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A few years ago, my wife The Duchess, tired of my complaining, bought me a guitar and some lessons. I’d been saying for years that I wanted to learn how to play an instrument simply because I like to take on new challenges and learn new skills, and the whole guitar thing is something we white guys born somewhere between 1945 and 1995 have burned into our genetic code. When we’re 15 we very much wish to be in a rock band, and for those of us who never managed it as kids, it’s something that haunts us.

So, I learned to play the guitar, and to this day I play every day, for myself. I even make songs! That you can listen to! Though you probably shouldn’t.

You can learn about writing from playing guitar. Part of learning how to play involves practice. Playing scales, learning how to play songs, fingering exercises—you do these things every day in order to master the instrument. And you should be doing similar things with your writing.

I Got Blisters On Me Fingers

Yes, of course, most writers try to write every day. But we’re not talking about working on your novel or stories or epic poem about video games. We’re talking about exercises. Quick shots of skill-building work that keep expanding what you feel comfortable with. One example I always trot out is my habit of writing a short story every month. A lot of these stories aren’t great, but they keep me generating ideas, teach me how to end a story, and allow me to practice whatever I need work on. So, if I’m feeling rusty working with a first-person narrator, say, I can work on a story with that POV.

Maybe you need to work on dialog, so you should spend a week writing conversations. Or you need to practice world-building, so you should write some quick setting descriptions or histories. Only you know what you need to work on, but once you figure that out you should work on it every day. It doesn’t have to be in the context of a larger story—in fact it’s better if you break it out as a short practice bit you can get through very quickly.

Of course, if you listen to my guitar playing you likely have much less respect for me now, so forget I said anything.

When the sentient mollusks that eventually inherit the irradiated ruins of the Earth sort through my manuscripts (which will, of course, be preserved as part of the brief, glorious dominance of human culture on this rock), they will pretty much be able to guess what I was reading when I wrote certain things, because of the wholesale theft and copying. I don’t feel any shame about this—in fact, as discussed here and many other places around the web, stealing ideas and techniques from better writers is a great way to become a better writer yourself.

Something a lot of people don’t talk about much? Stealing ideas and techniques from better writers is a lot of fun.

Never Figured Out the Butterfly Knife

There’s a crazy joy you experience when you try something new and make it work. The first time you ride a bike. The first time you beat a Boss in a video game. The first time you unclasp a bra one-handed with just a flick and a twist. The first time you play with a butterfly knife to impress girls and don’t end up in the emergency room.

Add to that, the first time you play around with an unreliable narrator. The first time you pull off (or, you know, mostly pull off) a stream-of-consciousness narrative. The first time you decide that this impossible plot twist is possible … because MAGIC EXISTS.

The first time you play with a technique or idea that came from someone else’s work is exhilarating. It’s exciting stuff, because you can feel your mastery over your craft getting stronger. The best part is, since you’re working privately, on your own, you don’t have to worry about whether you were too slavish in your imitation, or if it worked at a high professional level. Sometimes it’s okay to just enjoy the moment, the breakthrough. It’s like the first time you managed to go a full block on your bike. Sure, you still fell over at the end—but you did it, and that’s all that matters.

Stealing ideas from other writers is fun. It’s thrilling. Let’s not forget that. By the time you rub off the serial numbers and make that trick part of your own repertoire, the thrill will be faded and thinned-out, and as you read more widely and work more those thrills get fewer and far between. So enjoy them when happen.

Another thrilling moment? When you realize that pants are 100% optional while writing a novel.

You learn grammar so you can break the rules with purpose and intent, but boy howdy you should break those rules. Every novelist should have that failed novel where they tried to go Full Joyce and break all the rules—and yes, that novel will be failed, but what fun. And if it isn’t a Fail, you certainly don’t need this blog or my grimy thoughts.

I’ve always had the vaguest and most primitive grasp of grammar, because I’m a lazy man who relies on instinct instead of book-learnin’ as a rule. Writing has always come easily for me, and I’ve always regarded grammar as a collection of loose guidelines instead of, you know, rules. When you show a novel or story around to enough people, someone will note your grammarly failings—the dubious overuse of commas, perhaps, or the clear evidence you don’t really know how to use the semi-colon (the most mysterious of the colons). And humorless people will correct your grammar, no doubt.

Ignore ?em.

