Feel Good and Fail Big
By John Vorhaus | August 28, 2014 |
Last time we talked about the writing process from a tyro’s point of view. Let’s continue with that train of thought, and see if we can continue to build a coherent (and at least cautiously optimistic) view of the writer’s life.
Writing has been described as a battlefield, and the metaphor may be apt, but this battlefield is fluid; you never know where you’re going to make your breakthroughs. In fact, given that creativity often involves taking yourself by surprise, you can expect to make breakthroughs in unexpected places. Especially if you’re expecting them.
Expecting the unexpected? Is that what being a writer is about?
In a sense. There is a phenomenon that’s common to writers, the feeling or sensation that washes over us when we see our writing take on a life of its own. You bury yourself in a writing project for an hour or a day or a week or a month or a year, and later you look back and wonder where did all that come from? That’s the magic of writing: I know that I wrote all the words, but they don’t all seem to have been written by me.
There’s either a logical or a mystical explanation for this. Logic tells us that if we work on a project long enough with our conscious mind, eventually our subconscious mind starts to pitch in too. Mystics tell us that creativity is bestowed upon us by higher powers, and by writing we put ourselves into a place where higher powers can act upon us. Which explanation is right? Doesn’t matter. Choose either one you like.
They serve the same end. If you take the logical approach, you’re going to spend more time writing in order to derive more benefit from your subconscious partner. If you take the mystical approach, then you’ll spend more time writing as a means of positioning yourself to receive the gifts that higher powers bestow.
Either way you win, because either way you’re going to spend more time writing. But there’s a catch: To be a well-informed and confident writer, you have to write a lot, yet to write a lot, you have to be a well-informed and confident writer. How do we resolve this paradox? How can we work toward being the kind of writers we want to be in advance of having the necessary craft and craftsmanship to move forward. How do we build strength?
Gradually. By degrees.
You start by pretending that you’re not completely ignorant and ill-informed, and move your writing forward a tiny bit on that basis. Having moved your writing forward a tiny bit, you now have a little more writing experience to draw on. This experience gives you new information and new confidence, which you feed right back into your work. Additional writing gives you more experience of yourself as someone who can do a writer’s job, and also gives you more skills for doing that job. Each time you confront recurring writers’ problems (motivation problems, story problems, logic problems, detail problems – oh, that list is long) you’re incrementally better equipped than you were last time through. Eventually the battle starts to go your way.
Writing alone is not enough, though. You also have to study your writing, examine your process, and experience yourself as the writer you are and the writer you’re becoming. This wedding of write more and study your process moves you toward a well-informed and confident place. A place where a writer can get some real work done.
Take a long view of the battle. You won’t win it overnight. You may not win at all. You might never close the gap between the reality of your writer’s life and the fantasies you create and sustain in its name. That’s all right. You’ll still improve – in ways you can’t even imagine now – just by writing, and by watching yourself write. You’ll get better; it’s a given.
Life is long. If you’re still drawing breath, you still have time to be the kind of writer you want to be. Here’s the kind of writer I want to be: a better writer today than I was yesterday. That’s a reachable goal. [pullquote] Here’s the kind of writer I want to be: a better writer today than I was yesterday. That’s a reachable goal.[/pullquote]That’s something I can do. You can too. It happens automatically if we just keep writing. Well hell, that’s all we really want to do anyway. All that could possible stop us is lack of capability or lack of nerve. And these are two problems that the mere, sheer act of writing solves as well. Do anything long enough and you’re not a rookie anymore. Skill builds confidence and confidence builds skill. Unless you feel you already have too much of both, strive to add to your store.
Words on the page.
Words on the page.
Words on the page.
It always all comes down to that: words on the flipping page.
I feel like I’m trying to sell you a diet supplement, guaranteed to shed pounds! It just can’t be that simple. But it is. Really, it is. If you want to get better, write more. If you want to get flipping better, write flipping more. Take small steps, and take as many as you can. It doesn’t take forever to get good, but it does take time, and it does take work. If you imagined that you didn’t intend to harvest a single word you wrote for even five years, you’d be giving yourself a decent apprenticeship to serve. You’d certainly keep your expectations in check.
