Beating the Yeah Buts with Baby Steps

The Artist's Way Week Five: Recovering a Sense of Possibility

In week five of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron addresses the paradox of the morning pages head on. It’s all well and good to spend a few minutes each morning taking dictation from our inner artists, but when the pen stops, our rational selves take one look at the fever dreams described in our chicken scratch, frown, and lodge a complaint that always seems to start with just two words: “Yeah, but…”

Ah, the dreaded yeah buts.

Like no-see-ums whose bites make us turn our backs on a beautiful sunset to run to the bug-free nirvana of the great INdoors, yeah buts make us dismiss the ideas that tickle us the most as unfeasible nonsense.

Your artist: This idea for a comedy horror series sure is making me giggle!
Your pragmatist: Yeah, but you have zero experience with that genre!

Your artist: I’m gonna finally write my screenplay!
Your pragmatist: Yeah, but you know nothing about screenplays!

Your artist: I’d love to be a prima ballerina!
Your pragmatist: Yeah, but you’ve approaching fifty and have never—not once—donned a tutu!

The bad news is the yeah buts can be fatal to our beautifully outsized dreams. The good news, though, is that we can slay the yeah buts by breaking our impossible dreams into small steps, even when those steps are just small gestures in the general direction of those dreams.

Want to write a book in a genre you don’t know much about? Start reading!

Want to write a screenplay but no nothing about screenplays? Buy a craft book.

Wish you could dance as principal ballerina in Swan Lake? OK, the yeah buts maybe have a point if you’re fifty years old and have never so much as pointed your toe, but it’s never too late to stop drooling at the description of that introductory ballet class in the catalog for the local adult education center and actually sign up, right?

Easy right?

Not so much, no.

Because the yeah buts are so insidious we often yeah-but ourselves out of an idea before we’ve even fully considered it. We’re briefly lit up by the idea of a complicated story that would involve a breathtaking amount of research, say, only to yeah-but our way into choosing the easier premise, leaving nothing of the original idea but a restless discontent we try our damnedest to ignore.

Fortunately, Cameron’s tasks for week five center on diving straight into that discontent to mine for all those snuffed out ideas. Making a list of the top ten things you’re not allowed to do, for example. Revisiting the imaginary lives exercise from week one. Creating a collection of images of things you want to own but don’t feel you can.

Funny coincidence that week five comes during the first week of the year when so many of us are naturally dreaming big about the years we’d like to have, huh? (I’m picturing Julia Cameron smirking at the synchronicity). Smirking aside, I like this week’s reminder that no matter how big the goal for the year might seem—and finish a draft of a novel feels huge to me—it can only be accomplished one day at a time, one hour at a time, one word at a time, hell, one measly letter at a time.

Now to string enough of those letters together to reach THE END.

How about you?