Underway

I finally figured out, late last week, that I was just coming up with excuses not to write. 

I hate it when writers do that.  Some people don't enjoy writing, and there, I can see some reason to make excuses.  But people who love writing, then make excuses not to write? 

I don't believe there's anything difficult about writing.  The notion that you have to know exactly what you're going to say before you sit down to write is inherently silly; if you knew what you were going to say, it wouldn't be writing - it would be transcribing.  Writing is about exploring ideas and creating something that doesn't exist until you type or scribble or encrypt it into existence.

But you always have something to say. 

Somehow, I managed to talk myself into wasting time.  Now, not everything I did before I started in on Prophesied was time-wasting.  Some idea of how things develop and who all is going to be there is good.  But once there's an outline and cast of characters in existence, the only reason not to write is because you're afraid what comes out won't be up to your own personal standards.

Here's a hint, though:  It never is.  What you're going to write is going to be first-draft, and it's going to require revision.  There will be things about it that are good, and things about it that suck.  However, until you write it, you can't do anything about the things that suck, and you don't have the good things to look at and go, "Hey, that's pretty good."  So you have all of the anxiety, but none of the reward.

Even after all these years of writing every day, I still manage to get myself into places where I put off starting new projects.  I do the same with research that's part of my job.  I'll find excuse after excuse to not start a new research project, and every time I put something off, it only increases the anxiety that goes along with doing it.

Writing is about the last thing that should be like that, if it's what you love.  The fear that you'll produce something crappy shouldn't be an impediment to doing the work; I'm sure I've quoted JBB before, but I'll do it again:  "No great writer has ever been a wimp."  You take risks.  Those risks start with admitting to yourself that you think you have something worth saying, and then sitting down and trying to put it into words.  The risks continue as we put our work out there to be critiqued.  Some people are going to brutalize you.  That's a fact of life.  There will be people who absolutely hate whatever it is you do.  No good reason why - you just aren't their kind of writer/composer/painter/pediatrician/pet groomer/bricklayer/boom mic operator/etc.  They will hate your guts.  They will call you unpleasant names.  They will tell you that you don't know what you're doing.  They will insult your lineage, tell you not to quit your dayjob, and so forth.

These people suck.  I won't say that you should ignore them, because if you ignore any part of your audience (even the jackass part) you give up the opportunity to learn why they despise you and grow from their critiques, but anyone who uses the word "suck" as part of a critique has a somewhat limited amount they can teach you.

I've wandered a little bit afield.  I'm finishing up the first chapter in Prophesied.  I like where it's starting; there's a decent hook, I think, it brings Mack back in a recognizable form, but it gives him something different that he's working on.  I want to finish establishing that he's still acting under the assumption that he's smarter than everyone around him (because if he weren't operating under that assumption, he wouldn't be Mack...), give him something scary to send him rolling forward (but not too scary, because I don't want to fall into the trap of writing a horror story, which I'm no good at), and then transition into the next chapter and introduce the second PoV character.  Well, re-introduce her, since she was in the first book. 

Here's an excuse not to do that immediately, though:  I don't know how old she is.  She was 14 last time I wrote her.  That was two books ago.  Mack can't go beyond age 39 (or rather, he won't admit to it), so I have to figure out if I actually stated how old he was in either of the first two books.  I also need to figure out how old one of the new characters is, based on the established timeline in the previous stories.  Freaking continuity.  See, this is why I need a book deal and a large fan base and someone who obsessively follows my stories, so they can put all this stuff together for me.  It'd be so much easier than doing it myself!

But those are all excuses.  I can find whether Mack's age has ever been mentioned in 10 minutes or less, probably by searching on the word "thirty" and seeing what comes up in the earlier manuscripts.  I've only got a thousand or so pages of text from the other books, total (the first is probably 1.5x longer), so going through and continuity-checking isn't hard.  It's not as easy as just sitting down and writing, but it also doesn't get in the way of sitting down and writing.

There can't be excuses.  Writing is a joyous activity that has no down-side.  The fact that I manage to make excuses to not do it just astounds me.

Comments

[AlanKinNA]

I visited your page at ...


http://unamuzd1.vox.com/library/post/underway.html


and read your... (quote) Writing is about exploring ideas and creating something that doesn't exist until you type or scribble or encrypt it into existence. (unquote)




I experienced a sort of "knot" to unravel in reading "encrypt" as a word choice, insofar as it would seem to me writing is decrypting non-linear, thoughts, emotions and putting them in linear, even digital form.





Now, with second and third thoughts, perhaps writers do encrypt until, like now, their meaning is chewed, exchanged, and possibly decrypted -- whatever...





If, at any time, you find the sheer process of tap-a-tapping the keys is becoming cumbersome, bothersome, or troublesome, a writer can speak their thoughts.





Besides a writer, I'm a freelance writer's assistant, i.e., in my work I transcribe the spoken word - more at http://www.VerbatimIT.com





All the best - bye





AK

[AlanKinNA]

I visited your page at ...

http://unamuzd1.vox.com/library/post/underway.html  

and read your...  (quote) Writing is about exploring ideas and creating something that doesn't exist until you type or scribble or encrypt it into existence. (unquote)




I experienced a sort of "knot" to unravel in reading "encrypt" as a word choice, insofar as it would seem to me writing is decrypting non-linear, thoughts, emotions and putting them in linear, even digital form.





Now, with second and third thoughts, perhaps writers do encrypt until, like now, their meaning is chewed, exchanged, and possibly decrypted -- whatever...





If, at any time, you find the sheer process of tap-a-tapping the keys is becoming cumbersome, bothersome, or troublesome, a writer can speak their thoughts.





Besides a writer, I'm a freelance writer's assistant, i.e., in my work I transcribe the spoken word - more at http://www.VerbatimIT.com





All the best - bye





AK

[unamuzd1]

I think (and I'm guessing here, since it's been a little while and my blogs tend to be fairly stream of consciousness) that my use of "encrypt" had to do with the mechanical act of entering the writing into a computer that would save it in some form that might or might not be recognizable, were the raw data file to be examined.

I like your thought about decrypting better, though, since it often feels like that's what I'm doing when I try to puzzle out the way a story is flowing and what naturally happens next.