But whose got that kind of patience? I want the harvest right now. I want to be good from the start. Okay, fine, but contemplate this: You don’t have to be good to get good. Choose to learn. Choose to have patience. Choose to serve the writer you’ll be in the long run. That’s a place where a writer can stand, and that’s a battle a writer can win. The secret to writing success, it seems to me, is just to feel good and fail big. Everything follows from that.
What are your tools for morale boosting? How do you bootstrap yourself out of a writer’s funk and back into a productive state of mind?
John Vorhaus has written seven novels, including Lucy in the Sky, The California Roll, The Albuquerque Turkey and The Texas Twist, plus the Killer Poker series and (with Annie Duke) Decide to Play Great Poker. His books on writing include The Comic Toolbox, How to Write Good and Creativity Rules!
Yup. Failing big. That’s what I’m sure will happen.
I’m going to do it anyway, because my plan for this story was always to write it for me, so I keep telling myself it won’t matter if I look like the biggest fool on the planet when MY idea of what is right, and how a story ought to end, becomes public knowledge.
I will have it all down on paper, where I can pull it out and read it when I want to.
Then why am I ecstatic when one of my tiny band of loyal readers leaves one of those comments – you know, ‘Couldn’t put it down!’ or ‘Nooooo!’ (but said nicely)?
Because someone else gets it. Gets me. Feels the same about one of my characters.
Many writers have a bit of the outcast or of having been the odd one in their backgrounds – perfectly happy cheerleaders don’t write books – and vindication is a real charge.
Maybe Emily Dickinson was actually happy being unknown – she kept writing, didn’t she?
I keep a file I’ve entitled ‘Reader Love.’ When I’m having trouble with today’s work – which admittedly can be a slog – and the end seems very far away, and ‘why am I doing this with my time?’ digs its little teeth in, I pull out that file – and I remember I made a commitment to finish the story for that reader, as well as myself. And I get back to work.
When a reader sends you: “I can still remember my very first reaction to the massage scene, which was wandering around my house for ten minutes in an explosive daze, muttering “How do you kill any romantic possibilities and then TURN UP THE SEXUAL TENSION?!” It was very, very good. Epic, in fact.” you can wander around yourself in a daze for ten minutes feeling you are doing what you set yourself out to do. Thanks, Rachel!
That’s what I do for morale: words – READER’s words – have power. It’s a two-way street.
Great post; I love it. I’ve learned in my 15 years of writing that failure is more like fear, not the reality. I stay away from that fear because it can derail you. You are right that learning to write does take a lot of time and practice and study (what was that 10,000 hours rule at practicing and learning something?). I find that reading other really good writers helps to illustrate to me what they’ve accomplished in a scene or narrative or character. So, I would add reading to the writing process and craft building.
Supportive and encouraging, John. And, thanks for the mention of ‘still time to do it’ for seniors, like me. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest and most obvious. Practice makes perfect. Write and keep on writing if you want to hone writing skills. (Supplemented with some study and other outside inputs). It works!
For years I subscribed to the wirite-at-your-own-pace philosophy. What I found is that my own pace can come to a grinding hault when I find something to get in my way. So this year I decided to get serious and actually set writing goals and self-imposed deadlines. I also fired the muse, since he doesn’t pay the bills. I’ve set an insane schedule of 6 books per year, but the constant need to put words on paper has actually improved my morale and desire to write more. I may have to back off when the reality of editing sets in, but I’ll still make sure that I am too busy to think about quitting. So, for me, it’s all about challenging myself to do more and do it better. I’m having more fun, and being more productive, than I ever have in the fifteen years I’ve been plugging away at this thing.
“You bury yourself in a writing project for an hour or a day or a week or a month or a year, and later you look back and wonder where did all that come from?”
