Reading time: 3.46

894 words

Hey Reader,

“You make it look so easy!”

That’s when you know you’re really good at something. When someone says that. And I always glow a little bit and puff myself up a little taller.

But there is something inherently frustrating in this whole exchange, and nowhere is it more stark than when you’re upside down on a trapeze in front of a couple of hundred people, and the death-defying move you just did got a ripple of applause, but the easy beginner shape got a roar of approval.

“NO!” I want to shout. I want to stop the music and yell at the audience to please look — look at the move you ignored, how difficult it is, how much strength and courage it requires. I want to yell that their roar of approval was misplaced because, yes, that back balance might look nice but it’s easy.

That, however, is not how creating things works.

It’s an eternal paradox: we want to be good enough at the thing we do so that people tell us how easy it looks.

And we want them to understand deeply just how much bloody work — and sometimes actual blood — goes into creating it.

I’m as guilty of this as my audience are.

That movie I enjoyed (or didn’t). The TV show. The painting, the poem, the novel. The Netflix comedy special. The album. The stage play.

I gaze at the finished product, which is so beautifully crafted I can’t see the work beneath it.

Which I think is what stops so many people from writing their book, or painting a picture, or learning to dance.

We compare our first attempts with their final examination piece and, because humans are ridiculous creatures, we find ourselves wanting and we decide we’re not good enough and can’t compete (like it’s a competition at all) and we scroll our phones instead.

(I see you.)

So let’s look beneath the surface.

Behind the scenes in Hollywood

Katharine Hepburn, Hollywood actress famous for playing Jo March in Little Women (among many other roles) didn’t just learn her lines. She kept a “promptbook” for her projects, including for the stage production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Hepburn pasted the script into her notebook and made various notes on stage directions, sound cues, lighting, movements onstage, character notes and locations. She sketched out the locations of props during rehearsals, and noted changes, to help herself remember during her evening performances.

And not only that, she was interested in costume design, too, and sketched costumes for the play.

I love that her notebooks survived because they show just how much work went into her craft.

Other people’s notes

Jillian Hess’s Noted newsletter is well worth subscribing to because it shows us how artists, engineers, politicians, and other interesting people think.

Some of my favourites are Enimen’s boxes of notes for how he creates his rhyme schemes. He describes himself as only being good at one thing: rhyming, and put everything into becoming “the Bruce Lee of loose leaf.” We don’t see all that when we hear Slim Shady.

Another favourite is Octavia Butler’s “essentials of success.” She wrote affirmations, plans, and instructions to herself with no self-consciousness at all. There’s no room for embarrassment in the pursuit of excellence.

And my notebooks

I’m a voracious note-taker, too. I have at least three notebooks on the go at any time: one by my bed to record ideas that might wake me, and also anything of significance that happened in the day.

One for work, where I plan each day on the left and scribble ideas and things to remember on the right.

And a commonplace-slash-journal-slash-scrapbook, in which I paste things I want to keep or remember, sketch things I fancy sketching, copy down quotes that appeal to me, and write thoughts that might turn into something else later on.

And I have a comedy book, for working out routines, sketches, and bits.

Oh — and a notebook for learnings and lessons.

They all get a little muddled sometimes, but that’s okay.

Those notebooks are where every idea begins. They’re the start of something. They’re messy and alive and I love them.

They’re the story of everything I’ve made and everything I’ve done.

So: show your workings. Share your works in progress. Peep behind the scenes of other people’s work, too, and find out how their minds work.

And remember, every finished book you read started out as a messy bunch of ideas in someone’s notebook.

This is the work we do before the work, and a lot of people miss it out. Because they don’t realise they need to do it at all.

There’s so much focus on productivity and writing routines and grinding out the words, most people don’t realise there’s a whole foundation we can build to make all the rest of it much easier.

That’s what I do with you in my Book Breakthrough: Unlocked sessions. We do the foundation work so you can walk away with a blueprint to your book, knowing exactly what you’ll write when you sit down to write it.

I have 3 spots in August. One of them could be yours.

TTFN,

Vicky 🫡

p.s. Know someone who might enjoy this email? Please forward it to them and get them to sign up here.