Zero to One

My publisher Ace just sent me the final cover for Chaos Terminal! I was lucky enough to get another design from the amazing Will Staehle. Release date is November 7, and you can preorder now, from Amazon or your local indie store (affiliate link).

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I wrote a piece about starting projects for my church, and wanted to reprint it here. Many will see the influence of Ze Frank here. Enjoy!

Inertia

When you’re looking at a daunting project, it’s best to break the steps down into smaller bites. That’s common wisdom, we all know that. Organize how you’re going to do things. Make a list. This goes for projects from party planning to writing a novel.

But rarely do people mention that these steps will not have the same distance between them. There are two steps that will always be different sizes than the others; those are the steps that have to fight inertia. I’m talking about the first step, and the last one.

The first step is the scariest for most people. Is this the best place to start? Should you start tomorrow instead after a good night’s sleep? How about after lunch when you bounce some ideas off of your partner? Maybe after you read all of wikipedia. The inertia of Not Doing The Project is very strong. It takes so much more energy to get a ball rolling than it does to keep it rolling. It’s scary. It’s daunting. You’ve moved from potential energy, where anything is possible, to kinetic energy, where your possible outcomes just got narrowed down considerably just by choosing to get started, choosing to go in a certain creative direction, choosing that giant step from zero to one.

Fear of failure is a big thing for almost all of us, on any new project we tackle. We’re all familiar with it. But what we don’t talk about is another fear, one that I blame Puritanical thinking for polluting our creative minds, and that’s fear of “wasted time or wasted work.” If we start something new, and go the wrong direction with whatever we’re working on, we have regrets, we’re frustrated, we’re even angry. We just wasted all that time, all that effort, maybe even materials or money! We forget that every time we choose the wrong path to take, we learn one more thing not to do.  Not to mention the odds now go up that the next choice will be the right one. Thomas Edison famously said he never failed while working to create the light bulb, he succeeded in finding the 700 ways it would not work (although someone inflated that to 10,000 and made an inspirational image online.)

Last summer when I started running, I promised myself I would consider it a triumph just to get going. Maybe I didn’t run as fast or as far as someone else, or even as well as I did the last time, but that was okay. I was fighting inertia to get started, so it was a win to just get my shoes on and out the door. I was listening to an app that encouraged me to make a running mantra, and I chose “I’ve already won”. Running wasn’t the hard part. Getting dressed and out the door was the hard part.

Writing isn’t hard*; sitting at my desk and closing all the distracting windows is hard. Turning off my phone is hard. It’s that first step: choosing a direction and risking making the wrong choice or the fallacy of wasting time.

Many years ago I worked on a gaming book with another writer. We were each supposed to write half the book. We emailed frequently and communicated well, or so I thought. The day the book was due, he sent an email to me and the editor saying he was sorry but he hadn’t started yet. He hadn’t been able to go from step zero to step one, and had pretended that everything was fine until it was absolutely too late. I don’t know what kind of lesson he learned that day, but I definitely learned one in watching the fallout of his inaction. Just get started. Doesn’t matter what direction, just get started. You can’t fix something that doesn’t exist.

People worry about making something that’s bad. Or letting down a collaborating partner. There’s the saying that you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, but a pig ear purse can still hold your change. Making something is always better than not making something.

The other step that inertia makes difficult is the last step. Some people can get started and work merrily along on a project, but then can’t stop. As a creator, finishing a project always has a tinge of bitterness for me, because nothing i create will be a glorious as i imagined it in my head. I will have to stop adding to it, stop editing it, stop researching it. I must accept the flaws—and I will see flaws, even if everyone tells me that my creation is amazing. But this is the other end of inertia, the energy you must put forth to stop the ball rolling. It’s declaring it done, for better or worse, and if you can’t do that, then it’s about as bad as never starting.

In my line of work we say “done” is better than “perfect’ because we know there can be no perfect book or story. We don’t finish stories, we just stop.

In the themes of creativity and collaboration, whatever you’re working on, if you’re working alone or with a collaborator, you must acknowledge that the first step may be terrifying, and the last step my take great effort. And please remember not to be afraid of failure, or afraid of wasting time. Because everything we make, whether it’s flawed or glorious, is better than silence.

*OK, writing is hard. But starting is harder.

I’m taking time off from podcasting and most socially facing things for some family time from about March 22 (today) to April 3. In the meantime you can catch up on a whole bunch of podcasts over at murverse.com or patreon.com/mightymur. And if you subscribe to the paid version of this newsletter, you’ll get a private RSS feed to get all the content a day earlier than everyone else!