One step at a time will get you there

Since I’ve started running, friends, I’ve found my perception of distance has changed somewhat. There’s something about the ability to cover good distances on foot, in not-so-great amounts of time, that makes everything seem…closer, somehow.

See, if you hop in your car for a four-mile drive through a residential neighborhood with stop signs and lights, it can seem like that four miles takes forever to cover. We might find ourselves saying things like, “If I were on the highway, this would only take four minutes! And why the hell is this idiot doing BELOW THE SPEED LIMIT!?” 

Or maybe that’s just me.

But when you run, when you lose yourself in the rhythm of your footsteps and measured breaths, time and distance seem to blur a little. That four miles fraught with vehicular interruptions, when you run it early in the morning, is now a free and clear path for your feet. It’s a half-hour’s light jog.

I first noticed this in San Diego a couple weeks ago, when I was there for World Fantasy Convention. (No, I didn’t do a post on that. Yes, I may yet. What? I procrastinate! Or perendinate, as the case may be. Sue me.)
When I woke that first morning in California I was still on East Coast time, so naturally it was at 4 am. I tried, I really tried to get back to sleep, but after an hour I gave up, got up, dressed, and went for a light breakfast before my run. 

The hotel was four miles from the Pacific Ocean, a straight shot, essentially. I decided I wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. So four miles there and back it was. Off I went.

The first leg was fairly easy. It was cool, but clear (aren’t all fall mornings like that in San Diego?), and the air felt richer, somehow, than what I’m used to. And after I’d wiggled my fingers in the ocean and collected a few shells to bring back for the kids, I headed back to the hotel.

Now, as you might assume, the run back is always a bit harder than the way out, so when I crested a small hill and saw the hotel towers in the distance, perhaps a mile and a half away, I got this sinking feeling of holy-crap-that’s-so-far-my-legs-are-going-to-drop-the-hell-off!

I swear it looked farther away than this....

What do you do at this point? What can you do but keep running?

So I did.

And despite how far away that hotel looked, I put one foot in front of the other, took one breath at a time, and in no time flat, I was jogging back through the hotel grounds toward my room. It hadn’t been that far at all. It just looked it.

You can see where I’m going with this, right?

As with running, so with writing. 

Right now I’m struggling to finish a novella, with an expected 25k or so wordcount. But it doesn’t have to be so hard to finish, does it? Focusing on how far away 25k is won’t help anything. What will help is simply writing the words down, one after another, following the story to its (bleak, depressing, apocalyptic) conclusion (hey, it’s me—what did you expect?).

That’s how I’ll get there. One step at a time, one word at a time. The thing is to keep the legs going, keep the words flowing, and trust that, if you persist, push through, eventually you’ll reach that destination.
So that’s what I’ll do.

That’s how the magic happens.

Write on, friends.