Writing

One thing they never tell you when you decide to be a writer is how the definition of success shifts and changes over the course of your career, often without your permission (and sometimes without your even noticing).

Everyone has a different experience and evolution of thought, of course. For me, it went something like this: When I was but a young’n, success was just finishing something that resembled a novel. It didn’t matter how good it was, or if I might ever sell it. Just writing 50,000 words or so that made sense was enough.

When I’d done that, the goal posts shifted: I wanted to write something good. Something original. When I felt like I’d done that, the goal shifted again. Now I wanted to be published. Then I wanted to be paid for my writing. Then I wanted a contract with a major publisher. Et cetera and so on.

The Ladder

Every time I achieved my current definition of success, the definition shifted on me, so I never quite made it all the way, and still haven’t. But you have to remind yourself sometimes that writing a book is in and of itself an achievement—most writers who intend to write a novel, or even begin one, fail to finish it. And most that finish that novel never revise it. Or never try to publish it. Or never write another one.

Noted weirdo Woody Allen once said that success was 99% showing up, and he’s right—whatever your current definition of writing success, it all comes back to putting in the time and the work, producing material, and getting it out there somehow. The goal posts might shift, but the ways of getting to them don’t—you write, you revise, you submit.

And you should keep in mind the shifting nature of success in this business, and remind yourself that there was a time when the thing you did yesterday in an almost routine fashion was once your definition of success. The world is a machine designed to prevent you from writing, so just getting words on the screen is success, sometimes.

The world is also a machine designed to murder us, but that seems like a topic for a whole different sort of blog.

I wrote my first novel when I was about twelve years old, and as a kid what I most remember about writing was the rush of constant ideas I was excited about. I wrote constantly, churning out novels and stories at a pretty prolific pace.

Part of this was a function of my ignorance and immaturity—everything seemed like a brilliant new idea to me because I wasn’t aware how much had already been done. And when I encountered things in other people’s writing, it was always a shocking new concept for me, which fueled my ability to just run off and bang out 50,000 words in a few weeks as I played with my new writing toy.

Another aspect of being immature and thus being able to write at a really fast clip was the fact that I wrote for myself. I didn’t bother revising; I finished an idea and moved on to the next. It was fun and exhilarating, but didn’t really result in material I could submit or sell. The more you work to polish, the more you work to produce writing that can actually interest people, the less fun it gets.

That Spark

Even today, my novels and stories always begin with that spark of excitement. It always seems like an idea no one else has ever had, or a technique no one else has ever tried. Usually, I’m wrong about that, because I’m kind of an idiot, but all that matters is that writing still begins in a molten moment of intense excitement for me.

That writing is fun. I can still tear through thousands of words in a few days, driven by excitement. But the closer your story gets to being really good, the slower things get, and the less fun it all becomes. That’s the strangest thing about writing: The inverse rule. The better your story gets the more like work writing becomes. If you’re lucky, you manage to balance this out—writing never quite becomes a chore, because you retain just enough excitement to keep pushing yourself along. But sometimes, usually when I get, say, the fourth round of revision notes back from an editor, you lose that balance and it just becomes work. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

Keeping yourself motivated when you’re way past that initial phase of intense joy is the piece of the puzzle most people struggle with. Writing is art, it’s creativity, and so it seems like it should always be exciting, and if you’re not excited you must be doing something wrong. But that’s not always the case, and navigating the Inverse Rule is the difference, often, between selling a novel and, you know, not selling a novel.

When it comes to dealing with the Inverse Rule, here’s a pro tip: Alcohol helps.

Writing anything is a lengthy process that requires a lot of patience and diligence. One of the biggest challenges that new writers face is dealing with the adjustment between excitement and difficulty that invariably sets in after the initial rush of creative energy fades.

We all know that feeling: You start off with a flash of inspiration, you sail into the first few hundred words or the first stages of plotting in a frenzy of excitement. And then you stall. Your narrative starts to get complex, a paragraph seems weak and uninspired to you and all of a sudden every word seems suspect, your plotting hits a wall around chapter 20 and you can’t see any way to bridge the gap.

It takes time to right the ship. It takes time to figure out what went wrong or if anything actually did go wrong and you’re not just doubting yourself for no reason. And then it takes time to link everything back up.

It takes time to write the first draft. Time to get feedback on it, to let it marinate in your Drawer of Dubious Ideas until you’re somewhat certain it’s not half-bad. Then it takes time to revise, to polish. Then it takes time to convince someone it’s worth going out on, or to convince readers that your new book is worth their money.

The Long and Winding Road (Is a Terrible Song)

It all takes enormous amounts of time. I first had the idea for Writing Without Rules sitting in my agent’s office sipping bourbon with her in February of 2016. We didn’t finalize the proposal until October, and I didn’t start writing the book until January 2017. I didn’t have a final draft to send to the publisher until May, more than a year after the initial idea. I still haven’t seen copy-edits, so the book’s not done yet, and the pub date is officially May 2018—more than two years after the initial idea.

And this has actually been one of the fastest roads from idea to published book I’ve ever experienced.

This is one reason why chasing trends is fruitless. Even if you’re in the habit of slapping unrevised, raw zero-draft books onto your DIY digital platforms of choice, the delay between your inspiration and delivery of a salable book is just too long. I don’t know about you, but the fastest I’ve ever written a complete novel from idea to THE END was three months, and I was a much younger man and the novel itself was garbage. Have brilliant novels been written much faster? Of course they have—and yet there’s always the delays of review, revision, and the other hard work.

In other words, settle in, it’s going to be a long ride.