Every creative life has one problem that success doesn’t solve. Sometimes it actually makes it worse.
Earlier this week, I found myself looking at my calendar with a growing sense of unease. It should have been a quiet week. After walking two hundred kilometres during the Nijmegen Four Days Marches, I’d planned to recover before beginning the next phase of my fantasy novel. Instead, my schedule filled itself almost overnight. Interviews in three cathedrals. Editing another series of podcasts. Publishing a few articles. Parish work. A radio interview about my Dutch podcast. And then, almost at the last minute, an invitation to Castlefest as a member of the press, my favorite fantasy festival of the year. The sensible thing would have been to stay home. Instead, I immediately started looking for my recording gear.
That’s the problem with work you genuinely enjoy. It rarely feels like work. I love interviewing authors and exploring old churches. I love telling stories about saints and meeting people who care about fantasy as much as I do. Every invitation sounds like an opportunity I shouldn’t miss. Yet somewhere along the way I realised that I was measuring success by everything I managed to fit into a week, while the project that matters most, writing my own books, kept waiting patiently for “when things calm down.” They never do.
Earlier this year, I made a public promise that I wanted to publish eight books this year (most of them already exist as drafts). It’s an absurdly ambitious goal, and I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. But I know myself well enough to understand why I set it. The number isn’t really the point. It’s a reminder of the person I’m trying to become. You don’t become a writer by thinking about books. You become a writer by protecting the time to write them. That means saying no, not only to bad ideas, but sometimes to wonderful ones as well.
So this August I’m trying something different. One chapter a day. That’s all. Not the perfect chapter, just the next one. Everything else will go on hold. Cathedrals will still be there. Festivals will return next summer. New opportunities always appear. Stories, on the other hand, only exist if someone sits down and writes them. For the next month, I want that someone to be me.
This article is based on the latest episode of my podcast The Walk. If you'd rather hear the story in my own voice, you'll find the podcast player at the top of this page.
