I write mostly because I can't stop. It's the hinge of my life, and I don't know who I would be without it. It's my identity. I love the potential of it, the possibilities of it. You choose your palette, your subject, your canvas. You can write about anything in the world, or our of it. Fiction is limited only by your own imagination, your abilities. And this is precisely what I hate about it, too. It scares the shit out of me. Any success I've been able to find--and perforce, any failure--is entirely my own.

Also, there's this: you're never entirely sure where it comes from, so you're never sure that it's going to keep coming. Or what to do if it stops. I hate the uncertainty of it--not knowing when I sit down to write if it's going to be any good or not.

It's too bad that the effort you put into it--the daily grind, the research, the struggling, the interior sweat and shake of it--is, if you're doing it right, mostly invisible within the published work. Writers should be the unseen mechanics. As soon as a writer says, "Look at me. Look at how hard this is," the reader is knocked out of the dream, which is the Original Sin of all fiction. This is a particular risk in historical fiction, where there's always the temptation to stuff in a lot of interesting and irrelevant historical detail. With Last Year's Review, I ended up using a very, very small percentage of my research.

To steal John Barth's excellent metaphor, we should all be the secret operators of our funhouses. "Though [we] would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed." And so no one--family, friends, people you see every day--ever realizes how hard it is. Which is maybe why we do interviews, so we can holler it out loud: "Man, this ain't easy!"

Allen Morris Jones
Interviewed by David Abrams
from The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Inspiration and Discipline

I'm still writing about writing instead of, you know...actually writing. I am two weeks into my declared year of writing dangerously and I have yet to write one word on the actual manuscript. Any new words, that is.  I've got about 22,000 old words, but I have problems with many of them.

It's true that there is a certain amount of manuscript work that doesn't actually involve writing. I'm in the process of reviewing what I wrote last year, and trying to be brutally honest about what's working and what's not. There's also mental work that I can do any time...turning the plot over in my mind, exploring story possibilities, that sort of thing. But I'm well aware than none of that is the important part of the effort, and it's no substitute for adding to the word count.

So: I am "gearing up." This weekend I intended to go to Ikea in Burbank and acquire my writing desk, among other necessary items of furniture, but my Social Security Number puts me in the batch of citizens who will be getting their Economic Stimulus™ on the 16th. I'll be heading south this coming Saturday instead. As I've mentioned, Ikea figures into all this because I'm rearranging my surroundings to support my writing, which means a desk in a room with a door. Yeah, the fact that I haven't got the desk yet is one of those "excuses" I'm trying to identify and quash. I could write on the couch. I just haven't.

It's tough to create new habits out of whole cloth. I'm not whining, that's just a fact, so I'm cutting myself a little slack. I'm engaging in a number of different activities that support writing, including research on craft and technique, ramping up my own fiction intake, that sort of thing. Some of those efforts show up here: videos about the creative process, my own thoughts on craft, and so on. None of this is a substitute for sitting down in front of the computer and stringing words of fiction together. I know this.

I've read a lot of what writers have to say about writing. Without exception, any writer who has had any success whatsoever has said the same thing: writers write, and the ones who succeed do it every day. If they're not powerhouses like James Patterson, David Baldacci, or Stephen King--in other words, if they still have day jobs--they carve out time whenever they can. So my plan is to write every day at my new Swedish writing desk, once I have it. An honest-to-God writing schedule. Merciless. There will be a word count indicator on the right side of this page, and it damn well better go up every day. You have my permission to berate me if it doesn't.

It's important, I think, not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. All my life I've written in fits and starts, when the mood struck me. I've never been much of a believer in "the muse," but I certainly know that there are some times when it's easier to write than others. To meet my stated goals, I'll have to write when I don't feel like writing, when I'm pretty sure that every sentence I write will be unadulterated crap, when I am most assuredly not in the zone.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that for all of his life, he was frightened at the moment he sat down to write. Margaret Atwood said that blank pages inspired her with terror. John Steinbeck spoke of his fear of putting down the first line. The fact that you've heard of them is a testament to their courage.

