Writing is a painfully personal experience for most writers, and I think that can be constructive to a point; it keeps us humble and always reaching to live up to the expectations of our art. But I also think we can romanticize writing to the point of paralysis. It’s easy to forget that effective writing, besides being an art, is also simply a result of practice.
In that vein, here are some thoughts — spurring, and hopefully encouraging — that may convince you to carry on when you feel unworthy to hold a pencil or sit at that keyboard:
- Your brain is a muscle; you need to work it out. Nobody becomes a competent pianist by reading theory books alone, and you will never grow in your writing by simply thinking or reading about writing. These things can help, but at the end of the day you need to write, even if it feels like you’re making no progress (I’ve been there, trust me). You can only learn some lessons on the battlefield. You need to make mistakes to grow. If you write regularly, you will inevitably get better at it. If you don’t, not only will you not improve, you may go backwards.
- You need to be yourself. Oh, it’s pretty normal for beginning writers to mimic their favourite author’s style. This is fine and healthy to start off, but eventually you need to rely on your own voice. The good news is that you don’t have to find your writer’s voice any more than you have to find your own political opinions. Your unique writing voice is the voice you write in when you’re not thinking about writing in any voice at all. It’s as unique as your fingerprint and entirely beyond your control. One problem might be that you don’t like your writing voice, which is a different problem that can be remedied over time, as you write.
- If you work in a skilled field or raise children or climb mountains or anything else that involves a fair degree of competence — do you recall the moment a bolt of lightning struck you in the head and you were suddenly transformed from a hopeless hack to a confident expert in your field? Of course not, because that’s not how things work. Instead, you performed said skill probably for years, each day rolling into the next, until one day you looked around and realized you were an expert in something that once made you feel like a moron. Why should writing be any different? It isn’t. You may have some epiphanies in your writing career, but you’re not guaranteed to have any, nor are they necessary to success.
- No matter how crappy your first draft writing gets — and at this point I’ve personally written reams of word turds that sit stinking at the bottom of my desk drawer — writing those embarrassing bombs is better than writing nothing at all. I find that when I write something I hate, I can often leave it for a bit, and when I go back to it, I see something I didn’t see before. I find little nuggets of okayness that I can shine up, or that send me on a different, more productive path.
So here’s my final thought for you — if you’re serious about being a writer, then just write. It’s like doing that half-hour jog in the morning, or eating that steamed broccoli because your doctor told you to. Your current enjoyment is beside the point. Olympic athletes train obsessively, and you have to believe they sometimes feel like giving up. Becoming a publishable author isn’t a hobby, it’s a marathon, so instead of surfing the Internet, which is the author’s version of sitting and eating cheese puffs instead of going to the gym, get your ass onto that seat and write your daily words. You’re paying your dues, so someday you can look around and realize you’ve made it. All the magic happens while you’re busy busting your hump.
Happy writing.
