by Dara Girard
Go to sleep a half hour later or wake up a half hour earlier to write.
Write in five to fifteen minute intervals. Just to jot down an idea. In the kitchen, while boiling water, scribble down a sentence. On Sunday, Malcolm discovered the body. Good you’re done for the day. Tomorrow you’ll add something more and the day after that even more. It doesn’t matter how much you put down, just that you write something. It’s like using drops of water to fill a bucket. Eventually, each drop will accumulate into a story. Slowly you’ll eke out more time to write.
Don’t let time be the enemy of your dreams. Don’t dream of the day when you’ll have all the time you need to write. Make time now.
I’m Not Smart Enough
Life is my college. May I graduate well and earn some honors!
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
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You are smart enough and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I doubt my fourth grade teacher would believe I’m a writer now. I missed most of recess that year because I was kept inside to redo my English tests (grammar, spelling etc.), but I still wrote stories and poems and plays. I kept writing. Successful or smart people recognize their limitations and hire others to compensate for them. You have all the skills you need to make your writing dreams come true and one of those skills is delegation.
Use other people’s strengths to your advantage. Are you unsure about your subject? Talk to an expert. Grammar not a strong point? Read a book, hire someone, or get a trusted friend to look it over for you. Are you a poor speller? So what. Write the way you think the words are spelled then look them up later or just use spell check on your computer or have someone proofread. The one thing you need to remember is that readers want others to instruct them or to tell them a good story. They don’t care about your limitations or shortcoming as long as your words do their job. You’re only limited by your fears.
I Have a Disease
I will in no way belittle the burdens of a disease, but don’t let it stop you. The writer Christy Brown (the subject of the movie My Left Foot, a great inspirational movie) had a major handicap and still made his literary contribution. Debbie Macomber overcame dyslexia to become a New York Times Best-Selling writer. Eva Rutland is blind and uses speech recognition. After his near fatal accident, Steven King continued to write through the pain. There are authors who have continued writing after surviving cancer, struggling with muscular dystrophy, dealing with diabetes and coping with many other ailments.
I, too, struggle with a chronic illness that impacts my “quality of life.” I faced ten years of being undiagnosed (and at times, misdiagnosed) and I continue to struggle in managing my illness, but my writing kept me going and continues to do so. I don’t focus on my illness and I encourage others to do the same. Your words are needed.
Write for five minutes a day. That’s all. It will add up.
It’s the act of movement that differentiates the winners from the losers. Winners keep moving like the turtle, unlike the hare that finds reasons to stop. Get moving. Toss away excuses, they have no place in your dream plan.
Excuses are easy to fall into and are the enemy of resilience. When you have written only three pages of a three hundred-page novel, the “I don’t have time” excuse will pop up. A rejection turns into an “I’m not smart enough” campaign. You see a fresh-faced young writer get a million-dollar contract and you tell yourself that you could have written that book if you weren’t always so sick.
Excuses are the perfect shield for fear and the longest and most painful road to regret. You can be yourself (flawed, imperfect) and succeed. Get rid of excuses and take responsibility for your dreams.
I know this section might make some of you angry. Many aspiring writers write me and say, “You don’t understand! I have a really good excuse!” You probably do and that’s fine. I just hope that it’s good enough to combat regret.
After excuses, the next dream killer is the Poverty Complex. Many people think that writers are either very rich or very poor. But there are plenty of writers who are making a good living and you can be one of them. Don’t fall into the Poverty Complex. Here are a few tips on how to avoid it.
Make Money Matter
Because the thought of poverty is a dream killer, think of riches. Yes, there are people who will write for free. This fact can make it difficult to earn a living. Don’t worry about it. Set your standards and go for high markets. Make sure to work with those who value your skill and will pay for it. Kill the starving artist stereotype. Unless it gives you pleasure, pay no mind to the statement “It’s impossible to make a living as a writer.” It’s a poverty trap. People won’t pay for writing if they can get away with it. But don’t let them.
As a professional, demand to be paid. If it’s a low paying market, make sure you’re in it for the right reasons (good exposure, to get clips etc.) but don’t stay there. Branch out into bigger markets.
Make money matter. You don’t want to live on noodles for the rest of your life and you don’t have to. You don’t need to be greedy or obnoxious, just business savvy. A check always helps the ego.
