We take our cognitive cues from the world around us and are heavily influenced by our parents, peers, teachers, and any corporation with an advertising budget. Throughout childhood, we are imbued with certain ideologies that stick with us for the rest of our lives. Some of these ways of thinking are good, and others are better left behind. The problem lies in that we can’t always see the source of these troublesome thoughts, and that they can sometimes cripple our understanding of the values other people hold dear.

For any writer who publicly identifies as such, these cognitive biases are going to be turned against you. When you’re out in the world and trying not to be a complete social disaster, someone will invariably ask you what you do for a living. Everyone reacts differently on hearing that you’re a writer, but more often than not, there is a slight crossing of the eyes and a furrowing of the brow as they try to understand why you would want to devote your time to something so silly. The confusion is only enhanced when they learn that you don’t have a day job. Rarely will anyone admit these feelings to you. They will politely ask about what your book is about, and then transition into how nice it must be to just do whatever you want all day. There is a general consensus out there that being a writer is a fine and dandy hobby, but not a vocation to really be taken seriously.

Until you’re published, of course. After your friends have seen your book on the shelf of the big box book store, or after you’ve used the earnings from your successful second novel to buy a big house in that fancy neighbourhood, it all becomes quite respectable again. Every one of us has these ideas about what is worthwhile. We wonder why anyone would want to be a poet or a mathematician. We gossip about the friend that we saw working a retail job. We look down on ourselves for not having the right education, or not sticking with a ‘smarter’ career path. But it’s all okay, because when we’re not raging with frustration over our latest work in progress, we realize that we are fortunate enough to live our lives in the pursuit of creativity. It is a pursuit that often bears no financial gain, and still we carry on. There is as much pain in the work as there is joy, but for some of us, this is the true value of a life worth living. We do it because it engages us in a way that we haven’t been able to find elsewhere.

My friends support my endeavours because they care about me as a person. They may not understand exactly why I’ve chosen this particular course of action, but they recognize that it’s something in which I find great personal value. These people are my friends because they are able to give me that respect and support despite the back of mind voice telling them I’m wasting my time. We aspiring writers may not be seen as equals to the rest of the working world, but for now, that’s something I’m willing to live with.

I just spent the last 25 minutes making coffee. I have a wonderful insulated stainless steel french press that I haven’t used in more than half a year because it’s been sitting in a box while I enjoyed a variety of temporary living experiences. Now that I’m in my own place again, I finally got around to buying a pound of my go-to house coffee [Ethical Bean Sumatran], and cleaning out the press pot.

I hadn’t used this particular press too often before packing it away, and never quite nailed down the bean to water ratio. If you like coffee, then you already know that the ideal is 2 tablespoons of ground beans to 6 ounces of water, but I don’t actually know the size of my press pot. I did a bit of quick measuring and learned that the pot holds 32 oz. of water. Now how much room will I have to deduct for the space 10.3 tbsp. beans will take up? If I lower the water quantity by 4 oz., how many tbsp. of coffee to I need now? How does a tablespoon of whole beans compare to a tablespoon of ground beans?

Twenty one minutes later, I’d done all the measuring and calculating to be able to eyeball the requisite amount of beans in the grinder, and the level at which to fill up the press with water, but this isn’t really about coffee. While waiting the precise four minutes of steep time before plunging, I caught myself thinking about how I tend to approach things. I’ve never been one to wing it and hope for the best. It’s in my nature to break things down, and to be as precise as possible. This may sound ridiculous to some of you, but I get an almost perverse sense of pleasure out of mastering small tasks like these. I pay attention to every small variable, and try to come up with a consistent means of producing a product that meets the standards of quality that I know myself possible of achieving.

This explains a lot about how I approach writing, and why I’ve so often felt frustrated at advice from wildly successful writers who suggest starting with a single idea and simply exploring it as you type. I generally like to have an idea of where my books is going. I like to have scheduled writing time. I don’t go in for fuzzy feelings of a piece of work yearning to be written longhand with a quill pen in a Komodo dragon skin notebook with virgin papyrus pages. I tend to be left-brained in my approach to writing because I am left-brained in my approach to life.

I’ve come to see writing as a blend of two worlds. There is art, and there is craft. For many years, I worried that writing was all art, and that I wouldn’t be able to produce anything worthwhile. Spending time with a few different published authors has shown me that we can live in either hemisphere and still tap into the other when we need to. I can approach the task from the neurotic and detail oriented craft side, the same way other authors can light incense and meditate their way to a brilliant bit of wordsmithing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pour a second cup of coffee and get back to work.

In thirty minutes of being in the water today, I was washed back in towards shore six or seven times, without a single attempt at riding a wave. The wind was onshore, and the swell was choppy and relentless. No matter how hard I paddled, I couldn’t make any progress, and I just felt my arms getting weaker with each passing minute. I wanted so badly to just quit. I wanted to go back to my room and sit down with a book, forgetting that I’d ever bothered getting into the water in the first place.

Sometimes life is like that. You feel as though you’re always sitting just inside where the waves are breaking, and try as you might, you just can’t paddle beyond where they keep crashing over your head again, and again. Each torrent of water sends you spluttering ten feet backwards, and flips you ass over teakettle until you can’t remember which way is up, and which way is just another mouthful of water. Your head hits the sand, and you roll again. When you come up gasping for air, the board slams into your shoulder, the sharp fin slashing across your skin.

Today I stuck it out. I paddled harder, pulling until my arms were exhausted, and forcing down the nausea of rough seas and too much salt water in my stomach. Eventually I made it out to a relatively calm spot beyond the building waves. I sat and rested, trying to focus my mind away from some things that were keeping me down, and after a while I turned back towards shore and paddled into a sloppy wave. It broke sharply and closed out on itself, and I ate it pretty hard. As I did on the next wave, and the one after that. It took nearly an hour of suffering and forcing myself to continue before I finally dropped into a wave and stood up smoothly, locking my rail in, and gliding along the surface of the water rolling along beneath me.

Life can be difficult at times, even in a place like the beaches of Costa Rica. As long as you haven’t completely separated your brain from your body, there are things that can get in the way of making progress, or of enjoying yourself whether you’re on vacation, at school, or just at home with someone you love.

The trick is to just keep paddling, even when you’re getting your ass kicked. Sooner or later you’ll be gliding along again, able to forget your troubles and every other bad thing in the world, but it only comes if you force yourself to keep pushing through the rough spots. It may not happen that same day, but hey, there’s always tomorrow.