I don’t always enjoy sitting down to write. Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. Most of the time it’s pretty awesome; I mean, what other hobby/job/side-gig do you get to sit down and create stuff out of nothing? Art, I suppose. Or sculpting. Or composing music. Or coming up with a new dance move. Okay, well, you get the point though, right? Creative people get to do awesome stuff, and I feel lucky that I get to write about worlds and people and situations that never existed anywhere else before. It’s fun, is what I’m saying, except when it’s not.
There are reasons why it’s not always a barrel of laughing fish. Sometimes I don’t know what to write next. Sometimes I don’t know what to write at all. Sometimes I’ve written myself into a corner and I don’t know how to get out. Sometimes I get stuck because I need to do more research first. Sometimes I just can’t think of how to start. Sometimes what I want to write starts off sounding stupid in my head. Sometimes I’m just plain exhausted, especially after a long hard day at work, and I just want to do nothing at all.
What I’ve learned in those times when I don’t want to write, or when I feel like I just can’t write, is to just Trust the Process. It’s like a mantra that I often hear in the back of my mind. I sit down at the keyboard or the pad of paper to write, and I don’t know where to even begin, and I think to myself, Maybe I need ice cream first, or, Maybe I need hot chocolate at Starbucks, or, I probably just need a nap first. If I sit there long enough though — and don’t give in to those other temptations — eventually my mantra comes around and tells me, Just trust the process.
This mantra implies two things: 1) that there is a process, and 2) that it can be trusted. It took me a long time to figure out what my process was. For a long time, I didn’t even know I had a process. Probably I didn’t, or at least if I did, it involved a lot of kicking and flailing around and mostly just trying not to drown. When I first started writing, it was exactly like that. I threw myself into the deep end of the pool — with absolutely zero idea how to swim — and did everything I could just to keep my face above the surface of the water. Eventually I learned how to doggy-paddle. My feet were supposed to do something, behind me rather than beneath me. I propelled myself around. I swallowed some water. I coughed and spit and sputtered. After a while I learned how to relax. I became more fluid. I swam under the water as well as above the water. I learned about breast strokes, butterflies, crawls, side strokes, free style, floating. I’m not winning any races or anything with my swimming/writing, but at least I’m not struggling to tread water, and I can pretty much go wherever I want.
I’ve refined my process over the years. I’m still figuring it out, still working at it. I’ll likely keep adding to it, keep tweaking it, keep modifying and refining it as a learn new things and relax even more and become more comfortable. What I have learned about my process though is that I can, in fact, trust it. Does it always work 100% of the time? No, just as nothing ever works 100% of the time. But more often than not, I can count on it mostly working.
So what is my process? I guess this is pretty much it. Bear with me while I sort through this and nail it down on the page:
First, relax and believe that the process works.
Words will come, your imagination will open up, and you will get into it. Most of the time, my writing suffers because of my perfectionism. I expect every word to be perfect, every idea to be original, every character to write himself, every scene to perform exactly as I’ve planned out. I have to lower my expectations and stop demanding that every writing session should be perfect, stop demanding that any writing session should be perfect. Relax. Breathe. Close my eyes if that’s what it takes. What I find is the more I write, the more I just push through, the more the images show up. You have to prime the pump before the water flows. And once it starts flowing, it spills out in buckets.
Write a single word.
Just one word. Any word. In any order. It doesn’t even matter. Place one brick on top another brick on top another brick on top another, and very soon you have a wall. Build four walls together, and you’ve got … I dunno … a house? A tree fort? A zombie bunker? An igloo? Whatever you want, man. Point is, structures are built from small individual components layered on top of and around one another. Same thing with stories. Every story starts with a single word. String words together and you have sentences. String sentences together and you have paragraphs and pages and scenes and chapters. Before you know it, BOOM!, you’ve got a whole darn story. Start with a single word, just one. What word comes after that? After that? After that? Sometimes I get so overwhelmed thinking about the whole story I forget about the smaller units that make up the whole. Just start with what comes next. Even the pyramids began at one small corner in the ground and were built up from there by the aliens.
Rough sketches before permanent lines.
The more I learn about drawing, the more I see parallels with writing. No artist slaps down paint without first doing some rough sketches. Light lines scratched loosely over the paper. Maybe some general thumbnail sketches first to figure things out. Some small silhouettes drawn quickly on the page. You’re sort of getting a feel for the thing, trying to get down the overall shape. My perfectionism always tells me, You should be able to write this story flawlessly from start to finish, every word perfect and in order, with no rewrites necessary. Write, finish with THE END, send it off to an editor, get the sale. Uh huh. Because that’s always been a thing for every writer who’s ever published a story. That’s not even realistic, people! That’s not a thing! And yet my perfectionist tells me that’s what should happen with every single story I come up with. I have to start loose and messy. What’s the overall shape I want this story to take? What kind of vibe or emotion am I going for here? What kind of setting? What kind of characters? What message am I trying to convey with this thing? Just write, fast and furiously, whatever comes to mind, anything and everything. Just get it all down. My perfectionist is a liar. Contrary to what he’s telling me, there’s always time to go back and change things later.
