Starting a Fire

Darth Hubby and I bought a house last March, so this is our first real winter in the new house. And, hoo boy, this winter didn’t come to play.

We have an electric heat pump as our primary heating, and anyone who’s had an electric heat pump knows when the outside temp dips below 35-40˚F you need a secondary heating source. Heating coils, a gas furnace, or as in our case, a wood-burning stove.

I love our wood-burning stove. Darth Hubby’s parents gave us their old one which they’d refurbished. It’s gorgeous and extremely functional. We haven’t had to run the house’s heater since we started using it, and it keeps things in the high 70’s. It’s the best.

I tell you all these mundane details of new home ownership because the process of maintaining a wood-burning stove includes making a lot of fires. And I’ve been thinking a lot about building and maintaining a fire and how it relates to my writing and life. Follow me, if you will.

There’s a flow to creating a fire. In order to start, you need something that will catch fire easily. Like brown paper grocery bags or newspaper. It usually takes a single match. But you can’t build a fire with just this. There’s no staying power. It burns too fast.

You need something more substantial. Something like kindling. Sticks and wood chips that will catch from the paper, but will burn slower and longer. From their flames, small logs will catch, and they’ll burn longer still. Then from the smaller logs, the larger pieces catch after a time. Eventually, these larger logs will burn down, creating a nice hot bed of embers. All you have to do, at that point, is feed the fire with wood every once and a while. The embers will do the rest.

Voila. You have made fire. From here, it is so easy to keep a fire going. Just keep an eye on it, and add more logs every so often.

So. Why am I thinking so much about building fires? I was building a new fire the other day, and I thought about how you can’t skip ahead in the process if you want a long-burning fire.

The kindling won’t catch without the paper. The smaller logs won’t catch without the kindling. The larger logs won’t catch without the smaller logs. Lasting embers can’t be created without the larger, long-burning logs.

I like the process of building a real fire, the discrete steps, the ritual of it. And I adore the result.

However, in my writing—as well as other places in my life—I loathe the equivalent of building a fire in a cold stove. I want an already burning fire. One I just need to feed.

Once I find a rhythm in a stage of a project, it’s easy. The fire is stoked. I just need to keep it alive. 

Just draft X words today. 

Just revise X pages today. 

Just line-edit X pages today.

Where I struggle most is the first steps of a new stage. Moving from drafting to analyzing to revising to editing can be difficult for me. The next stage usually feels impossible. It’s too much, too big. It’ll drown me.

If this sounds familiar to my last post, it should. These perceptions of Impossible™ are due to my ADHD. My brain, with its no-sense-of-future, looks at the next stage and sees the final product: You have to have a finished revised novel. Right now. But it’s a mess. Unfixable. Sorry. Good luck with that.

It’s like if my brain looked at the larger logs and said: Those can’t catch fire. All you have is a match. But it’ll snuff out before the logs catch. Undoable. Sorry. Them’s the facts.

But with a real fire? I know that I have to build up the fire slowly. Step by step. Paper. Kindling. Smaller pieces. Larger pieces. Embers.

There’s no: Ta da! Behold! Fire!

A fire is something that grows over time. Not something that pops into existence like Athena sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus.

When I look at a new stage of writing, though, all I see is the finished product. I can’t see the steps to get there. I can’t see the process. I can’t see that I need to reach for paper and kindling first.

Igniting the next stage, however, requires that paper and kindling, but I get impatient. It feels like a waste of time, but I can’t start anything without it.

You can’t rush ahead with a fire. You can’t move beyond the step you’re at in order to reach your goal. The fire will die.

There’s an immediate temporality to making a fire. You can’t be in the past or the future. You have to be in the present if you want to succeed. I want to be present with my writing. Like I’m building a fire.

Right now, I’m in—what I think is—the smaller logs stage of revisions. And, right now, it’s easier. The fire is catching.

It’s okay to take things step-by-step. It’s okay to be wherever you are. Enjoy the process. Enjoy watching the fire grow.

How about you? What could be the paper and kindling for a project in your life?