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On Why Being a Writer is Neither Glamorous nor Exciting

If you watch the blogs and various sites around the internet about writing, you've probably seen at least one list that details a few universal truths about writers, but they all pretty much boil down to several actual truths.

All writers write.
All writers procrastinate.
Writers don't actually write, because we spend all our time doing something else.

This probably explains why, in the dark hours of one of the very last days of NaNoWriMo, I'm sitting here writing this, when my NaNo is sitting in another window with a pathetic 31.8k words.

Will I finish by 11:59pm tomorrow? Probably not. Do I care? Not particularly, although I'm sure that there's probably some part of my brain, which has been hardwired in a certain way that will start seriously freaking out sometime around 5:00pm tomorrow night.

Why am I so far behind, you ask? Simple. I told myself that I was not going to do NaNo this year. I haven't written anything since February, because I haven't been able to find any inspiration. Clearly, I make a habit of lying to myself, since sometime on the 7th, I decided to do NaNo this year.

Mistake number one.

My NaNo did something this year which I generally try to avoid when I write; I got an idea, and I ran with it.

Mistake number two.

The problem with just taking an idea and running with it, at least for me, is that it tends to snowball to frightening proportions. Somewhere, my NaNo went from being a silly little thing about time travel to using concepts like hyperspace, time travel, and relativity to mercilessly make fun of the way such concepts are blatantly ignored in most science fiction. Eventually, other ideas got tacked on as well. At a friend's suggestion, I watched Survivors, a BBC drama about the last 1% of the human population after a virulent evil hyper-flu comes just short of wiping out the human race.

Some aspects of these sorts of shows and films bother me, and those bits that bothered me have now become an entire subplot about how a race whose planet was nearly devastated suffered terrible consequences when they tried to rebuild their population, owing to a monogamous lifestyle throughout the entire culture.

It wasn't until I was about 10k in that I realised that I seriously needed to do an outline for this thing, before it swallowed my soul.

There are other things that have wiggled their way in as well, like convergent evolution, and an almost obsessive need to use actual stars and constellations in the world building process.

Mistake number three.

These points are not why I am terribly behind and simply not caring. The reasons why I am terribly behind and simply not caring are because of the research, fact-checking, and general link surfing that goes into making sure I actually understand what I'm writing about before I write it.

Or so, that's what I tell myself.

I've spent a lot of this month doing hideously complicated sums, working out problems with genetics, and reverse engineering hyperspace drives. I've probably spent more time doing this than I have writing. But even this pales in comparison to everything else I've done.

Writing anything, terribly complicated or not, is not as simple as just sitting down to put digital words on a digital piece of paper, though. I know there are some people out there who can just throw words down, and consider it good. I'm quite the opposite. I'll spend sometimes several hours on one single paragraph – spirit of NaNo be damned – trying to work out the best way in which certain words fit together. Especially in fiction, I tend to believe that the cadence of the narration does everything to set the tone for the entire story.* If the narration can't construct a sentence that flows in an aurally-pleasing way, then everything else just seems to fall flat. Sometimes, I'll get a few words down, decide that I don't like them, and in fixing them will also wipe out half of the page that I'd already written in an effort to make the words fit together better. This morning, I realised that a line by one of my characters didn't quite scan as well as I'd thought it did last night. In fixing that line, I wound up changing half of the scene. Whether I lost or gained words from it, I'm not actually sure, but the scene reads so much better now than it did last night.

And it's this constant niggling with words that gets me hung up. I cannot write out of order. I don't understand how people can do it, either. If this bit is not perfect, then I simply cannot move onto the next bit.

It's this trying to move on that takes up most of my writing time. I'll be sitting here, at my computer, trying to figure out what to do next. My heroes have stolen the space ship, they're in a low orbit around the planet, and... what? I don't know. Even with my outlines, which are at best just neurotic dot point lists, I still have issues filling in the gaps between points A and B. It's not the points that get me stuck, but the details between them.

Since my computer is not near my window, looking out it is not a viable option. I have arranged my workspace like this intentionally. Since I'm usually doing most of my work after the sun goes down, I inevitably wind up staring out my window at the stars for hours if my computer is next to it. So, I'm on the complete opposite side of the room.

I'm very particular about my environment when I write. The lighting has to be perfect. The sounds around me have to be perfect. Bob Dylan is great for writing, but sometimes, I might require endless hours worth of remixes of the Doctor Who theme tune. And often times, I seem to take quite a long time to figure out just what music I need for writing.

And even then, my words still don't like to come to me. I recently had to work out the problem of getting two characters to meet up, when these two characters have already been established to be on opposite ends of the Galaxy. This, I decided, was a two tuna sandwich problem. So that's exactly what I got up and made; two tuna sandwiches, on white bread, with pickles and Miracle Whip, which I ate whilst staring at my screen saver. By the time I had actually worked out this problem, I'd had four more tuna sandwiches, three baths, a litre and a half of orange squash, had stood outside and stared up at the sky until I could no longer feel my fingers, and had gone to the shop for a bag of crisps and some more orange squash. And that was the sum total of my work that night.

If I get really stuck on something, I'll do something really drastic, like clean the kitchen or do the hoovering. You can always tell when I'm having a crisis of words, because my hair is amazing, and my flat is spotless.

Right now, I'm halfway there. My flat's kind of a disaster, but my hair has never looked better.

And that's what writers do. Writers everywhere will always be just like every other writer out there, because we're always finding new ways to not write the next bit. No matter how much we say we want to write it, that next bit just never seems to get written because we're too busy making sandwiches and having baths to actually get anything done.

*To really understand what I'm on about, read Sock by Penn Jillette. It's a murder mystery, as told from the point of view by a foul-mouthed sock monkey who is way too much into popular culture.