Forget all the writing advice and just write.
All the writing advice in the world was necessary, at least for me, and at least for a little while. But then those chestnuts started sticking in my head and hampering my writing. That’s purple prose, don’t write that. That’s telling, not showing, change that. That’s first person present, you should change that to third person past. That’s an adverb, delete it. There’s not enough conflict in that scene, go back and rewrite it. You didn’t write enough try-fail cycles. Is that a proper Freytag Pyramid? I don’t think so, try again. Your plot is lagging there, you need more conflict, and make sure it’s constantly rising. On and on goes my internal perfectionist. Writing advice is like water wings or training wheels or electroshock therapy — necessary at first, maybe, but eventually you gotta stop relying on it, or worse, using it as a distraction from actual writing. That happened to me a lot, thinking I had to know more before I could actually write. Learning is part of writing, right? Nnnnyeah okay maybe, except when it stops being learning and starts being procrastination. Learn the difference and be honest with yourself. No book on writing advice contains the Holy Grail, that one magical phrase that’s gonna suddenly unlock the hidden secret that takes you from “wannabe” to “published pro”. Took me a long time to realize that. Just write.
Be the avocado.
I love me some guacamole. We live in Ohio, and in Ohio we can’t grow avocadoes, which means we are forced to steal buy ours from the grocery. They’re hard, these grocery store avocadoes. Sometimes we take them out back and play baseball with them to soften them up. In the colder months though, when it’s too cold out to play baseball, we let them sit on the counter for a month or two until they’re soft enough to mash into guacamole. Stories are like that too. No, you don’t play baseball with them, but you have to let them sit a while and ripen. It never fails to surprise me when I work on a story and think to myself, This is the best story I’ve ever written and I need to send this off right now to an editor who will buy it and pay me a million dollars and pass it around to the staff and tell them, “I discovered this guy! He’s gonna be the greatest!” But I don’t. I shove that story in a drawer and I let it sit for a few weeks while I work on something else. Then I open the drawer and read it and thank my lucky electroshock machine that I didn’t send that off because, Whoa Nelly, that story has issues I never even saw before. That story needs work. It needs cutting up. It needs mashed. It needs whipped together. It needs some salt and some cilantro and some lime juice mixed in there, maybe a little onion, maybe some tomato. It ain’t guacamole yet. (Sure, Subway’s menu might say it’s guacamole, but trust me, it’s not, it’s just mashed up avocado; there’s nothing special about it. Don’t believe everything you read, kids.)
Two re-writes and a final pass (everything else is a pain in the a$$).
I used to beat dead horses … umm … well, to death. Rewrite after rewrite after rewrite after rewrite. Know what I discovered? What was once horsemeat now resembled something closer to guacamole. It wasn’t horse meat anymore, which was sad, because horse meat is quite delicious in Japan and Mongolia. Or so I’ve heard. I’ve never actually been. And now I’m wondering about a nice slab of horse meat covered in guacamole. Mmmm… But I digress. What was I talking about again? Right. Rewrites. I used to rewrite the life and excitement clean out of a story. Another thing I discovered: there’s just so much time I can spend with a story before I’m sick of it and want to delete it from my computer and move on to something else. It’s the pretty girl you date long enough to discover she’s gorgeous on the outside, yeah, but she’s got a nasty personality and poor hygiene and your friends are begging you to stop seeing her and you’re beginning to realize they’re right. Plus, you know, that smell. After my first clean draft, I let my wife and writing group critique it. I’ll take all their comments and suggestions into account and rewrite once more. Then I’ll do one final rewrite just to make sure I’m saying what I want. Then I’ll do a final pass for spelling and grammar, which includes reading it out loud to sand away any remaining splinters. Then I’m done. Finished. The End. Send it off into the wide wild world and work on the next one. Because Done Well Enough is always better than Done Perfectly, just like horse steaks.
And that is pretty much my process. It works for me. I have faith that it works for me. When I’m in doubt, I think back to all the times it’s worked for me in the past and use that to propel me forward. I’m sure it will change and morph as I continue on this journey and learn more about myself and what works best for me. Do you have a process that works for you? Tell me about it in the comments below. And if you take away anything from this post at all, it should be aliens and horse meat.
