Busted-Day Gravy

All of us have busted days. You can be the most productive, high-energy creator on the planet, and every once in a while circumstances are still going to leave you feeling farted on by the universe. You'll wake up with the best of intentions, hop into an invigorating shower, pour that first piping-hot cup of coffee... and then settle in for four hours of un-openable e-mail attachments and crossed signals on just where things stood with that grant application. You'll spill something down your front, skid through a stop sign, get yelled at by someone close to you for no very good reason, and find a corrupted file in a critical location on your hard drive. And it will go on like this. For the whole day.

And then? Then, at some indeterminate point in all that mayhem, you will casually look down at your phone and realize that it's 7:28PM, and whatever it was that you'd set out to do that day will seem impossibly too far gone to start. Don't tell me it doesn't happen to you because it does. It happens to the best of us. It probably happens to Bill Gates, which is not exactly the same thing.

The point of today's column is that it's not how (in)frequently this happens to us that determines our maximum creative efficiency; it's how we handle it when it does. But in order to explore that question, it is first necessary to explore the opposite one--namely, just what an "un-busted" day might look like, for a benchmark.

The "Bad Idea" Trick

Way back in the summer of 2000 I attended a writers' workshop in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, that was moderated by novelist Douglas Coupland. On one particular languid afternoon when none of us were reading anything particularly good to the rest of the group, Coupland suggested we adjourn to our studios with the idea that, the following day, we'd come back with the worst thing we could write, about the worst character we could think of, without intentionally sabotaging the prose. In the end we called the assignment "Bad lives, badly written." The next day we met, turned in our work without names on top, and had Coupland read each of them out loud.