I Write Because I’m a Writer, and That’s What Writers Do.

In Writing on 10 November 2009 with 5 comments

I despaired yesterday.

After decid­ing to fin­ish (or rather, truth be told, get a bet­ter start on) Book One of the Love & War paper series, I sat down at my desk to write and ended up read­ing chap­ters one through four, reas­sur­ing myself that I don’t, in fact, suck. While there are def­i­nitely sec­tions that need to be rewrit­ten, and it seems I need to make up my mind about how a cou­ple of char­ac­ters intend to inter­act with each other, the story thus far is solid.

But by the end of the day I had only writ­ten 750 words.

That’s ridicu­lous.

I’m so eas­ily dis­tracted. I admit it: most of the time I’d rather watch Big Love on HBO on Demand than write. I keep remind­ing myself what I learned from that fan­tas­tic Twyla Tharp book: writ­ing and being cre­ative is a job. It’s work. It’s not always going to be fun, it won’t always come eas­ily. And like every other job out there, you still have to do it.

Still I man­aged to dis­tract myself. I checked Twitter inces­santly. I text mes­saged old friends. I added new friends to Facebook. And all the while I won­dered to myself how the hell I was going to fin­ish this novel in two years let alone three months (which is what I’ve given myself for the first draft). The only thing I could man­age to make myself do was read and wonder.

Then I took a walk. I talked it out. What specif­i­cally needed to hap­pen next? (I’d been stalling because I had only fig­ured out so much of the plot, and once I reached that part I didn’t know where to go next.)  What was the dri­ving force? Who is the vil­lain? I know it seems like some of this basic stuff should have already been worked out by now, but it hasn’t. That’s not really how I write. I don’t so much dic­tate as I do med­i­tate, let­ting the story come from some sub­con­scious part of my mind and find its way to the com­puter screen.

So I took a good long walk, talked to myself out loud. (My neigh­bors know I’m crazy. My talk­ing to myself is the least of their wor­ries. They’re just glad I finally put blinds up in my bed­room win­dows.) After 45 min­utes, I had the plot worked out. Some details needed more thought, but since I wasn’t to them yet, they could wait. I knew what had to hap­pen next. I was even jazzed about writ­ing it.

But when I got home, the inter­net really needed my atten­tion. I needed to make din­ner. And excuses upon excuses piled up until I had nowhere else to go but 43folders.com

And lo and behold, one of my per­sonal heroes, Merlin Mann had a piece posted about writ­ing in honor of NaNoWriMo. I read the article.

And I cried. I felt like he was speak­ing to me.

I pad out to the liv­ing room where my hus­band is sit­ting on the couch. “I need help,” I say. “I need a sched­ule. I need to write. I need to get this book out of me and move on to the next thing. But between Zachary, and work­ing out, and house­work, and cook­ing I feel like I have no time to do the very thing I stopped work­ing to do. I never signed up to be a housewife.”

My hus­band smiles. He’s the one who bought me the Twyla Tharp book. Though he doesn’t say any­thing, he knows the obsta­cles I’ve just listed are the least of my prob­lems. My biggest prob­lem is me.

“Here’s what you do,” he says in his project man­ager voice. “Take Zachary to school at 7:30. Come home, enjoy your cof­fee, have your break­fast, set­tle into your day. You should be ready to work out at 9:00am. Do your work­out, stretch, shower. Start writ­ing at 10:00am. Write until 12pm. Take a break for 30 min­utes; have some lunch. At 12:30, go back to your office and write until 2:30. Don’t write in the liv­ing room on your lap­top. This is your job. You do your job in your office. You can write for fun in the liv­ing room. Pick Zachary up from school. If you’ve writ­ten five thou­sand words, you can stop for the day. If you haven’t, get your 5,000 words on paper. They don’t have to be good words. Just get them down. When you’re done with that you can worry about tidy­ing up and prepar­ing dinner.”

I shake my head. “I’m going to need more than four hours of writ­ing. Stephen King writes for eight hours a day,” I say. I feel defeated.

“Well right now you don’t write for an hour a day,” he says, not with­out reproach. “So let’s see how four hours goes.”

Four hours is a sur­pris­ingly long time when you don’t check your email, send text mes­sages, get on World of Warcraft “just for a sec­ond”, or waste the whole after­noon on Twitter.

In four hours today I man­aged to write 5,000 words. About 4,000 of the words are good. The other 1,000 might need some work. But they’re there. The plot is devel­op­ing. The story is fur­ther along than it was yesterday.

Tomorrow we’ll start all over again. I’ll look for­ward to my work­out more than I will the writ­ing, and I hate work­ing out. But I’ll buckle down and I’ll do it any­way. Because I’m a writer. And writ­ing is what we do.

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