#85 The bullshit artist
It’s you, me and anyone else who calls themself a writer
Everyone lies — writers are just especially good at doing it non-verbally. The words you’re reading right now, in my post and pretty much everywhere else on Medium, are a fiction.
“Whoa, hold up,” you’re probably (not) thinking to yourself, because you should know better. “Writers are liars?”
Yes, totally. You can read posts titled “Writing 1,00o words a day,” “How to build an audience in just one week,” and “5 reasons it’s okay to quit, you quitter” (post forthcoming, from me) until the cows come home, but they aren’t your truth-they’re the words and methods of the person who wrote them. While it’s entirely possible that the advice these SEO-friendly, Buzzfeed-clickbait-y articles contain could work for you, the reality is this:
You are you.
And not in that Dr. Seuss kind of way. Your motivations, hurdles and successes are yours and yours alone. Own them. I can only speak from my experiences as a token slacker and member of “Generation X,” but I bought at least a dozen books on novel writing, read through all of them and then didn’t write a single word until, one November, I decided I was going to write a novel in 30 days. Then, not like magic at all, I did it. Twice.
Both novels were garbage, and I immediately tossed them in a drawer somewhere. But I learned that there is no panacea for a lack of motivation. You have to put the big toe in your own butt (metaphorically speaking, of course).
As for my posts on Medium, I only started publishing them on a regular basis when I made the decision to commit to writing for 100 days straight. I set a concrete goal — a box I could check every night-and then I checked that box. If anything, that’s the way my first (publishable) novel is going to get written, one easily digestible chunk at a time.
But, again, every word of that novel (if it gets written) will be, much like what I’m writing here, the philosophical equivalent of a Twix bar: true for me, not for you.
