How To Write More

A few posts ago I wrote about writing advice and what it may or may not be worth. While I could write my own book (that no one would buy), there are still more things I'd like to say. No one's going to teach you how to write. As I've said earlier, I believe you either have the talent or you don't. Having it, though, doesn't mean you'll be successful, either as someone who completes a single, poor, unpublished novel or someone who actually sells something somewhere. You have to learn the craft, learn how to actually build a novel, and then you have to do it to achieve the kind of fluency you want in order to produce something you can be proud of. And then you have to be damned persistent and do it all over again. And again and again.

Unless you're a hack, and you don't aspire to quality, or to something unique or filled with your own style or voice. Then you just need luck, a good contact, a good book doctor, or something.

You won't be really good unless you try to be really good. Chances are this won't happen right off the bat, of course, it rarely does in the course of any pursuit. But there's no substitute for the learning process. Which is why purported "rules" are harmful: more often than not, rather than keep you on the right path, they dictate directions for you to follow that may not have been what your own talent would have wanted. They stifle, they suppress. The only real rule should be to do what works for you. The trick is in finding it.

Not too long ago I was at a conference where two established woman writers were dishing out a number of these juicy nuggets, buoyed by the eager questions of the mostly geriatric crowd. No, I wanted to shout, don't listen. Follow your own gut as a writer (if you really are one), don't let this poison you. I walked out after the second point, which was a difficult thing for me to do. It's one thing to rant to friends or on a blog site without readers, but it's another to get up from the second row of a crowded room and abandon a presentation.

Rudeness aside, the point they had just made, or rule of law they laid down, had to do with the age of your protagonist (I forgot what it was they actually said, my steam had already risen to the point where I was building the courage to walk out). When a woman raised her hand and said that the hero of her book was a fifty year old woman, both authors shook their heads no and one of them immediately said something like, "No. That won't work, you'll have to change it."

Amazing advice given by someone whose only knowledge of the work in question was the age of the main character. They didn't know what her background was supposed to be, what the plot was, nothing of the sort. Perhaps the story was a mystery come to light after a woman loses her adult family through a tragic accident at sea. Or whatever. The point is that this woman could have been a truly gifted writer with a unique, heart rending character and situation worthy of the next Pulitzer Prize. But not according to the two presenters whose point of view they justified as having an appeal to the younger generation of editors found at most publishing houses.

My only solace was that if this woman were actually the next big writing thing, she would have gotten out of her seat and left a thousand times over before raising her hand and laying out for these two ladies. Her writer's gut would have made it so.

So there's a point about rules, here's one about the actual writing life. Years ago, at a writer's retreat in the Everglades, I met both Randy Wayne White and Peter Mattiessen. I'll write about this another time as it was a seminal point in my writing development but the point I want to make here is how Randy told me he structures his writing day.

Until about halfway through the book, he says that he begins each morning by reading everything he's written thus far before doing any new writing. He said that was how he got into the narrative flow each day and allowed him to pick up where he had left off.

This method makes a lot of sense to me and is something I'd recommend people try. I can't do it now, however, and I may never be able to. When I read what I've previously written, I get so hung up on every conceivable flaw or doubt as to what I'm doing that I can't climb out of the resulting depression in time to be productive. So you see why this would be another lousy rule: it simply can't work for everybody.

I found that for me, I had to continue to write the book I thought I had in my head. That book wasn't so flawed that I'd have to stop, drop and rewrite before I could write another sentence. That book reads the way I'd intended in my mind, no matter how I may have botched it on actual paper. And that way I could get through the book.

A lot of this has to do with the confidence you have in your own writing. You're told your whole life that writing a book is damned hard, that few people can do it, and what makes you think you're one of them. On top of that are all the unvocalized self-doubts you bring to the table: what does make me think I can do this? Who the hell am I, anyway?

Name any established book-a-year author that's been around for a while. Imagine what they're thinking as they're writing the next installment in their bestselling series. Are they wondering if what they're writing will be published? Nah, they're already under contract. Think how freeing that must be. That's why following your gut and learning the craft of writing is so important: so that you can develop for yourself the talent of having confidence in what you write. How could you possibly write well without that?