Going Full Cormac

Look, no one’s telling you that you can pull off a Full Cormac McCarthy and just ignore whole swaths of our delicate, glorious language; not many people can go Full Cormac (and some would argue not even Cormac himself is pulling it off) without falling off a cliff into incomprehensibility. But you shouldn’t feel like you’re a prisoner of grammar rules handed out in school. Use those commas freely. Abuse verb tense, write glorious, overlong run-on sentences.

Just do it with purpose. That’s the key. If your grammar is muddled because your grasp of it is muddled, then all the grammar bluenoses have a point, kid. If you’re doing it on purpose and you like the effect, then ignore all of them and don’t ever look back.

I think every writer who has ever attempted to write something seriously, whether it’s a short story or novel or something in-between, has struggled with that leaden feeling you get sometimes. Your story is dragging. You can’t quite figure it out—maybe you plotted that sucker out to the second, and it all hangs together elegantly, and yet it’s dead in the water. Or maybe you wrote the first third in a sweat of feverish inspiration, and now you simply can’t believe it’s all abandoned you.

Either way, you find yourself struggling to move forward, and you’re sweating those word count goals you set for yourself back in happier days. Because we all know that the only way to make any progress as a writer is to be able to post a word count goal on Facebook at the end of the day (ahem). So you grind away, uninspired and clayfooted, but comforted by the number of words you’re logging every day.

Here’s the thing, though: You’re writing this story. If you’re bored, what makes you think a reader won’t be?

The Delete Key is Your Friend

This is tough, especially if you’ve been grinding for weeks and now you’re looking at tens of thousands of words—but you should delete them.

It’s that simple. If you find your own mind wandering when you’re writing a scene, a chapter, an entire book (you poor bastard) there is a very good chance your readers’ minds will wander as well, which, you know, is not the goal. If you’re not enjoying what you’re writing, stop, save, delete, save as—and start over.

I wish there was a nifty acronym for that, but SSDSASO doesn’t mean anything.

Don’t kid yourself; writing is a talent that requires skill to develop properly, but there is no amount of skill in this universe—or talent—that can mask an author’s boredom with their own material. Take the night off, have a few drinks, and start over with a new idea that does excite you.

For most writers, the problem isn’t ideas—it’s finding the time and discipline to bring those ideas to life (and then, often enough, dealing with the brain-frying realization that you just spent six months working on a terrible, terrible, no-good novel). The ideas come fast and furious, and writers also know the inexorable sadness of watching those ideas melt away if we don’t work on them.

So, most of us make notes. You might carry around a literal notebook, or use an App on your phone, or a complex system of soggy cocktail napkins. You jot down a few key words and hope to hell Future You is smart (and sober) enough to understand what Present You is trying to say. And usually Future You, who is a more bitter and older version of you, has no idea what you’re talking about.

So here’s an idea: Don’t write notes. Write stories.

The Mega Note

The idea is to take the ideas that come to you in flashes of inspiration and actually flesh them out into something that would be recognized as a story. Not a slow-cooked, hand-crafted piece of literature that you would submit to an editor, but rather a hot-take on the idea, written quickly, and skipping over a lot of the grace notes and meat that makes a story more than just a jumble of character sketches and plot points. In other words, don’t just jot down the future except the sun is purple, write out a jumble of character sketches and plot points that form a semi-coherent story about how it’s the future, except the sun is purple (we can only assume Past You had some sort of brilliant metaphor in mind, or perhaps was a Prince fan).

This takes some time, of course, but not as much as you might think. The key is to put aside your usual urge to wordsmith and craft, and instead to pretend you’ve got to have this story written in four days or the world will be blown up by aliens. Bang it out. Then put it aside and as with all ideas, let it simmer for a bit. Forget about it. And when you come back to it a few days or months or years later, you won’t have a single line of inscrutable words, you’ll have a full-on treatment of the idea you can revise, refine, and shape. Once you get into the habit of doing this, you’ll find your moments of inspiration are a lot more productive, because you’ll capture the energy of that inspiration—or you’ll discover there wasn’t any ?there’ there in the first place, which can also save you time and energy because you’re not carrying an idea around for a decade, convinced it’s brilliant, only to have it fall apart the moment you finally sit down to write it.

Unless, of course, you enjoy making confused, inscrutable notes on soggy cocktail napkins. In which case, you do you.