With Proper Motivation

I used to think I was lazy. I wasn’t the only one who thought so–I heard it a lot. Too lazy to do my chores, too lazy to do my homework. Too lazy to finish that paint-stripping project and so I lived without a bedroom door for months and then put the ugly thing back on, still with its layers of tainted white, dead-turtle green, and bloody-brick red. It was another two months before I found and replaced the knob mechanism. I’d restart the washing machine to avoid hanging out clothes, and you don’t want to know how I avoided doing dishes.

I wasn’t too lazy to read, though. Oh no, I burned my way through the elementary school library, then the junior high library, at a wildfire’s pace. I wasn’t supposed to read the senior high books till I hit senior high, but the librarians got tired of telling me no. The day the public library gave me an adult card–meaning I could check out thirty-five real books on my monthly-if-I-was-lucky visit–was a great day indeed.

Another thing I did with enthusiasm and energy was daydream. Globe-trotting spies with every gadget and luxury? I invented that. Okay, I didn’t do it first, but I did make it up for myself without ever having seen a Bond movie. Herd stallions as a role-playing game? I bet I was first to come up with that. We had radios in our hooves!

Someone told me that white paste we used in school was made of horses’ hooves. (I categorically deny I was told this to get me to stop eating it.) Quickly I came up with a heroine to save the poor horses! She dressed like Dale Evans, and she lived in a hollow but living redwood because I’d read My Side of the Mountain and thought it sounded cool.

If that girl had a name, I don’t remember it. I do remember crafting her adventures as I lay in bed at night–carefully tweaking the stories, the events, the villains, to make the narrative the most satisfying, only to forget all but a shadow by morning.

When I got tired of losing it all every night–by then I was dreaming of Han Solo-like freighter captains and/or marrying Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran and touring the world with him–I started writing it all down. And found to my horror that it was all awful.

And that’s when I started to figure out I wasn’t all that lazy. The housework still went undone, the dog and horse poo unshoveled, but the writing–oh, the writing got done. And re-done, and done over again. I discovered the “and it was all a dream!” ending in eighth grade, and moved beyond it quickly. In ninth grade I found my teacher, who tossed aside the grammar book with the comment “if you don’t know this now you never will” and instead of trotting me through verb forms again, he made me read more and wider than I ever had before, and he made me write.

And I loved him for it.

In twelve-plus years of schooling, only one teacher received every assignment he gave me. One teacher got every assignment on time, if I had to spend a weekend high on Mountain Dew and minimal sleep to get it done. (I’d found motivation. I hadn’t found time management skills. Those, alas, still elude me.)

Of course I’m thinking of this as I plow through the final content-edit of Queen’s Man, my next Turtleduck Press novel (due out April 1st!), dreaming of a scant month of not-editing time before the final polish edit. I’m tired and I want to drop it, let it be good enough…but I can’t. I won’t.

My daughter is thirteen now, and she’s looking for her own motivation. I nag her about the litterbox, but otherwise I mostly bite my tongue on hypocrisy and try to let her figure it out herself. I know it’s out there, hiding in an unlikely place. Like in a darkened classroom, where Mr. Eichholtz read aloud Stephen King’s The Boogeyman and with nothing but the written word, caught spellbound an entire class of hormone-fueled ninth-graders.

Now that’s motivation.