Whenever you go looking for writing advice, you’ll hear the phrase butt in chair a lot. Basically it’s an admonition/reminder that you can’t write a novel or a story if you don’t, you know, write. So you have to actually sit down with your butt in a chair and type or scribble, or nothing gets done.

This is true, and it’s decent advice as far as things go. But there’s another aspect or dimension to any writing advice. You have to ask yourself, what does “writing” look like?

It Looks Like a Lot of Work, is What It Looks Like

Because writing isn’t just tapping at a keyboard.

Now, I’ve literally written every single day of my life since I was about twelve years old. That’s a lot of days, and a lot of writing (though I should note that many, many writers started writing as kids and have written every day since, so this doesn’t make me special), and most of that involved typing or writing longhand to some degree. But there are other things that may not look like writing but which definitely are writing. For example:

• Thinking. Thinking is writing, so sitting in a comfortable chair staring into space counts. As long as you’re actually thinking and not just daydreaming about shaving your cats and dressing them in tiny suits.
• Reading. Everyone tells you to read widely in order to become a better writer, so reading counts. So does watching and listening, as long as you take some time at some point to process the things you consume and consider what they can teach you.
• Talking. Talking about your work—or someone else’s work—is also writing. The concepts you are exposed to in conversation about the craft or business of writing are just as vital as anything else.
• Revision. This might seem obvious, but some writers consider revision to be treading water—you’re not creating anything new, so it’s just busywork. But revision is often just as creative as a first draft.
• Drinking. Just kidding. Or am I? Deranging your thoughts and experiencing a chemically-altered perspective can be part of the creative process. Or so I tell myself at 3AM when one more shot of whiskey seems like a terrible, awesome idea.

Writing int his context is sort of like expenses that you claim on your taxes: Just about anything can count. If it somehow, in some way, worms its way into your creative process at some point it counts as writing.

So “butt in chair” and similar advice doesn’t have to be taken literally. As long as you’re working on your writing in some sense, you’re doing the work, even if you didn’t type anything.

Now I have to go pitch a book about why Day Drinking is a great way to write a novel.

I’m currently reading a novel that’s pretty well done in many ways, but the author has one terrible habit that really annoys the crap out of me: By the Way Writing.

BTW Writing is when you shoehorn facts into the prose when information suddenly becomes necessary for the reader to know. It’s a form of exposition that gives exposition a bad name. Here’s a made-up example:

Jim turned the corner and stopped dead, uncertain if he should keep going or turn back. Up ahead was his old friend Tanner, who would almost certainly demand money, probably framed as a mysterious debt suddenly remembered and now long over due (Jim hated to loan money because of his deadbeat father, who had steadily drained the family bank accounts with constant small loans begged from his mother).

The BTW part is that last sentence; BTW Writing almost always occurs at the end of a paragraph or longer section within one, and often though not always within parentheses. It’s a clunker of an expo drop, and I call it “By the Way” due to the awkward way it’s just shoved in there, because the writer suddenly remembered that they hadn’t communicated that information before. Realizing it was important for context or character development, they just toss it in. It’s literally like saying “By the way, this is why he’s like that.”

Ban the BTW

This is shitty writing for many reasons, but it’s fairly common to see it creep into your first drafts because often when you’re working on a story you do suddenly realize you either forgot to include a detail earlier, or you suddenly realize there’s a detail to include in the first place. I do a lot of first-draft BTW writing myself. It’s often easier to just drop a loaded parens into your paragraph than it is to stop dead and search back to find the right place to bring it up earlier.

The key though is to go back and fix that. Find your BTW bombs and defuse them, sprinkling that information earlier in the draft in a more elegant way.

Like a lot of bad writing habits, this one can be subtle and tough to spot. Sometimes reading your work out loud can help, because BTW lines tend to stop the flow like a truck crashing into a building, and you can feel that when you read it out loud, because you literally have to stop and shift mental gears when you hit one.

By the way, there should be a joke here at the end, but I can’t think of one.

The first time I wrote a story, I was probably eight or nine years old. It was a school assignment that, bizarrely, involved bookbinding; our assignment was to write a story, lay out signatures, create hardback covers, and bind it all into a book by hand. I have no idea why someone thought this was a useful skill for kids in Jersey City, New Jersey to have—but it was fun. I wrote a story about how the planet Earth was created by aliens who had this huge pill, like a Tylenol rapid-release capsule, they launched into space.

What I remember from my early days of writing was the sense of limitless possibility. Every book I read offered something I could steal and try out for myself. Every idea I had seemed incredibly new and original (spoiler: they weren’t, but they felt that way). Every time I sat down to work on an idea, I had this rush of exploratory joy—I was venturing into fresh snow every single time, and it was mine to mark up and shape.

These days? Much of that thrill is gone. And that’s something all creators have to deal with.

Three Chords and a Beat

I wasn’t really aware of this curse of experience until I began learning how to play guitar a few years back. I’d always wanted to play, and finally learning how was a lot of fun—and in those early days when every new chord or bit of music theory knowledge was a revelation, I felt like every song I put together was a major creative breakthrough. Looking back, those songs are terrible—but at the time I had that sense of excitement that I once had with writing. It made me realize how I’d lost some of that in recent years with my writing work.

Don’t get me wrong—I still feel vital and creative. I still get excited about writing something new and I still push myself to experiment and try new techniques. But the excitement is tempered by the knowledge that what I produce probably isn’t going to be a world-shattering new idea. I’ve been at this too long. I know my own limitations too well, and I am much more familiar with the body of work produced over the centuries, so I can no longer fool myself that I’m doing anything seismically new.

That’s the curse of experience: The knowledge that you’re not as smart as you once thought you were.

Still, we beat on. Knowing your limitations doesn’t mean you don’t still have a fire in the belly for creating something awesome. It just means you don’t fool yourself quite so much. There’s a sadness in that, but also power. It’s like my knowledge of the capabilities of my liver: Limiting, sure, but also kind of comforting to know where your line is.

There’s a persistent myth that your first effort on a manuscript will be terrible. That a good book or story requires dozens of revision cycles, endless routing through beta readers, and wordsmithing until it’s almost unrecognizable when compared to the first draft.

This is what scientists call horseshit.

Hole in One

Some stories require that kind of massive effort, it’s true. And some writers like to work like that, which is fine. But neither of those facts means that your story isn’t actually kind of great in its initial draft form. There’s a sort of understandable instinct to distrust things that seem too easy, and when you bang out 80,000 words in 3 months and actually love everything you did, it’s natural enough to feel like you must be missing something.

But, hey, it happens, so why not to you? In other words, don’t start tearing your first draft apart and jump into a heavy revision just because. Consider the possibility that your first draft is actually great, and maybe all you need is a polish?

Of course, I say this as a writer who tends to be very satisfied with my first drafts, or, you know, completely unsatisfied. In other words, I either like my first draft enough to polish it and do something with it, or I despise it and want to bury it in the back yard and never admit it existed. For me, personally, there’s nothing in-between.

But assuming your first draft is trash just … well, just because all first drafts must be trash? That’s crazy. In fact, I’d encourage the opposite: Assume your first draft is fire, and then try to find reasons why it isn’t. Because I firmly believe most first drafts are actually pretty good, and most revision is kind of unnecessary in the sense that it doesn’t actually improve things, just re-arranges them.

Of course, what do I know. I’m sitting here wearing a cardboard box as pants as I write this.