Perhaps my favorite part of my week involves my quiet time sitting and reading at Barnes & Noble. I grab a couple of magazines (I start with the weeklies The Economist and The New Yorker, then scan the shelves for anything else that looks interesting), get something from the coffee shop and settle in for a few hours. Over the last two weeks, three pieces in The New Yorker caught my attention. All of them involved writing, and for different reasons I related to each of them. Two of them are involved in this post. I'll get to the third in the future.
One of my goals has been to write a novel. I am in the process of writing one, in fact. I am about 19,000 words in (a normal book ranges between 100,000 and 200,000), so it’s off to a decent start, but there is much work to be done. I enjoy it for its long-from storytelling, a chance to create a complex and detailed world of my own, populated with my own characters. It is a totally different type of writing than I did as a reporter, where the joy came from creating quality under the pressure of a nightly deadline.
When you’re working on a novel, you can take all the time you want. You can make the characters do anything you want. That freedom is exciting. It can also be debilitating in some ways. It seems obvious, but one of the primary challenges of writing in that type of long form is…well…finishing the damn thing. For every novel you see on the shelves of a bookstore, there are dozens sitting half-finished on aspiring writers’ hard drives. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. It also takes a lot of patients with yourself, something I frequently lack.
You can get stuck on a single scene or subplot, something that no matter what keys you hit, never seems to ring true in your heart. You can have issues in your personal life. You can get too busy to write, and you can allow yourself to get too lazy to write. With so many things that can go wrong it’s remarkable sometimes these things ever get written in the first place. I, for instance, have a huge chunk of a different novel stuck in a drawer in my desk, where it has now sat for years because I got stuck, then had work and personal issues, and by the time I came back to it so much time had passed my perspectives had changed, and I wanted to make so many changes it looked more like a mountain to climb rather than a book to write. Right now I hope to tackle it again after finishing the current one. Will I? That question leads back to those magazine articles.
The first New Yorker piece that struck me was about a shrink in L.A. (his name has slipped my mind since I read the story) who caters mostly to screenwriters. Writers are often thought of as a neurotic lot, and anyone associated with this man’s practice would not be dissuaded from that idea. He has a tough-love philosophy to combat self-doubt and writers’ block. He calls is KWSS: Keep Writing Shit, Stupid.
Just like the most important part of getting in shape is dragging your ass to the gym regularly in the first place, the most important part of writing is to sit down and make yourself write. Even if you know what you’re doing isn’t going to make the final product, sit down and write. You never know when a single line, a phrase or the tiniest germ of a really good idea will jump out of your head. One thing for sure is you’ll never find it if you don’t keep writing shit, stupid. It’s a great system, but it’s not enough all by itself.
So how else can I motivate myself? There is no single answer. One thing I have tried to do is have friends read what I’ve been writing and ask for their feedback. This accomplishes two things; the feedback helps keep me going in the right direction and also gives me a pseudo deadline, which keeps my in front of the keyboard. I have to write because they asked me when they were going to get more pages, and I feel responsible to come through. So far this has been effective for me, but getting back again to what I was reading, another article was about fantasy author George R. R. Martin, and it showed how that strategy can backfire. Martin is in the process of writing a series, which as anyone who has seen a bookstore line on a “Harry Potter” release day knows can produce a fanatical following. He has a website, a blog, and uncommonly open communication with his fans. This was great for a while, but now it seems to have created a major problem. Why is that?
He got stuck.
The first few books rolled off his fingers to the keyboard and onto a printing press with ease, and in rapid succession. Then, he hit a snag. He’s been working on the latest part for over six years now, and what started as a happy gathering of fans on the internet has turned into a more and more belligerent badgering session, a never-ending series of posts and comments asking him when the living hell is he going to finish the next damn book? Martin has not run out of ideas. He knows where he wants his story to go, it’s just that he has to live up to progressively higher fan expectations on how to get there. This has turned into a vicious circle. Martin writes knowing people have been waiting years and will scrutinize every word, so he second and third-guesses everything, deleting and rewriting chapters and plot points thinking it won’t be to the mob’s liking. This in turn makes them wait even longer, and get even more impatient.
As for me, for the time being this small-scale outside pressure of letting people read bits at a time, hoping they’ll ask for more is working for me. It keeps me writing in the present and it keeps me scribbling down ideas and improving my outline for future chapters. Of course, I don’t have George R. R. Martin’s problems. I don’t have thousands of fans clamoring for my next piece. To be honest, that’s a problem I would love to experience someday.
I’ll just have to keep writing and find out.
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