On Writing, Part II, or: My Doubts Do The Electric Boogaloo

So . . . yeah, writing. Becoming a Writer. Whatever.

This is a bad decision for a variety of reasons:

• Writing is not a social activity. (Yes, you can join a workshop, or hang out on message boards, but the work itself is solitary in nature.) 
• Writing is not a physical activity. I spend enough time already on my ass in front of a computer -- spending an extra 30 minutes, or hour, or two hours a day in a similar position seems pretty stupid. 
• Writing goals are generally inherently shitty, and hard to progress towards. This one will take a little longer to explain, but it's one of the most important problems.

The "good choices" of the last post have some easy-to-attain-or-judge goals.

If you're a hiker, you can count the number of trails you've been on, or build up to a hike of a given distance -- and when you've done it, you know it.

If you're working out, you'll see progress quickly, and it's very measurable (whether in miles run, pounds lifted, pull-ups made, or whatever.)

If you're taking photos, they're easy to share with practically any and all of your friends, and they'll be happy to tell you what they like and what they don't.

And if you're a drug dealer, you can easily quantify the mad cheese you're banking due to your peeps taking care of that beef with those wankstas on the corner. I'm just sayin', yo.



Plus, all of these activities (especially the cheese-banking) are to a large extent enjoyable while you're doing them. (Working out -- maybe not as much, though it's pretty sweet when those endorphins kick in. And you almost always feel awesome post-workout.)

Writing has NONE of these advantages. It's really quite a stupid activity to engage in "for fun" when you think about it.

When you start out writing, you suck, and it takes forever (well, years, or hundreds of thousands of words, whatever comes first) to get better. And because you'll suck, it will be difficult to get honest opinions about your work, not to mention get folks to read it. It takes a moment to look at a photo -- but a few pages of a short story is another . . . er, story. (Feel the writin' prowess!)

And it's HARD to know what you're doing wrong -- you'll know you'll suck, but not how to improve. And then it'll come the time when you think you're not doing so bad . . . but no, you actually still suck. Sorry, but you do.

To quote Jonathan Coulton:

"The process is excruciating . . . I think anyone that has done it, will agree . . . it's brutal, it's work, it's pushing a heavy rock up a hill." 

He does say that "Occasionally something good happens" but I think that that "occasionally" is pretty freakin' infrequent for those of us who are just starting out.

So I have, for reasons as yet unspoken, decided to try to Become Enthusiastic about an activity that is inherently solitary, non-physical, and causes one to be fraught with self-doubt and uncertainty.

Yikes.

But this is where that bit in my last post comes in, and it gives me a shred of hope:

Thus, according to Buddhist thought, one could be quite enthusiastic about some pursuit, but still be miserable, or be temporarily happy and then fall back into a Deep Dark Pit O' Doom, especially if one ties one's self-image too closely to one's success in that pursuit.

If one is comfortable with sucking (i.e., does not tie one's self-concept as a Writer to the fact that one is writing extremely poorly), and if one creates goals that are easily measurable (say . . . word count, or time put in hammering away at the keyboard), then the third disadvantage flies away, and all one is left with is the first two.

And, you know . . . those aren't so bad, especially when one can engage in other activities to meet one's quota of social and physical exercise.

So . . . what the hell, right?

I've heard it said that you need to write a million words or so before you have a clue about what you're doing. I've also heard it said -- by Lawrence Watt-Evans, many moons ago (~15 years?) at a con, that when you start, what you write for the first year-and-a-half or so is going to be crap.

I'm not getting any younger, so it's time to make a commitment. I'm not going to go with that million words thing right off the bat, though.

Let's start small -- say, 1000 words a day, on average, six days a week. Hell, 25,000 words a month -- that's pretty wimpy, but it's a start, and it's about 24,950 more words a month than I've been doing lately. I'm going to count anything non-work that is at least vaguely constructive -- blog posts, writing exercises, and real story work or background writing. I'm going to be keeping track of the total at the bottom right . . . let's see where this takes me.

Now, a critic might say that bloggin' don't count as real writing. They have a point, their delightfully grammatically incorrect idiom aside. But I like bloggin', and figure that it's more important to put time in hacking away at the keyboard than it is to worry about precisely what the content is. What's key is to create the habit . . . next month, I'll put a limit on how much of that word count can come from the blog.

(By the way -- it's one thing to say that this will work if one becomes comfortable with sucking, and another to actually DO that -- but we'll leave the Buddhist commentary on all of this for another time. It's important, though -- it will probably mean the difference between this being a long-term commitment, and something that lasts for a week or a month.)