So You Wanna Be a Writer

Just thought I'd share a response to this article:
http://bit.ly/bRaViv
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I've heard this advice many times. Matt likes to daydream about a day when I'm richer than JK Rowling. I'll be happy to get published and sell enough to break even.

The advice of writing every day is absolutely true. This is what NaNoWriMo is all about. "So, you want to be a writer? Fine, spend one month as a writer. If you can hack it and produce a 50,000 word novel, maybe you've got something." Most of the writers I've met for Nanowrimo feel beaten and exhausted at the end of the month. They're GLAD when they can stop writing and declare they don't want to touch a keyboard again. It's not a profession for them. For me, I almost always go for double, 100k words in 30 days. That's giving me a REAL challenge. If my computer is out and I can't write all day, I feel lost.

I don't write because I want to be a writer. I write because I can't imagine anything else I'd rather be doing. Whether I publish it, whether it sells, whether it gets good reviews... sure, part of me cares about that, but the important thing is to get that story out of me and sculpt it into something I like. That's why I prefer fiction. It's a story I WANT to tell, not one I feel I have to in order to get paid. That's like literary prostitution! The only time I don't write is when the seizures turn my brain into stir fry. Otherwise, I'm writing daily, or like now, editing until my brain hurts.

I used to hate editing for many of the reasons stated in this article. I would spend hours researching a scene, or looking for the right word, just to discover the entire chapter was crap. I've recently dealt myself such a devastating blow--two days of researching a description, and as I was proofreading I began to yawn. Totally boring part, did nothing to enhance my character, I wanted to skip it and go to the part I knew was exciting. Two days of research! It might work good for an article on Celtic armory, but it has no place in my story.

Every major novel I write has a file purely of "take-outs," scenes I loved at the time, and maybe they'll work somewhere else, but I had to get rid of them in order to find my literary David hidden in the lump of marble logorrhea. It hurts to edit. It's masochistic! It's one more element which makes the argument that all writers are secretly sociopaths.

However, I disagree with his opinion on "inspiration" being untrustworthy and something not to seek out. For one, I've yet to figure out how anyone "seeks" inspiration, except through Absinthe and drugs. True, some great classics came out of those altered states, but so did a lot of freakishly BAD writing.

Those who believe they can write purely on inspiration are fools. Still, there are times when I get inspired, write like a madwoman for days or weeks, foregoing sleep, and turn out something that makes me think "where the hell did THAT come from? That can't be me. It's GOOD!" And there are days when what I produce makes my stomach turn. Yesterday's sheer brilliance is today's shudder of horror. Time to hit the delete button and pretend that never happened.

Often, inspiration comes in bursts. I'll write for 2-3 hours a day, and maybe for 10 minutes I'll get a flow of words that clicks. A well-placed joke, a witty remark, a paragraph of description that leaves me stunned. Usually, I have to wait days, if not weeks, for any drive to write at all. That's the time for masochistic editing.

Inspiration is not always bad. It's just not always good, and holding on to those pages purely because they were "inspired" shows immaturity. Writers who think "inspiration"--mere episodes of prolix paroxysms--are Muse-inspired brilliance have obviously not realized that Muses hand out rocks, not pearls. A writer's job is to take that rock, cut it, polish it, and hope and pray there's a gem inside and not just mud.