-
Nothing New Under the Sun
I used to be quite prolific in this space. I know that’s difficult to believe as you scroll down to find the most recent post is from February and the one before that is almost a year older and neither of them has a clever title like, “How to Write When You’ve Forgotten What Words Are,” or “How Can I Possibly Finish This Book When My Protagonist Is Smarter Than I Am?”, or “Six Places in Your House (Besides Under Your Desk) Where You Can Hide From Your Novel.” It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about the writing life. (I have plenty.) It’s just that I don’t…
-
How to Be a Writer During a Pandemic
It’s been a crazy year for writers. For some of you, it’s been a curiously productive season, despite all the challenges introduced by the pandemic. Perhaps your writing success was prompted by the change to your routine, or the self-induced pressure to make something good out of something awful. Or maybe it was that “I’m a writer…I can’t not write” thing forcing words to the page. [Is that a real thing? Or just something writers say to sound cool? It sounds oppressive to me. “I’d love to feed the kids and walk the dog and shower more than once a month, but I can’t leave the computer because my hands…
-
Why
It’s a common response to the big “why” question. I hear it all the time. I’ve used it myself once or twice. “I write because I have to.” But unless someone is pressing your fingers to the keyboard, it’s simply untrue. Even for those of you who are facing a looming deadline. You don’t have to meet that deadline. Really, you don’t. Yeah, you’ll ruin your editor’s day, and you could theoretically lose your publishing deal, but no one is forcing you to give up binge-watching “Jennifer Jones” in order to finish chapter sixteen – the one where that thing happens you haven’t yet thought of that makes the whole novel work. No one is forcing you…
-
The First Book
Congratulations. You’ve written a novel. Your first. It’s no longer a thing “you’d like to do someday,” it’s a thing you did. The End. You just wrote that, and it made you smile. Family members barely recognize you. Where’s the sullen, contentious, lost, confused, un-showered, frustrated writer-wannabe they’d come to expect every time you crawled out of your writing cave into the real world to briefly consider eating food that doesn’t come out of a plastic bag? She’s gone. That was the exhausted, mud-caked, sweaty Basic Training writer; the “I’m going to finish this thing if it kills me” writer. You’re not her anymore. You’re a Bonafide Author now. And guess what? Your book, this very first novel…
-
I Quit. Again.
There is a tiny flame that burns deep within a writer. A pilot light. In moments – some lingering, some fleeting – that pilot light sparks to life and becomes a furnace of ideas. Great books have been stitched together from such moments. These are not sweet and beautiful moments. There are no butterflies whispering perfect words into your ears. There are no fairies singing songs of your literary brilliance. These are pain-filled moments where orcs threaten you with bodily harm and the flame itself threatens to incinerate your soul. Your fingers fly across the keyboard not in delight, but chasing fire. You fear the unpredictable flame, as well you should, but the end of it more. So you type and type and type and…
-
What If?
Usually it goes something like this: What if I’m a terrible writer. Or (gasp) a truly average writer? What if all the kind words people offer about my stories are nothing more than polite lies accompanied by fake smiles because they want to avoid hurting my feelings? What if my dogged pursuit of traditional publishing is a fool’s errand? What if there are exactly zero literary agents interested in the kind of stories I write? What if the only thing I learn from querying is how poorly I handle rejection? What if I self-publish and the book just sits there on the virtual shelf, impervious to my attempts to find an audience for it? What if the book’s cover is…
-
#amwaiting
When the language gods sat down at their very expensive polished maple conference table to decide which term to use for the art of putting words together to tell stories, “writing” wasn’t their first choice. “Bloodletting” actually had the most up-votes and was likely to get the nod. But then one of the lesser gods – the one everyone mistakenly called Vern – felt compelled to mention how similar “writing” was to “waiting,” which they’d already determined would mean “excruciatingly long pauses where nothing appeared to be happening.” While he was publically showing his support for the already-popular idea of eliminating “writing” from contention, he was secretly hoping his observation might be clever…