Description
On Why Being a Writer is Neither Glamorous nor Exciting

If you watch the blogs and various sites around the internet about writing, you've probably seen at least one list that details a few universal truths about writers, but they all pretty much boil down to several actual truths.

All writers write.
All writers procrastinate.
Writers don't actually write, because we spend all our time doing something else.

This probably explains why, in the dark hours of one of the very last days of NaNoWriMo, I'm sitting here writing this, when my NaNo is sitting in another window with a pathetic 31.8k words.

Will I finish by 11:59pm tomorrow? Probably not. Do I care? Not particularly, although I'm sure that there's probably some part of my brain, which has been hardwired in a certain way that will start seriously freaking out sometime around 5:00pm tomorrow night.

Why am I so far behind, you ask? Simple. I told myself that I was not going to do NaNo this year. I haven't written anything since February, because I haven't been able to find any inspiration. Clearly, I make a habit of lying to myself, since sometime on the 7th, I decided to do NaNo this year.

Mistake number one.

My NaNo did something this year which I generally try to avoid when I write; I got an idea, and I ran with it.

Mistake number two.

The problem with just taking an idea and running with it, at least for me, is that it tends to snowball to frightening proportions. Somewhere, my NaNo went from being a silly little thing about time travel to using concepts like hyperspace, time travel, and relativity to mercilessly make fun of the way such concepts are blatantly ignored in most science fiction. Eventually, other ideas got tacked on as well. At a friend's suggestion, I watched Survivors, a BBC drama about the last 1% of the human population after a virulent evil hyper-flu comes just short of wiping out the human race.

Some aspects of these sorts of shows and films bother me, and those bits that bothered me have now become an entire subplot about how a race whose planet was nearly devastated suffered terrible consequences when they tried to rebuild their population, owing to a monogamous lifestyle throughout the entire culture.

It wasn't until I was about 10k in that I realised that I seriously needed to do an outline for this thing, before it swallowed my soul.

There are other things that have wiggled their way in as well, like convergent evolution, and an almost obsessive need to use actual stars and constellations in the world building process.

Mistake number three.

These points are not why I am terribly behind and simply not caring. The reasons why I am terribly behind and simply not caring are because of the research, fact-checking, and general link surfing that goes into making sure I actually understand what I'm writing about before I write it.

Or so, that's what I tell myself.

I've spent a lot of this month doing hideously complicated sums, working out problems with genetics, and reverse engineering hyperspace drives. I've probably spent more time doing this than I have writing. But even this pales in comparison to everything else I've done.

Writing anything, terribly complicated or not, is not as simple as just sitting down to put digital words on a digital piece of paper, though. I know there are some people out there who can just throw words down, and consider it good. I'm quite the opposite. I'll spend sometimes several hours on one single paragraph – spirit of NaNo be damned – trying to work out the best way in which certain words fit together. Especially in fiction, I tend to believe that the cadence of the narration does everything to set the tone for the entire story.* If the narration can't construct a sentence that flows in an aurally-pleasing way, then everything else just seems to fall flat. Sometimes, I'll get a few words down, decide that I don't like them, and in fixing them will also wipe out half of the page that I'd already written in an effort to make the words fit together better. This morning, I realised that a line by one of my characters didn't quite scan as well as I'd thought it did last night. In fixing that line, I wound up changing half of the scene. Whether I lost or gained words from it, I'm not actually sure, but the scene reads so much better now than it did last night.

And it's this constant niggling with words that gets me hung up. I cannot write out of order. I don't understand how people can do it, either. If this bit is not perfect, then I simply cannot move onto the next bit.

It's this trying to move on that takes up most of my writing time. I'll be sitting here, at my computer, trying to figure out what to do next. My heroes have stolen the space ship, they're in a low orbit around the planet, and... what? I don't know. Even with my outlines, which are at best just neurotic dot point lists, I still have issues filling in the gaps between points A and B. It's not the points that get me stuck, but the details between them.

Since my computer is not near my window, looking out it is not a viable option. I have arranged my workspace like this intentionally. Since I'm usually doing most of my work after the sun goes down, I inevitably wind up staring out my window at the stars for hours if my computer is next to it. So, I'm on the complete opposite side of the room.

I'm very particular about my environment when I write. The lighting has to be perfect. The sounds around me have to be perfect. Bob Dylan is great for writing, but sometimes, I might require endless hours worth of remixes of the Doctor Who theme tune. And often times, I seem to take quite a long time to figure out just what music I need for writing.

And even then, my words still don't like to come to me. I recently had to work out the problem of getting two characters to meet up, when these two characters have already been established to be on opposite ends of the Galaxy. This, I decided, was a two tuna sandwich problem. So that's exactly what I got up and made; two tuna sandwiches, on white bread, with pickles and Miracle Whip, which I ate whilst staring at my screen saver. By the time I had actually worked out this problem, I'd had four more tuna sandwiches, three baths, a litre and a half of orange squash, had stood outside and stared up at the sky until I could no longer feel my fingers, and had gone to the shop for a bag of crisps and some more orange squash. And that was the sum total of my work that night.

If I get really stuck on something, I'll do something really drastic, like clean the kitchen or do the hoovering. You can always tell when I'm having a crisis of words, because my hair is amazing, and my flat is spotless.

Right now, I'm halfway there. My flat's kind of a disaster, but my hair has never looked better.

And that's what writers do. Writers everywhere will always be just like every other writer out there, because we're always finding new ways to not write the next bit. No matter how much we say we want to write it, that next bit just never seems to get written because we're too busy making sandwiches and having baths to actually get anything done.

*To really understand what I'm on about, read Sock by Penn Jillette. It's a murder mystery, as told from the point of view by a foul-mouthed sock monkey who is way too much into popular culture.