It’s Always Darkest Before Dawn

I love this line from “Batman The Dark Knight” although I’m pretty sure Christopher Nolan didn’t invent the phrase.

My interpretation of the phrase is that often things tend to get worse before they get better. The worsening is part of the healing so to speak.

My yoga teacher used to say, “the spot gets bigger first”. What she meant was when you have a spot on your shirt and you start to clean it, the first thing that happens is that it gets bigger.

It looks like things are worsening, and maybe they are, but that’s part of the process. You’re moving in the right direction.

Take your writing for example. Let’s say, you have a draft in place and you give it to someone for feedback. That person points out something that doesn’t work and now that you see it you totally agree.

Now, having a new insight about your story, you see that you have completely new possibilities to make it better.

But in order to do that, the first thing that you need to do is tear it apart. So, first you need to make a big “mess” out of it, brainstorm new possibilities how the newly found bits fit together in a dramatic way.

So, it might look as you’re moving backwards, as if it’s “getting worse”. Because you had the story finished and now you have a big mess.

But that’s not true.

Sometimes moving forward means you must wade through the dirt first in order to come out shiny the other end.

How to find the motivation to keep going?