How Do You Eat An Elephant?

     I am sure that most of you have heard this one and I am sure it’s obvious to all of us but let me tell you why this came to me today.  This weekend was the weekend that my wife, Bridget, and I decided to close the pool for the winter. Honestly, for me opening, and closing, the pool is the most difficult and trying task, that I must do every year. I’ve even made so difficult that one year I had to close it myself. What likely makes this whole task difficult, is that I have had to help open and close a pool, since I was 14, and I have probably just made it harder because it was never a simple task during my teen years.

This weekend, Bridget had to work, Saturday morning. So, I had to begin the closing down process by myself. Now over the last couple of weeks we have had the heater off and now the pool is cold. There hasn’t been a cover on the pool and the leaves have been falling and there are plenty of leaves in the bottom of the pool. Obviously, going in to get them out, is out of the question and vacuuming them up will take forever. Vacuum, stop, turn off the pump, dump the pump skimmer basket, turn the pump back on, repeat and I am not the most patient person in the world.

It’s a huge pile. In my head, it’s probably bigger than the pool. I’m already about to throw in the towel and just cover it up with leaves in it. However, I have done that in the past too, and it’s not pretty. What does any of this have to do with writing?

Well nothing. Unless you stop to consider the monumental project of coming up with 60,000+ words in order to even be considered having written a novel. Of course, that depends on the genre, but I think you get the idea, it’s a lot. In my case, I am not currently “An Author.” I am just a guy who wants to write a story. Long or short, doesn’t matter. Just write one but I do want to write a novel and that’s a lot to do. What I have though, is time. I’m not under any specific deadline to get it done. Now I do have a personal goal to meet but other than that, I have time.

Now if you consider the pool closing project, I am talking about, I also wasn’t under any fast time constraint. I had all weekend. Saturday morning until late Sunday afternoon. Closing the pool generally takes less than a day, when it’s already clean and ready to go. In this case, I can afford to be patient.

I’ll be honest, in the early morning, I dragged my feet. I finally got started around 10:30 am. What I did was I left the pool pump off and grabbed a long pole with a skimmer net and began to scoop the leaves. I was more than 70% done when Bridget got home, and we had to leave to go pick up her van at the mechanics. In any case, after we had lunch and got back to work. I was done early enough with scooping out the leaves that Bridget could vacuum the pool and I could add the winterizing chemicals to the pool and leave it run over night.

What I later realized, was that I could afford to take my time and not rush, get anxious, or angry because I wasn’t moving the story along fast enough, or scooping leaves. By relaxing and taking my time I was able to take the necessary steps to get the pool done and I can apply this same logic to my writing.

So, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, until it’s all gone.