Today is October 16 and the Navigate the Chaos question to considder is “How often do you allow yourself to be terrible?”
Those who navigate the chaos strive not for perfection, but for progress. Kazuo Ishiguro, the British novelist and the latest winner of the Nobel Prize details how he navigated the chaos when, at 32-years-old, he was flailing professionally and having trouble being productive.
So Ishiguro and his wife, Lorna, hatched a plan to jump-start his creativity.
According to Ishiguro “I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a ‘Crash.’ During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitatively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.”
As Megan Garber wrote in The Atlantic “Ishiguro’s goal was to create an environment, through force of will, in which the author and his story might be merged into one. It was a plan that demanded intentionally de-romanticizing the act of writing.
During the Crash Ishiguro noted “I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere—I let them remain and ploughed on.” “It worked. Four weeks later, he had a draft of The Remains of the Day. He tinkered with it still, yes. He added and trimmed and honed. For the most part, though, he had, in a concentrated month, completed a masterpiece.
The author, Garber wrote, “gave himself the freedom to be terrible for four weeks—and now he has a Nobel Prize to show for it.” How often do you allow yourself to be terrible?