So. Next Saturday, in a frenzy of allen wrenching, I will remove the last practical excuse that I've been hiding behind. I'll put my ass in my new chair, fire up the computer on my new desk...and make my leap.

    "I want to write about dialogue today."
    "It's your blog. You can write about whatever you choose."
    "What, you have a problem with that topic?"
    "No, no problem at all."
    "You don't have your 'no problem' look on your face."
    "I have a 'no problem' look?"
    "Well, not at the moment, but yeah, you do."
    "I see."
    "Well, I don't. So out with it."
    "If you insist."
    "I do."
    "All right, then. You've been writing scenes that are full of snappy dialogue."
    "I like to think so."
    "And I'd like you to consider the possibility of wit fatigue."
    "What?"
    "Wit fatigue. That's what happens when all of your characters speak snappy dialogue, all of the time."
    "But these are fabulous people. They're witty."
    "Real people aren't witty every hour of the day, no matter how fabulous they are. They're not bon mot machines. Even Oscar Wilde wasn't constantly witty."
    "But I like witty dialogue."
    "Of course you do. I'd like you to consider the possibility that you're writing all of this banter because it makes you feel clever, not because it serves the story or provides characterization."
    "Maybe."
    "There's something else you should consider..."
    "Giving up writing and resigning myself to the salaried life of a cubicle dweller?"
    "Hardly."
    "See, now you've got your 'Stop being a smartass and listen to what I'm saying' look on your face."
    "I'm sure that I do. Can we return to the topic at hand?"
    "OK, shoot."
    "If everyone in your story is always witty, always ready with a snappy quip, then they all start to sound alike. There's no differentiation."
    "Huh. Didn't think about that."
    "Try this: edit one of your witty conversational scenes by removing everything but the dialogue. No descriptions, no dialogue tags. Would you be able to tell which character was speaking?"
    "Of course."
    "This only works if you're honest in your self-assessment."
    "OK, fine. Maybe some of my dialogue sounds the same."
    "Right, and it shouldn't. Your character's voice is a powerful tool, and you can use it to create a more vivid portrait of that person as an individual. Pay close attention to the rhythms of their phrasing and the words that they choose. Your readers should be able to tell who's speaking based solely on what they're saying and how they're saying it."
    "What, like the conversation we're having right now?"
    "Precisely. It's a subtle thing, but crafting your dialogue in this fashion will add layers of characterization and complexity to the tale."  

The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.

Orhan Pamuk

God save me from writing literature on purpose.
Nevertheless: hiding yourself from view does require a certain artistry, whether you're vying for grant money from the Important Persons League or coveting Dan Brown's spot on the New York Times bestseller list. This problem is particularly acute if you've foolishly decided to write a first person narrative, like I have.

I say "foolish" because, although I've heard many neophytes claim that writing in first person is easier, it's not. At all. What they haven't figured out yet is that yes, it's easy to write in the first person, but it sounds just like them.  If they're writing a speculative fiction piece, it sounds like a  twenty-something protagonist with a quirky modern sensibility caught in the spaces between worlds. If they're writing horror, it sounds like a  twenty-something protagonist with a quirky modern sensibility who's discovered a nest of vampires in the basement of his apartment building. If they're writing romance...well, you get the idea. Writing in the first person is easy. Doing it well is another task altogether.

Writing well in first person is inherently more difficult because you're got pull off narrative sleight-of-hand. Unless you've opted for memoir, journal entries, or some other device, you present the reader with a challenge, which they may or may not consciously articulate: how am I able to hear this voice? You've got to be slick enough to get the reader to immediately suspend disbelief. One way to do that is to just dazzle the reader with the big big cleverness. Look at the first two sentences of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange:

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

I mean: who cares how we're hearing this, right? Look at that! It's too cool to wonder about the mechanics of it, and Burgess keeps that up through the whole book, addressing us ("O my brothers and only friends") as though we're sitting at the milkbar and hearing the story from Alex's own mouth.