I had to nod when I read this. In my first attempt at a novel I wrote by hand and forced myself to get to the end – no matter what. It was painful, but I learned a critical lesson: I can do it. I wrote my second attempt with this lesson as my torch, and it saw me through to another completed manuscript. But I also learned that written is not done, and had to step back. So I studied, took a workshop, learned about outlining. I was equipped to try novel three and hope it worked out. The only thing was, working from an outline slowed the process because I had to think carefully as I went. It took me a year, but I was faithful, putting in an hour a day every day. There were even days I didn’t want to write so as consolation I brought all my notes to bed and lay down with the computer (that, actually, was one of my better sessions and I laid down a trail of words worth keeping – talk about that magic, or subconscious connection).
Point is it all adds up and even today it’s all still adding up. Tough as the writing slower writing was, I learned more about how outlining fits into my process. But I also learned how much it can cramp me, as much as discovery writing can, so I’m about to embark on a new adventure, putting the last year of craft research and reflection together and rewriting my recent novel as a new draft to give it a new edge, and I’ll need that same focus, but the confidence from previous projects is there: I will make it; the story will get better; eventually, it will be as good as it needs to be and I as a writer will keep making everything better in the next novel.
Thanks for the booster – much appreciated.
John-
What, I wondered, could I possibly add to this wise post? Not much, but maybe this: What constitutes “good”?
Back in the Eighties when I was a young and struggling agent, I wrote fiction to support myself. Romance novels. YA. A certain teen girl detective owes a few of her adventures to me. Sturdy work, good enough to get published.
When I look back on those novels nowadays, I cringe. They’re not good. But wait, they *were* good. So what is good? Good is good enough for current purposes, for now. Perhaps that’s always true, as with first drafts and wherever you are with your WIP and even with your career.
I see newer writers use all kinds strategies to boost themselves: “I can do this”, attaching to published authors, clinging to small markers of progress.
When you see in people’s Twitter profiles, “Repped by Agent So-and-So” it’s a marker that really says, “I’m not there yet but see, I’m making progress! I even have some status!”
Long published authors don’t do those things. They write, just write. And grow. They’re locals, longtime residents. They know the back roads, best donuts, whom to talk to in the town hall, make cakes for the VFW bake sales and know all the secrets that we don’t.
Or maybe we do. Maybe you let us in on the most important secret today. Good post, John, thanks.
John–thanks for your “when you’ve got lemons, make lemonade” post. You do a good job of re-purposing
“failure.”
What a wonderful post, John. This summer I wrote a lot in my notebook since we were travelling and doing stuff with the kids. I put aside the revisions I needed to do and let myself fill up. Now, we’re all getting into our school/sports/writing routine. I am so grateful to have this writing life with my family. But it takes a while to switch gears from the lazy summer writing to productive writing. I get antsy because I want the fruits of the harvest now, but this year I’ve been working on patience … and it has served me well. I am revising a NF book and it’s almost done, though I know full well, I’ll revise it at least a couple more times with my editor. I have a novel to finish tweaking. And I get to go to my local writing conference next month, which will be a sure shot in the arm for getting some stories out the door.
Thanks for the kick in the pants, John. Some days I am so much better at words on the page than others. You’ve motivated me to stop playing around on the Internet and write the rest of the day.
Some of the share links are wonky today. Couldn’t post to Twitter or to Pinterest.
Wow John. What a fantastic post. Words on the page is it! and trusting myself as a writer but also having the humility to know I have so much to learn still. How to juggle all the learning as a writer and be able to include that into my own voice and style is something I am currently wrestling with.
The good news is I recently looked at the first 3 chapters, assessed them, gave them to an experienced editor friend who gave me the exact feedback on what I needed to do, that I had given myself.eg. not so descriptive, develop the characters more and a severe edit!
So, my trust has increased and my novel is writing itself again. I am purely the vechicle.
Superb post, John. I dont have anything to boost my motivation at the moment, except for the very article you just wrote.
There’s no real magic: If you want to get better at anything (writing, running, etc) just keep on doing it and learn from your mistakes.
Elvis
You might notice that I’m only getting to this post in mid October. It was the wishful thinking of your latest post about Con-going that got me this far.
Thanks for reminding me that, although there is a sleeping infant on my left arm, my right hand is free and has things to get down on paper.
And I need to pick someone’s brain about poker..;