Wait, cork board?

Yes. Purchased with humility and more than a touch of desperation.

Remember when I said that arrogance is sneaky? You don't? You...you aren't hanging on my every word? You didn't read through the entirety of the archives when you first found this site after a Google search for "love to eat them mousies"?

Eh. Can't say I blame you.

There is nothing quite so humbling as the moment when you realize--not suspect, but know--that you've overestimated your own knowledge and perhaps even your abilities. It's much worse when you can peruse your own archives and pick out all the shining nuggets of ignorance.

Ignorance is not stupidity, it's simple lack of knowledge, and it's remediable. But because it's a lack it can be hard to see, and that means that it's easy to go traipsing off into the forest like Bear Grylls when you're actually a Tenderfoot who's liable to throw a can of beans on the fire without putting a hole in it first. Then comes the inevitable surprise, alarm, and legume-scalded face. And the weeping. The gut-wrenching weeping.

I've already had one serious attitude adjustment about this blog, which had to do with my maniacal notion that it was going to chronicle my writing of The Novel in a year. I got over that relatively quickly. I had a few things published online (and got paid for one of them, score one for me). But The Novel was still the thing, and although I was doing quite a bit of head work on it, and some revisions to bring the existing chapters in line with the ever-evolving concept, it just...wasn't...happening.

Then, one day last week, I hit on the reason why. Or rather, it hit me, in the face, with the the explosive, scalding force of a can of fire-burst Bush's: I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

Yeah, go ahead, laugh. One day that'll happen to you. I hope you're not landing the space shuttle or fighting the Taliban when it does.

It seems stunningly obvious, I know, but it took me a bit of thinking to figure out why I hadn't realized it before then. I made a simple but profound mistake: I confused the ability to write with the ability to write a novel. Not the same thing at all.

I had already started to patch the gaping holes in my literary knowledge by gathering and reading the books of the giants. I have Dan Simmons to thank for pushing me to take that on as a conscious project. In an essay about literary style, he presented the opening paragraph of A Farewell To Arms, accompanied by a sort of quiz. After the questions, he wrote:

The good news is that you don’t have to take this quiz (although good for you if you did), but the bad news is that if you couldn’t answer questions #1 and 2, you haven’t read widely enough or well enough to consider becoming a writer [...] Sorry to be the bearer of such bad tidings. Tis true, ‘tis pity; ‘tis pity ‘tis true.

Those questions were "Who wrote this passage?" and "What was the novel it appeared in?" respectively.

I didn't have the answers.

I had a split moment's worth of sophomoric rage--what the hell does he know--followed by the crystalline realization that he was right. The issue wasn't whether it's true that no one can write if they don't know Hemingway. The issue was that my thin literary diet could not support the task I had set before me.

Fortunately, my brain tends to absorb and retain things, so I've been soaking it in Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, et al., and wondering why it took me so damn long to feed myself properly. I've learned more about writing in the past two months than I have in past ten years. It's a wonderful thing, and I feel my writer's sinews strengthening. So, there's been some progress.

Back to that cork board. Expanding on the theory that what I'd been doing so far wasn't going to take me any further, I set out to acquire some new tools, with the explicit intention of using them to help build a more solid structure for the Novel: note cards for characters and plot points, strung together, easy to shuffle around as things changed. I'd noticed last year that all of my unfinished books tended to peter out around the 20,000 word mark, where my initial rush of free-associative creation ended and the more precise work of constructing proper arcs and so on should have begun. If I knew more about where I was going, I reasoned, I'd have a better idea of how to get there.

And that's when my can of beany ignorance exploded.

I've got a story, yes. Is it a good one? No idea. I don't know about pacing a longer work. I don't know about scenes and sequels. I don't know about structure. In short, while I have an intuitive grasp of many of the things I'll need to do to build a story that can hang together for 100,000 words and bring the readers along with it, there's a lot more that I don't know, and I've been behaving--and writing here--as though I do.

Whoops.

As I said, ignorance is remediable. But for years I've been holding on to the pretentious, cavalier assumption that, someday, I'd just...do it. Sit down, write The Novel, get published. Now, here it is. Someday. And instead of working, I've been assuming. Wanting to have written instead of wanting to write.

There's a brief post followed by 207 comments over on Nathan Bransford's site, all in response to his question: how important is creativity over craft? I don't know if I'd put a percentage on the two, the way some commenters have. But I do know that I've been behaving as though creativity was all that I would ever need. I was wrong.

Now I've got a hell of a lot of work to do, and many things to learn. I'm pretty sure I can do it and learn them...but it's hard to avoid feeling like I've wasted too much time.