In Life After God, Doug Coupland takes it even further:

I was driving you up to Prince George to the home of your grandfather, the golf wino.

What risk! Coupland's brash assumption shanghais the reader, making you a participant in the story. A certain type of reader would immediately ask, "You were?" But these people are probably unreachable by such narratives, so I don't care about them.

You can use a combination of techniques. In The Children of Men, P.D. James intersperses journal entries with third-person narrative. In The Movie Lover, Richard Friedel adopts the tone of a memoir for the first third of the book, and then pulls off a switch to third person and back again which, by all rights, shouldn't have worked, but did. It worked because he used the third person to give us a tidbit that we didn't know that we were wanting until the very moment he offered it.

In each case, you as a storyteller have to be compelling enough to make the reader overlook the impossibilities of your first person narrative. Some audiences will be more receptive to this sort of trickery than others, but if you can't manage it, you'll fail. And then you'll feel bad and eat too much and get fat and die in obscurity.

Another problem occurs when the first person narrator is an embarrassingly obvious stand-in for the author, turning what is ostensibly fiction into thinly-veiled autobiography. This can go two ways. The first and most common is that you'll run smack into the depressing reality that your life and the conflicts therein aren't nearly as interesting to other people as they are to you, no matter how gut-wrenching you find your own pseudo-prose or how well you think you've disguised yourself. The second and far-less likely path is one of radical embellishment, which will eventually get Oprah mad at you. This requires a certain tweaked genius to actually accomplish.

At the moment, I've got a protagonist who's achieved the academic success I thought I wanted a decade ago, lives a lifestyle that I've fantasized about, has written a bestselling book (non-fiction), with another on the way. He drinks a lot and has access to exotic pharmaceuticals. He lives in a city I used to live in--albeit 25 years from now--and he's smarter and better-looking than I am.  Because this fellow is living a sort of fantasy life of mine, I risk creating a narrator who is merely a surrogate for myself and writing a masturbatory monologue that no one cares about.

The trick is mastering that sleight-of-hand. In his story "The '84 Regress," Douglas Lain begins with:


I'm not going to be as energetically weird as Lain, or as brash as Coupland, or as clever as Burgess. Which leaves me with two things: story and character. I've got to create a narrator who captivates the reader, and put him through situations that motivate the reader. The first captures his interest, the second keeps him reading. I don't care whether this project ever gets labeled "literature."  All I care about is whether I'm skilled enough to keep the reader engaged from the first page to the last.

Oh, that's all? No problem.

Yikes.

Sometimes momentum sucks.

It's all expansive energy and creative outpouring and fulfillment of the innermost need to express yourself by spinning a tale, right up until the moment you realize you've sailed over the edge of the cliff and there's nothing beneath you but 500 yards of desert air.

Every writer has their own ways. Some can't write a linear first draft to save their lives, and write chapters with no regard for where they'll eventually end up in the chronology of the story. Some start at point A and write straight on until point Z with no revision whatsoever, then go on back and rewrite point A so that all the nifty stuff they thought of at point M makes sense and matches up with how it all turned out at point Z. Others move back and forth, revising as they go, so that the last rewrite is mostly about dotting the eyebrows and crossing the teacups.

Whatever works.

Late last year I was writing pell-mell, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, neat and orderly, thinking I'd just go back after THE END and make everything match up all clever like. Then I ran out of ground, and pancaked into the hardpan far below with an amusing puff of dust.

Now that the momentum's long gone, I've got 22,000 words about characters I've lost touch with, and plot points that are fuzzy in my memory. When I first thought about wrenching myself out of the pit I've been in for awhile and opened up the first chapter in Word, I faced a foe common to most writers: my own suck.

I hated it. I read the first paragraph, closed my laptop, grabbed my wallet, headed around the corner to Hi Times Liquor, and got myself some Absolution. Not because of the chapter per se...more because that's what I was doing for stress relief that week.

