Yes Now: Writing On Needing To Write
(Ironically, I Should Be Writing Something Else.)
Like all groups, or at least all people with some common purpose, writers have community on the Internet. They have more than one. Some cross over, some don’t. At least not much. Independent publishers and traditional publishers and hybrids. (And isn’t that a strange dynamic. The cis/gay/bi analogy that occurred to me was immediately followed by “Except that in the space of a decade cis and gay swapped places and bi became an option for both sides.” So it’s not a good analogy.) “Genre” writers and literary writers. Fanfiction and, well, everything else. (Though again, there is cross-over.)
One of the splits people who aren’t part of these communities might not anticipate is this:
- People who believe in writer’s block.
- People who don’t.
The split is completely unpredictable. It doesn’t correlate strongly, from what I’ve seen, to indie/tradpub, genre/literary, or any other large and obvious division. (Though the members of the first groups are somewhat less likely to believe in it.)
People who believe in writer’s block have, ironically, written many thousands of words on the topic with many different theories, explanations or (uncharitably) excuses. The all-too-common depression which creative people experience. Life got in the way. The Muse is on vacation. I just can’t get it right. (That’s what the post I’m responding to seems to be blaming.)
People who don’t, while they can be equally verbose — hey, these are writers we’re talking about — tend to have pretty much one theory. You could write. You don’t want to. Why you don’t want to, in the end, is largely irrelevant. Though few would be so uncharitable as to fail to cut people suffering from major mental illness or life crisis some slack, failing that, if you’re not in your chair, fingers on keyboard, pounding away, it’s a personal choice. If you want to write, they would say, make a different choice.
In a sense, they are unanswerable.
Even the understandable, Oh-God-we’ve-all-been-there quandary of the original post — letting the Perfect be the enemy of the Good — is a choice. Sit there, bang it out, and move on. If you really feel it’s not good enough. stick it in a drawer (or the electronic equivalent) and do the next thing. You can come back to it later. Or maybe you could show it to a friend who’d be astonished you thought it wasn’t good enough and tells you to send it to an editor or get it up on KDP. That happens all the time, by the way, and it’s not always just because your friend owes you money and doesn’t want to upset you. You are better than you think. (If you weren’t, you’d already have Dunning-Krugered yourself into believing that this post wasn’t directed at you.)
I have not seen anyone who could argue with the basic assertion that writing, like any other activity, is something you get better at with practice. Like any other activity, some people are born, or acquire through early advantage, or whatever, greater ability. But, as the inimitable Chuck Wendig put it, “I have ice-skated past people with far greater talent, pirouetting all the way. Because I work harder.” If you write, you will get better. The steepness of the slope is a variable: the sign of the slope is a given.
I have often come up with reasons not to sit in my chair and start writing. I have never failed to actually start banging something out once I was in my chair and had a blank Word document open in front of me. Often, it was crap and I pitched it. But I wrote it and I finished it and then I went on and I wrote something else. (Speaking of, this is probably a good place for the mandatory link to Heinlein’s Rules of Writing.)
So, original poster, and blocked writers everywhere, I feel your pain. The world is full of distractions, detours, and denials. You will often write crap and despair of ever producing something good. (I know bestselling authors who readily admit to occasionally thinking It was all a fluke it will never work again.) You may even, unless you are Dean Wesley Smith and that job is taken, sometimes not know what you want to write about.
But, self-help-guru-y as this sounds, you will never produce anything good if you never produce anything at all.
Keep that in mind. Write it on your wall. Get a tattoo of it. Whatever. While it does sound trite, like many trite things it is inarguable. Sit in chair. Put fingers on keyboard. Engage brain. If you can’t think of what to write, write a description of your day. Pretend you’re someone you think is funny (or someone you’d love to make look stupid) and write what they’d think about your day, or their day, or somebody else’s day. Play. Experiment. Laugh at how unutterably awful what you just wrote is and delete it, and then write something else.
Then, eventually, show it to somebody. Preferably a friend who reads a lot and will be kind but honest, but somebody. Anybody. Get an anonymous account on WattPad or put it in a Tumblr. Let people see it, even just a bit. Let yourself be a writer. Because somebody out there somewhere really wants to read what you wrote. Maybe not many. But somebody. I guarantee it. And to quote a random 80's movie character, “I think all you need is a small taste of success, and you will find it suits you.”
After that, maybe you can sell it to a publisher or publish it yourself and make beaucoup bucks, as we say where I come from. But that’s not my point. My point is, if you need to write, then write. If you want to have written, well, we’ve all been there. And if you want to be a (commercially) successful writer, likewise. I wish the umpteen fragments of stories on my hard drive were all finished and amazing and were selling so fast on Amazon they had to buy a new server just for me.
But none of that is going to happen if you do not put ink to paper, or print to pixels, or whatever. So if you need to write, then write. Yes, now. Go on. I’ll be over here cheering for you.
Or maybe I’ll go write something myself.
