Keeping Going

There are people good at beginnings and people good at endings, but not very many people are known for their skill at the middles. Alas, the majority of your writing work will be on that dreaded middle, that long expanse between your catchy first sentence and your moving ending.

Writing is work, not much different from carpentry or weaving wool coats in a Dickensian sweatshop. The trick is making the work fun, and making the work worth the trouble.

Perhaps the biggest problem that occurs for people who write is self-abuse. It is easy to spiral into self-recrimination (or self-pity) when you can't get the words on paper. Your self-image as a writer is threatened.

This problem does not afflict bus drivers. They merely drive the bus. With enough practice, you too can work past your own worries about your work and merely drive the bus.

It's hard to get there, though.

No matter how badly you're writing, no matter how little you've accomplished, no matter how much another writer's skill exceeds yours:

You can never be cruel to yourself.

This is the cardinal rule. Once you go down the road of self-abuse or shame, you will only further inhibit your writing.

You can rewrite every word you've written. If you haven't written today, you'll write tomorrow. Your friends may be more experienced, but you're on the way. Never let writing become an excuse to mistreat yourself.

Because you're all you have.

Writing is a unique form of courage. It takes guts to write what you passionately believe. It takes guts to cut and rearrange the words you loved when you wrote them. It takes guts to send it to an editor for a likely rejection.

Anything you do that threatens that courage will destroy you.

You can never allow yourself self-pity. You can never allow doubt or fear to dominate your writing. You are your courage, and without it you can never survive.

Be the most fervent advocate of yourself and your work. Andrew Jackson (a total idiot by almost any measure) said one intelligent thing: "One man with courage makes a majority." You can't let anything erode that courage, least of all yourself.

Now go out there and kick some ass!

• Do not wait for inspiration; be your own.
• Set reasonable goals for yourself.
• Write only about the subjects and characters that fascinate you.
• Work quickly with as little thinking as possible.
• Give yourself permission to write lousy first drafts.
• Write in small pieces.
• Write an outline if it helps you.

Do not wait for inspiration; be your own.

The idea has permeated our culture that creators of artistic works are not under their own command, that only the force of their genius drives them to build their castles in the air. The omnipresent question that writers face is, "Where do you get your ideas?" This question is the core of the fascination non-writers have with writers: how do you manage to get the universe to talk to you?

The answer is simple: you listen. Every day.

There is no muse. No mystical force infuses you with the power to write what is important to you.

You do.

The secret to writing consistently is to focus on what you love or hate. Ray Bradbury observes in Zen and the Art of Writing that if the subject was right, poetry could flow from the mouth of his uneducated grandfather. We all contain passions, joys, and hates. The only question is whether we have the courage to write about them.

I feel that "inspiration" is the false name for that moment when the work becomes more important than you are, when you become so absorbed in what you love or hate that you have no time to think about the whys and wherefores of doing it.

My best stories were written in a single delirious session where I sat, giggled, and scrawled insanely on notebook paper whatever ideas moved me most. My worst stories, on the other hand, were carefully outlined, crafted, and designed with the leering eye of others looking over my shoulder.

Why write if you don't love it? Why create works that are not intimately tied to your passions? Why write stories that are not your own, not born from your bones?

If you find yourself in the middle of writer's block, ask yourself if you're writing what you truly love. If the answer is no, write something else. If the answer is yes, write about that love from another perspective.

The only rule is to keep writing. No ideas today? Write about your mother. Write about the time you fell out of the tree in your backyard. Write about why your cat is better than all the others.

Write.

An athlete does not wait for a sign from God to start exercising, and likewise you should train yourself to lift your words every morning or afternoon or evening or whenever without even thinking about it.

A sprinter runs a thousand miles for that sprint at the Olympics.

You'd better get started.

Set reasonable goals for yourself.

Books about writing are full of dour pronouncements about one's discipline and output. "Write one thousand words a day." "Work two hours per day." "Write in the same place every day." "Write four pages a day."

Just write. Any amount will do.

At the 2000 World Science Fiction Convention, I sat in the audience during a writing panel that included one of my favorite authors, James Van Pelt. When the inevitable question arose about how much each of them wrote per day, they went down the line saying things like "eight pages" or "a thousand words." When they got to Van Pelt at the end, he shrugged.

"My goal is to write 300 words a day--mostly in meetings," he said.

