How Long Will Your ‘Masterpiece’ Take to Create?

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to write story-books.  Oscar Wilde and Enid Blyton were my childhood heroes, because they’d created beautiful, magical worlds that meant I could escape the weirdness of my parents’ divorce.

If I could do the same for others, I thought, it would be the best thing in the world.

But then I grew up.  And after I went to a talk given by a successful novelist, I knew I would never become one myself.  “It’s like a conveyor-belt,” she told her wide-eyed audience.  “Publishers need to know you can deliver book after book, so I usually give myself six months to write each one.”

At that point, my work-in-progress had taken six years to write, and I still hadn’t finished it.

I still haven’t finished it.

Sometimes I wonder if I ever will.  Whether I actually prefer the slow, meditative hum of writing and tinkering with a gorgeous book, to the idea of carrying it across the finishing line.

It isn’t just writing.  I’ve been painting the same picture for seven years; adding a little bit here, and a little bit there whenever I need to de-stress.

Neither my book nor my painting could be considered masterpieces in the classical sense.

They are my masterpieces, though.  I love them, and I never resent the time I spend on gradually making them more real.  It’s always time offered up directly to the present moment (dare I call it ‘mindfulness’?).  And I always feel like the process itself is teaching me something.

With every brush-stroke I get better at painting; with every edited sentence I refine my ability to tell a clear and rounded story.

But if someone had told me when I started these projects, that I’d still be working on them almost a decade later, I probably wouldn’t have started them at all.

Especially since I’m living in the age of social media, where it often feels like time spent on anything you can’t immediately upload and show off, is time that never existed at all.

But sometimes, even genuine masterpieces take a while to show themselves.

The Lord of the Rings apparently took J.R.R. Tolkien between 12 and 17 years to finish.  Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture, The Gates of Hell, took 37 years.

“The masterpiece is not something we create to hang on our wall, but something in ourselves as we fulfil our potential and utilise our talents.”  Mary Potter Kenyon

(I amended Mary’s words slightly, removing her original references to God.  Whatever they might be, my potential and talents are wholly mine.  They weren’t randomly doled out by a temperamental sky-dweller who most likely doesn’t exist).

Whatever you imagine your own personal masterpiece to be, I think what matters most is that you make a start.  Enjoy the day-to-day process of creating, rather than worrying about when you’ll finish, or what other people might say about it.

Because none of that really matters, does it?

If your masterpiece-plan involves writing, and you think you could do with a little ‘push’ to get you started, why not talk to me about mentoring?

You won’t feel like you’re writing into a void, and I’ll have some interesting things to read and comment on.  Everybody wins.