Develop the key attitude that you deserve to make a living as a writer: Whether that is through self publishing, charging $100 an hour or demanding an advance of $15,000 or more. Don’t fall into the starving artist trap. The world at large will trick you into thinking that you must love what you do at the expense of money. But you have to eat. A person who hands out fries gets paid and so should you.
Book publishers don’t make most of their money on books, they make it on selling the rights to those books. You’re selling information that can become much more. Synergy is the name of the game: learn how can you take one idea and transform it into different forms.
Audio, scripts, articles, merchandise, try to see the bigger picture before you hand over all your rights. Be strategic. If you decide to take a low advance because there are other benefits to the deal, that’s strategy. Taking a low advance or low pay because you’re grateful someone’s willing to pay you, that’s a poverty trap.
Getting Started
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I’ve met many individuals who want a career as a writer, but who won’t make it because they haven’t mastered the first step. They can’t get started. They do a lot of busy work, but no writing. This isn’t uncommon; it’s a safety net. You can’t criticize what is not written. You can’t be judged on what you haven’t done. Unfortunately, dreams can die in the process.
Page fright is a common malady among beginning writers and even among some professionals. It panics writers until they’re buried under how-to books, overwhelmed with lecture notes, have watched numerous documentaries, read biographies and done everything except what they need to do — write. Similar to experiencing stage fright, you encounter a blank page in all its brilliance and as you stare you feel yourself grow smaller and your ideas grow less significant. You worry about revealing yourself to be a fool, an uncreative fool with no original thoughts or ideas, no ability to add to the millions of works that came before you. You know the first sentence — no the first word — is important, but how can you compete with:
“Call me Ishmael” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” (Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis)
“Jack Torrance thought: officious little prick.” (Stephen King, The Shining)
“Death with all its cruel beauty, lived in the bayou.” (Nora Roberts, Midnight Bayou)
Soon drops of sweat moisten the page or keyboard and you know there’s something in the kitchen that needs to be cleaned (the knives look kind of dull).
Halt! Stay where you are. This is not a time to flee; it is a time to fight with words. Any words. Your first try need not be brilliant. Why do you think there are erasers or delete buttons? If you don’t have access to either of those, use Wite-out®. Write badly, you
’re allowed to. No one will see. You don’t have any ideas? Try these:
Write about the stain on your carpet.
Create an imaginary feature story.
Write about the next door neighbor’s screaming parrot.
Write about how you sometimes wish your family would disappear.
Write about a talking pin cushion.
Rewrite a fairy tale.
Change the ending of one of your favorite novels or movies.
Write a letter to an invisible friend.
Create a diary entry of a crazy afternoon you never had.
Pretend you’re a famous novelist. You receive hundreds of fan letters a day, the critics love you, your editor adores you. The world can’t wait for your next book. They don’t care what it is as long as it has your name on it. Now get started.
If that is too far fetched, pretend you’re somebody else. Create a different persona. Now write.
Trick your mind in any manner you can think of just so that you can write. Write even as your fingers tremble and your mind tells you (in the voice of all your discouragers) “No, no, no! This is no good. STOP!” Write until the blank page looses its power and is destroyed. Jump into the icy waters of a blank page and write yourself to shore.
Creative Block
Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.
NORMAN MAILER
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I don’t really believe in writer’s block, because blocks happen to most artists. Its symptoms are common: sleepless nights, pacing, hair pulling, depression, and crumbled paper. The reason? Fear. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear that an idea is too big or too small, fear that you’re unworthy, fear that you have no right to be a writer, fear that you’re not a “real” writer, or fear that you may not be the genius you’d thought (or at least hoped) you were. These fears strike all writers at some time in their lives.
Those writers who aren’t paralyzed by it learn to pat fear on the head or look at it with amusement as one would regard a child throwing a tantrum. Others face it with white knuckles, determined not to surrender to the monster of doubt. Some cry through it. What they all have in common is the ability to keep writing. They may not continue working on the manuscript that originally brought on the fear, but they work on something, something that will get them through it.
Scared? You’re supposed to be. You’re baring your soul to a public that might throw tomatoes at you or worse, deem you brilliant at a level you can never live up to. Writing is all that will save you. Keep at it.
Ways to Overcome a Creative Block
Talk into a tape recorder. Or dictate to a friend.
Pretend you’re one of the characters in your story and write about an average day in your life.
Write a letter about your problem.
Come up with other writing projects to work on. It usually helps to work on different projects so that when one project stalls you can work on something else.
Be outrageous. Make something really strange suddenly happen in your story. Like a purple dinosaur being discovered or the hero contemplating a sex change.
