ballpoint pen and a cheap notebook, which I used as a journal. That’s it. 10 books and thousands of articles later, I have never looked back! (If you like, you can read the story about this transformation in Writer’s Doubt.)
The last twenty years have been revolutionary for writers, and really, all artists. There are new amazing tools coming out every day, better laptops, better software, and you name it, there’s an upgrade coming. It’s easy to fall into the trap of wishing for better software and faster PCs and better tools for whatever it is we want to create, but really, if we’re honest, these are just more excuses doubt uses to keep us in the stalled position.
The reality is once we get past the doubts that hold us back and we follow our true calling, all we need are the basics necessary to get the job done.
If you have better tools or the tools you want, then that’s great, more power to you. But it’s not about the mechanical tools you can buy – it never was.
What you have right now is the very best solution you will ever find, or need. I promise you.
It’s in the mirror. Go look.
