The Tough Advice Every Aspiring Writer Needs to Hear
No excuses. Write the thing.
I don’t want to hear your excuses, If you want to write the thing, write the thing. Do the fucking work.
Writing is hard, for a given value of hard. It’s hard in the sense of vulnerability, in the sense of creating something from your imagination, in the sense of putting in the hours to pick apart your own work to find errors, in the sense of taking criticism like an adult, sifting through the good advice, throwing out the bad.
If writing is suffering for you, then you would probably be suffering anyway. Either stop writing — I can almost guarantee no one’s begging you to do it — or work out why you feel the need to martyr yourself to the work. There are other jobs. Writing — fiction writing especially — is one of the lowest paid jobs there is. It’s time consuming, emotionally draining, financially draining and frankly overhyped by a whole bunch of Hollywood and old-time publishing myths. If you’re doing it, it’s because you want to do it, you love doing it — or you love having done it. It feeds your fucking soul, it consumes you. It gives you self-worth. It gives you meaning.
If you’re coming up with all the reasons why you can’t do it, then it’s not for you because it doesn’t fucking get easier. The self-doubt, the anxiety, the loneliness, the fear? They’re a part of the work. They sometimes are the work. They’re the burn than comes with the sprint. No pain, no gain isn’t a saying for nothing.
There is a good chance you will not make as much money writing fiction as the average checkout operator in a supermarket. There’s a good chance you’ll not make any money at all, especially if you’re spending all your time bemoaning all the reasons you can’t write. But your chances of making money or finding any kind of success — potentially major success — are negative nothing if you don’t do the fucking work. So do the work.
Creating words has never been easier. That time you’re spending writing that tweet while sitting on the toilet? Write a fucking sentence. That time you’re putting in writing a post on social media about how you can’t write? Write a fucking sentence. That time you’re spending agonising about the right thing to write? Write a fucking sentence. Write it on your phone, write it through dictation software, write it in an Excel spreadsheet instead of doodling while you’re in that really boring weekly sales meeting. Write. The. Fucking. Sentence.
Just fucking do it. One sentence, every single time you’re bemoaning the fact you can’t write, you can’t be inspired, you can’t do the thing.
You don’t think your idea’s a good one? Then maybe it’s not. But write the fucking sentence to see if you’re wrong. If you don’t write the sentence, you won’t know.
Will it be cohesive? Fuck no. Will your work be good for starters? Fuck no. Not everything has to be a masterpiece. Sometimes you’re working on the warm-up, stretching your imagination, expanding your abilities so you have the capability to write future, better things.
No one expects a painter to create a perfect portrait before they’ve ever picked up a paintbrush. No one expects to be able to run a marathon before they’ve ever walked a mile. That shit takes practice. It takes fucking up and learning from your mistakes. It takes listening, learning and fucking doing.
And maybe, after spending your time, actually fucking writing, actually fucking learning, actually fucking growing, you’ll have a short story, a play, a screen play, a novel. And maybe it’ll be good, maybe it won’t. But you would have done it. And now that you’ve done it, you’ll know you can do it. And you’ll do it again. Because that shit is addictive.
And eventually writing the fucking sentence will come naturally. Eventually you won’t even think of all the reasons you can’t write, because you’ll be writing, you’ll be learning, you’ll be growing and you’ll be a fucking writer.
Good luck.