The audience (and the other writers) gasped. How could he ever get anything written? Van Pelt pointed out that even 300 words a day is 100,000 words a year, the size of a decent novel. He also mentioned that he usually writes considerably more than 300 words a day, but that's still the goal.

I considered this on my way home and tried his technique myself. I've found it to be very helpful.

Why? Because those larger goals are intimidating. They inhibit you. They loom over you like stern schoolmasters. But three hundred words is ridiculous. Anyone can write 300 words, right?

That's the secret. By having any goal, you force yourself to sit down. By having an easy goal, you free yourself from the stress of missing your target.

Best of all, I guarantee you that it will be a rare day when you only write 300 words. In fact, I'd wager that you'll write 1000 words more easily if 300 is your goal than you would if 1000 was the goal.

Try it and see. 300 words a day. Easy, right? It gets you going.

And that's what you need more than anything else.

A corollary to this is Tom Picirilli's advice: do not attempt to "make up" for a missed goal the next day. "Oh, I was supposed to write 300 words today. I'll just write 600 tomorrow." This is a sure trap. You'll get further and further behind until you don't write anything at all.

Yesterday is gone. What are you going to write today?

Write only about the subjects and characters that fascinate you.

We already have an army of writers tapping on keyboards about inane subjects no one cares about. Too many people with talent sell themselves out to the current market or fashion and leave their true work go unfinished.

If there is a hell, I hope those people go there.

Nothing disgusts me more than wasted potential. You are the sum of everything that has happened to you, all you've seen. Your loves, hates, fears, desires define you, make you useful in the grand tapestry of the human race.

Your value as a writer lies in creating work directly from those stores, not from imitating others. Certainly not from engineering yourself to be popular or trendy.

Write about what excites you. Anything else is a waste.

I spend a few miserable years wallowing in a "literary" period where I considered the genres I loved as a kid to be beneath me. I took my required English courses, read a lot of doorstop novels, and wondered how I lost my love of reading.

I happened to take Dr. Kent Beyette's science fiction course my senior year and reunited with the books I'd loved as a kid: Dune, A Clockwork Orange, The Mote in God's Eye. I staggered from that class every day ready to weep at the time I lost.

I started writing my genre fiction again soon afterward.

Do what you love.

Work quickly with as little thinking as possible.

Analysis is the enemy of the spontaneous energy that exists in almost all exciting writing. When you sit down at your computer or your typewriter or your tattered legal pad, you should be on fire! Don't douse yourself before you have the chance to burn by overthinking what you're writing.

As Bradbury writes in Zen and the Art of Writing: "Work. Relax. Don't Think."

Speed is your friend. You have to outrun your own mind before it has a chance to censor itself.

A course in Psychological Approaches to Literature put my fiction writing behind by at least half a decade. I was too busy examining my own motivations and neuroses to get the work done.

Should you write without thinking at all? Of course not. But during the heat of composition, pauses to consider or rewrite will usually diminish the whole. Writing is more sailing than driving: your source of propulsion comes in bursts instead of a steady motion.

Ride those bursts and see where they go.

Give yourself permission to write lousy first drafts.

Anne Lamott writes in Bird by Bird that you must give yourself permission to write bad work, remembering always that the bad work can always be rewritten. You cannot let the fear of error freeze you before you have the chance to even make an error (or, more likely, discover something wonderful).

Somewhere in the compost heap you generate every day at your desk is some usable work. One some days, it may be a single phrase. On others, it could be pages. You cannot let yourself get in the way of that production.

Write in small pieces.

Lamott also writes that you should break larger works into smaller ones. Don't sit down to write a story; sit down to write a scene. Or a paragraph. Or even a sentence. The pieces come together for the whole, and you can be intimidated by the largeness of a task if you're focused on anything other than the small piece you're working on.

Break down your work into manageable bites and dedicate yourself to doing those well. Combine them at the end into a coherent whole.

Write an outline if it helps you.

A frequent reason writers stall in the middle of a work is that they don't know where they're going. This is not always a bad thing; letting your characters exert themselves is one of the joys of writing (and of reading the result). Stephen King views writing as the discovery of nuggets already formed. I agree and enjoy the exploration of writing.

Still, sometimes for longer works it helps to have an end in mind. Generally, my planning for stories consists of a situation, a beginning, and an ending. For more complicated stories, I make a rudimentary outline listing all of the things that have to happen so the story makes sense. Then I place those in order.

Don't spend more time writing an outline than writing the story, though. Don't give yourself an excuse to avoid writing.