A Writer's Tale

Forget about competing with other writers, impressing editors, worrying whether anyone will ever publish your book or promote it, or whether it will ever get into any store or into the home of any reader.

Put it all behind you.

Sit down and write.

I know, easier said than done.

Here’s a suggestion. If you can’t get past the “What-The-Hell’s-The-Use-Anyway”

feelings, try reading.

Go to a book store and buy a few paperbacks that have recently been published in the area of your interest. Take them home. Read them…

And grin.

Because if you’re a good writer yourself, you’ll notice that the stuff you’ve just bought is not so good.

And you’ll think, I can write better than this!

It’s very encouraging to discover that much of what is being bought and published day in and day out is complete, utter, stinking crap.

The realization is liberating.

Knowing that so much crap is being published, you have absolutely no reason to be despondent about your chances of eventual success. (Many of our greatest books were written by people who picked up their pens for the first time after reading a piece of published junk and thinking, I can do better than that.) All you need to do is vigorously, persistently write non-crap.

Of course, a great many editors aren’t capable of distinguishing crap from non-crap, so the journey to success may be long and frustrating. But sooner or later, good material will be discovered and published. I’m certain of that.

Fairly certain.

At any rate, you’d be an idiot to let the What-The-Hell’s-The-Use-Anyway Syndrome hold you back. You have a fine chance of being a successful writer if you persist.

Writer’s block can also be caused by confusion and despair about how to proceed with a novel or story. You’re not sure what to do, so you can’t do anything.

This may happen when you’re trying to start a new project or when you’re in the midst of one.

When just trying to begin a new project, the difficulty often come from a fear that your basic story idea isn’t good enough.

When you’re first starting out as a writer, you may have an exaggerated idea about what “good enough” means. How can you possibly come up with an idea that hasn’t already been used and is something that people may want to read it? After you’ve had some books published, you will probably be faced with competing against yourself. When I finished writing The Stake, I ran into a block because I was worried about living up to my own creation.

The Stake was in many ways a much better novel than anything I’d written before. I didn’t want my next novel to be not as good as The Stake. Therefore, I found myself unable to write anything at all.

Here’s my solution.

I thought, Screw it. I’ll write the book I want to write.

I’ll write the best book I can. If it isn’t as good as The Stake, too bad.

Face it. You can only write as good as you can write. Give them the best you can. If they want more than that, the hell with them.

There is, however, life after the “screw you” phase.

Once you’ve determined which story you want to tell, “good enough” or otherwise, you might still encounter troubles getting started.

The trick is, don’t let them stop you.

Take a while to analyze possible sources of the trouble.

In my experience, difficulties in getting started often have very specific causes.

Maybe this isn’t the story you really should be writing at this time. You sense that it won’t work, that something about it is beyond your reach. Maybe it’s too complex.

Maybe it’s missing a key ingredient that you can’t quite identify. Maybe you should put it aside and take another look at it down the road. (Many of the books that I’ve written recently would’ve been impossible for me to have written in my earlier years. I needed more experience, more confidence, more knowledge.) Your block may be the result of strong feelings, possibly on a subconscious level, that writing this particular book at this particular time is a bad idea.

If that’s the case, the cure is to move on to a new project.

However, your difficulty in getting started may have cures that are far less drastic.

A common problem is that you might be trying to start your story at the wrong point in time. Maybe you’re trying to begin the tale too early too many days or weeks before the real conflict gets under way. No matter what genre you’re writing in, the best place to begin is when the trouble starts. Begin telling your tale too early, and you might just be floundering around, trying to write scenes that serve little or no purpose. Begin with the trouble, and things should run smoothly.

If your plot doesn’t have trouble, drop it. Because if you don’t have trouble in your story, you don’t have a story.