This is borrowed from The Rabbit Room newsletter. I truly recommend The Habit podcast.
In an exchange that didn’t make it into the final episode, one of my recent podcast guests—Tish Harrison Warren? Alan Noble?—got on the subject of training montages in sports movies. Everybody knows that athletes have to train. We admire grit and hard work. Training can even be picturesque (especially Rocky training in Russia’s wintry countryside while Drago gets fine-tuned in a Soviet robotics lab). A training sequence is good for any story about overcoming hardship.
But the long, grueling, possible boring aspects of physical training—the aspects of training that actually transform the mind and body of the athlete—don’t make for great cinema. The training montage telescopes all that slow grinding down to something that is visually pleasing, fast-paced, and enlivened by jaunty music.
Thomas Aquinas talks about the bonum arduum, the difficult or steep good. The training montage gives us all the glory of the steep good (think Rocky running up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art) without subjecting us to the boring bits.
The bonum arduum, I am sorry to report, is mostly boring bits.
I love Tish Harrison Warren’s new book, What Grows in Weary Lands. In it, she writes,
Creative inspiration—the elusive, yet much discussed state of “flow”—is painfully rare. One learns pretty quickly thtat the craft cannot be sustained by peak moments of inspiration and brilliance. Those moments, as profound and powerful as they are, do not a writer make. Most artists I know have long swaths of time—years, even—when they feel about as enthusiastic about their work as they do about stubbing their toe. But a writer writes. A painter paints. A musician makes music.
Anne Lamott’s well-known advice to writers has nothing to do with internal feelings or enthusiasm: “How to write: Butt in chair. Start each day anywhere. Let yourself do it badly. Just take one passage at a time. Get butt back in chair.” It’s habits. It’s practices. It’s repetition. If one ever arrives at anything like flow, it is because of countless days, weeks, and years of ordinary disciplines that, in the moment anyway, seem frustrating, faltering, and like nothing significant is happening.
I have experienced “flow state” a few times in my long writing career, most notably as I was finishing The Charlatan’s Boy. It’s almost an out-of-body experience, and it’s pretty great. But the real work of creativity is surprisingly bodily. Butt-in-chair. You can’t get much more embodied than that.
Following the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Tish writes a lot about “staying in your cell,” the discipline of daily attendance to the less exciting responsibilities and habits that constitute a life well-lived. I would add that in order to stay in my own cell, it is helpful to be connected to other people who are committed to staying in theirs. If the work were a training montage, I might be able to do it alone. Since it’s a long slow slog, I need a community.
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