Procrastinate. Listen to music or watch TV. Surround yourself with other artists.
Use affirmations. You’re probably beating yourself up.
Stop. Tell yourself positive things. “I’m a great writer and I deserve to succeed.” “I serve, the universe provides.” “I have limitless ideas.” “I am wonderful, talented and creative.”
Take pictures and write about the images.
Eat a different food or wear something you usually wouldn’t. Write about how you feel.
Take a nap.
Write about how awful you feel.
Interview someone local. Most people are willing to share their stories.
Try to write the most boring story or article you can.
Bribe yourself. “If you do this then you can do that.”
Read the comics and come up with a different gag or storyline for some of the strips.
Take a walk.
Pretend you’re a tourist and write about your neighborhood.
Write a personal ad for the kind of story or idea you’re looking for. For example: “Desperate Writer seeking novel idea, preferably of the romantic sort with lots of twists and turns. Any race welcome. Must be long and interesting…” or “Lonely Writer in search of short affair with mystery and danger.”
Write a limerick.
Play hooky.
Watch a movie then retell it from a different viewpoint.
Time yourself. Write something (anything!) for ten minutes. Don’t judge it, just get it down and then you’re free to spend the rest of the day doing anything you wish.
Breathe. You’ll be okay.
Extra
Sleep On It
I know a writer who, when faced with a creative block, asks herself a question right before going to sleep, and then always wakes up with the answer she needed. I find that it works for me. This is how she does it.
Before going to bed, tell your subconscious your writing problem. After giving it the responsibility to solve the problem, fall asleep and don’t think about it. The key is to trust your subconscious to come up with the answer you need. The subconscious never sleeps so it can work on it all night for you. It doesn’t have the same censors as the conscious mind, so it will come up with ideas you never thought possible. The benefit is that you won’t lose sleep and you will wake up refreshed and ready to go the next day with the solution you need.
Write Anyway
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So now the page is no longer blank; instead it’s been vandalized. A perfectly good page wasted by crap. Take a deep breath and keep writing. Not everything you write will smell like roses, sometimes it’s just the fertilizer. If you’re really having a hard time, take brief breaks. But not for long, otherwise depression may settle in and soon you’ll fear you’ll never start again.
You don’t have to feel smart, special or good enough to write. Write despite your moods. That’s what professionals do. Keep going. Spread the crap until something grows.
The Truth about Imagination
You don’t have to behave like a child to be creative or to have a mind full of wonder and imagination. I am always annoyed when people offer adults advice that you have to “think like a child” to be artistic, joyful or wonderful. Personally, I have found some children just as closed minded and boring as adults. Ever try to tell a two year old something that they know is not true? Some will become very upset. As an adult you have had varied experiences and you can accept the absurd.
Your mind is powerful. People (children included) create the unusual to fill in parts that need logic. For example, if they wondered why rain falls and didn’t know, they would come up with a story about a man who is crying in the sky, which sounds perfectly logical. The ancient Greeks weren’t necessarily being imaginative when they created their myths. They were coming up with explanations for then-present mysteries. Still don’t believe me? Try telling a religious group that their sacred text is a collection of myths by imaginative storytellers. I suggest you disappear quickly thereafter.
Imagination isn’t ignorance. There’s a story of a small tribe that planted tin cans because they believed they could grow automobiles. Because they grew everything else they thought this next step was logical. Some people would call this imagination. I would not. Now, if someone who knew that you couldn’t grow automobiles out of tin cans came up with the above idea, that would be imaginative to me.
Imagination is knowing the truth and coming up with a different way to look at or perceive something. You are imaginative now. You don’t need to jump into mud puddles or play hide and seek unless you want to. You can see the inconceivable. You don’t need to be a child or childlike to do so. Those with less education and children at times do see or have dazzling insight because they have less of a framework to work from; however, don’t let th
at stop you from seeing things in both a complex and simplistic fashion.
Comparison
I will not Reason and Compare. My business is to create.
BLAKE
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If you want to kill your confidence faster than a hasty rejection, bad review or degrading critique, compare yourself to others. It doesn’t matter if the writer to whom you compare yourself is good or bad, you’ll still feel miserable. Why? Because if the writer is bad you’ll wonder why they’re a bigger success than you are (published, better paid, better looking or, Gasp! younger). If they’re good, you’ll know why and wonder if you should even attempt to foist your inferior product on the unsuspecting masses. So stop!