I’m reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, because I can’t get enough of books about self-improvement. Many of the ideas and stories in the book were already familiar to me, but there is one idea in particular I keep thinking about — the difference between being in motion and taking action. Clear writes:
“The two ideas sound similar, but they’re not the same. When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result.
“Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. ….
“Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself. It doesn’t matter how many times you go talk to a personal trainer, that motion will never get you in shape. Only the action of working out will get the result you’re looking to achieve.
“If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen. And that’s the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
“It’s easy to be in motion and convince yourself that you’re still making progress. … Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.”
I’m so guilty of being in motion but not taking action when it comes to writing. Especially lately, with the novel. Ugh. I like to pretend that thinking and planning or staring at the open document without touching its contents counts as work toward getting it done. In a way it does help, but not nearly as much as actually changing the words around to making things better or getting down some new words.
When I was younger, writing and posting online almost every day, I never had a problem with springing into action. I would handwrite notes and drafts all day long at school and in the evenings I’d type it up and get it online. I’d spend hours and hours every week writing fan fiction and journal entries and bizarre little stories. But then I finished high school and got a full time job and took classes in the evening, and I learned to only ever put ideas into motion — writing them down to save them for later — because I didn’t have time to let them take over my life the way they used to.
For a long time, putting an idea into motion but not taking action on it was a good thing, because it kept me focused on the things I needed to get done. I’m still in that mode most of the time — worried about an idea distracting me from other things, so just putting it into motion and then setting it aside for later. But later is now! My life is different now, and I have the time. It’s easy enough to start moving, but taking action seems scarier, somehow threatening, still something to avoid. But I need to turn it around — too much motion and not enough action threatens my writing life.
Not taking action is about fear of failure, as Clear says, but it’s also about fear of being overwhelmed. I wish I could immerse myself in writing the way I used to, but life now is nothing like it was in high school. I’m afraid of the desire to get lost in a story because I’m afraid of having to let it go and return to the real world. (I have this with reading sometimes too, not just writing.) Motion is safe; action is scary.
I keep thinking that I’ll never get back to the volume or confidence in my writing that I used to have, that feeling of churning things out and being content with the outcome, but maybe, with practice, I can.