The same thing happened with the new stories I wrote during the first three months of last year. I sent them out, and they were all rejected, with good reason. As soon as I re-read each one upon receipt of the rejection letter, I realized that it wasn't finished. I've come to believe that anything I write has to sit in a drawer somewhere for at least a few months before I revise it. I can't get any perspective on the thing, certainly not within days or weeks of "finishing" it.

Unlike certain famous people who do this sort of thing for a living, I don't get to sit down at a desk at nine AM with nothing to do until five PM but focus on the project...although I must confess that I have produced more than one chapter at work when I supposed to be doing other things. But those were special cases. I was manic and out of my mind and couldn't do anything else.

One of the strategies I've learned to adopt over the past couple of years is to identify my excuses. If there was something I wanted to be doing but wasn't--like eating properly, for example--I'd observe myself, to discover what obstacles I was putting in my own way. I was eating crappy food because I had no decent food in the house. But when I put decent food in the house, I'd still get something evil and fatty delivered to my door because the kitchen was a vast pit of chaos and despair. That meant that before I cooked the decent food I'd put in the 'fridge, I needed to do dishes, which made it just complicated enough to sway me towards the ordering of a pre-fab cheese and meat disk. Depression, obviously, contributes to such problems...it becomes difficult to do much of anything in such a state. But I think that simplifying your life so that you remove impediments to taking good and fulfilling actions on a regular basis is a good and wise thing to do, dysthymic tendencies or no.

Things that aren't moving have a sort of momentum, too. It's called inertia.

I've set about identifying what it is that makes it difficult to resume work on Walk of the Night People. When I was really burning up the page, turning out a chapter or two a week, I actually did a fair amount of writing at the office, where my real-world job is. One afternoon in January I cranked out an entire short story there and, remarkably, it didn't suck much. Still, it's very wrong to write fiction on your employer's dime when you're supposed to be manning the SONAR and listening for enemy submarines.

At my office, I've got a desk, an insectoid Aeron chair that isn't nearly as comfortable as the hype would have it, and a properly positioned monitor. At home, I've got my laptop, some pillows, and a rapidly collapsing futon-couch monstrosity. "Home" at the moment, is a one-bedroom apartment. Much of the first room is taken up by a wide assortment of musical equipment. The most obvious place for a writing desk is taken up by a digital audio workstation.

Because this is the kind of problem that's so in your face that the solution dissolves into the carpet, it took serious thought. Eventually I figured out that I could, in fact, place a writing desk in my bedroom. I'll need to move the bed which will, by happy accident, actually improve the feng-shui of the small space. Once I've done that and scooted a bookshelf over, I'll have access to the entirety of the only uninterrupted wall space in the entire apartment. Room enough for a desk, a dresser, and a wardrobe.

The Federal Government has seen fit to stimulate me economically to the tune of $600. Usually when the Fed pulls this kind of fiscal smoke-and-mirrors crap I enjoy thumbing its deficit-ridden eyeball by putting the money into savings, paying off debt, or buying a crack rock the size of my cat's head. But this time? Ikea! $600 will buy me the desk, the dresser, and the wardrobe, maybe with enough left over to get one of those nifty wall-mounted collapsing tables for my kitchen nooklet.

And most importantly: the bedroom has a door. I'll be able to go into the room, close the door, and sit down at a desk that is entirely dedicated to writing. I've noticed that many of the ridiculously prolific writers--folks like Stephen King and my childhood favorite, Piers Anthony--have emphasized the importance of the separate writing space. At the moment, I can't have an office under the eaves of my gated house, or a little miniature house in the woods at the back of my property, but I can at least have a few square feet of desktop with nothing on it but the instruments of my craft. Even when I owned a house with a home office, I didn't have that kind of setup.

Because I don't have the luxury of dedicating an eight-hour workday to fiction, I need to make the most efficient use of the time I can devote to it. For me, all of this furniture purchasing and rearranging represents a deliberate effort to bring more mindfulness into my life. My creation of a separate space kept clear of anything not related to the practice of writing will serve as an external signifier of my intention, in much the same way that an altar in an alcove is a physical expression of inward faith.

Whatever works.