In keeping with the last couple of posts, I’m going to give you my take on the most persistent problems in the writing life. This gets monotonous, I know. I swear, I’ll get on a different topic next time. Anyway, I’ve been doing this – writing – thing for about six or seven years now. That’s writing seriously, mind you – I’ve done writing as a hobby for closer to 50 years. In all that time, certain problems show up, at least for me, on a regular basis.
No time to write. This has always been a huge problem for me. I work a 9 to 5 to pay the bills, plus I go to the gym 3 nights a week and have other duties around the house. Not to mention feeding my fat ass. Scraping two or three hours together on anything like a daily basis is really tough. I find that I just have to tighten my schedule, put my head down and plow forward most days. Thankfully, my wife is really supportive of my efforts. That, and I have a few tricks up my sleeve (shh!).
Dry spells. I won’t call this ‘writer’s block’, because I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced that. A blank piece of paper or a blank screen does not cause panic in me or cause me to question my decision to be a writer. I almost never have an issue deciding what to write, just which of the dozen or so ideas I want to focus on. However, in nearly every project, I’ve had a break – a period when the words just won’t come. Sometimes it only lasts a day, sometimes a month or more. Usually this happens because the narrative has stopped making sense to me, and I need to rethink it. Once I’ve found a way through, I’m usually good. Pounding at it doesn’t help.
Perfectionism. This is part of the ‘screaming monkey brain’ that tries to tell me that what I just wrote is crap. If I listen to it, it starts telling me that everything I write is crap, and I should just give up. The only way through this (that I’ve found) is to remind the screecher that ‘The first draft of anything is shit’ (Hemingway, again), and that I’ll fix it in the edit. The monkey just wants you to stop writing, it doesn’t really care about the content. So, I keep writing crap – because you can always edit a crappy page, you can’t edit a blank page.
Distractions. Another way for my meddling brain to get me to stop writing, or never start. I don’t spend much time on social media, and I despise television in most of its forms, so that’s not at issue. But I admit to being addicted to YouTube, and I can waste an entire day in Google, jumping down rabbit holes. You see, what I’m really addicted to is information – I love to learn new stuff. Packaged and sanitized ‘entertainment’ disgusts me. But I have to be very careful to only allow myself to go on YouTube once my work for the day is done.
The screeching halt. This is an extreme version of the ‘dry spell’, where no amount of thinking or plotting seems to be able to get me around the impasse. It happened most recently with a science-fiction story I’ve had in mind for over 30 years. I restarted the damn thing twice, first to fix a plot/character issue, and then to fix a massive time hole in the middle of the story. When the story balked this last time, I realized that I’d lost the story and the characters entirely. I’ll get back to it and make it work, but not this year. I refuse to quit.
Criticism and Imposter Syndrome. These are problems I’ve only recently started to notice. Most criticism washes right off me – I don’t generally care what other people think. There are, however, a few people whose opinion I very greatly prize. A harsh word from one of them can put me in a nasty tailspin. I recall it happening many moons ago concerning a story I wrote and the opinions of a trusted sibling. Yeah, it hurt. Pissed my wife off, something fierce. As far as Imposter Syndrome is concerned, I’ve only recently started to feel this (see my blog ‘I’m a Fake’), and my only real defense so far is just to live through it.
Deadlines. I don’t currently do freelance copywriting, and have no plans to do so, so that kind of deadline – a deadline set for me by others – is not what I mean. What I mean is the setting of deadlines for myself in order to push the writing along. Many people will insist that deadlines are an artificial and unnecessary constraint on your freedom as an artist. I felt this way for a long time, but now I see this as an attitude I had to grow out of. As long as I am careful with my deadlines, I can usually get close enough to meeting them. And anything that pushes my output along is a good thing. When I do miss a deadline, it’s usually because I hit a dry spell. I have learned to be gentle with myself when this happens.
Many of the other issues that people have with writing – whether it’s where to get new ideas, or how to write like a famous author without sounding like that author, or feelings of inadequacy – I just don’t get. As I’ve said many times, my ego is way overblown, so I manage to avoid a lot of these problems. And I get new ideas all the time – more than I can ever get to, probably. My biggest issue, as I said before, is finding enough time to write. I have too much left to write, and not enough time to do it in. Good luck in your own journey – I don’t recommend following in my footsteps.
Be well.
bcd