What I’ve Learned from Three Decades of Writing
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" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." src="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c..." alt="focus photo of yellow paper near trash can" class="wp-image-25102" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1880w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 400w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 550w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 768w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/jamierubin.net/wp-c... 1800w" sizes="(max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px" data-recalc-dims="1" />Photo by Steve Johnson on Pexels.com“Give me any random idea and I can write a story from it.”
This is how I used to think of myself back when I first started to write with an eye toward selling stories. I was twenty years old, and up to that point, the ability to write, such as it was, was the only visible talent I could muster. Or perhaps not the only talent. I had a bit of ego to go along with it, something I’d heard was a necessary ingredient to one who thought enough of their craft that people would be willing to pay to read it.
Some people are slow learners, and in the classroom of writers, I just may be among the slowest. It took more than three decades of writing and the occasional story sale, to teach me lessons that I probably could have learned in a year, had I been more focused, had less ego, and been more open to discovery about myself. I’m not sure even now, as I write this, that I have fully grasped those lessons, but I have learned things along the way about writing and about myself. Let me tell you a story.
In late December 2023, while on holiday in Florida, I happened upon an article that described a goal matrix that Shohei Ohtani, the major league baseball phenom, created when he was only 17 years old. This matrix centered around 9 areas and had the goal of being drafted first in the MLB draft. I was impressed by this and thought I could use a similar matrix to jump start my writing. I set myself a goal of writing 100 stories over the next 7 years, or so–about 1 story per month. Why 100 stories? Because every story is practice and practice helps to improve the craft. I was never prolific with my fiction writing and I figured if I could write 100 stories, that would be all the practice I’d need to hone my skills to the level I knew they could reach. I used the Ohtani’s model to build up support structure for achieving that goal. Here is my matrix:
My goal matrix as it was on December 27, 2023January 2024 would be the month for Story #1. To meet my goal I needed to complete a first and a second draft of a story but I didn’t need to take it beyond that if I didn’t want to. That meant I needed a story idea. “Give me any random idea and I can find a story from it.” It just to happened that I had an idea for a story that never worked out, but sitting on the lanai in the warm Florida winter, it occurred to me that the problem with my idea was that it was too big. If I narrowed the scope of it, I could work very well. All of the sudden the idea caught fire. I could see the scenes as clear as day. It took all my effort to hold off writing until January 1. When the New Year rolled around, I begin to write the story. By January 5 I’d completed the first draft. By January 11, I had my second draft, and it wasn’t even halfway through the month. The story almost wrote itself. I spent January 12 and 13 doing some edits and the story was finished. A few days later, on January 18, I started the next story. By February 21, that story had gone nowhere and I knew the goal I’d set myself was a ridiculously silly one. I stopped writing entirely.
I stopped writing, but I didn’t stop thinking about writing. Why didn’t the second story work? It was a decent idea, so what was wrong? After all, give me any random idea and I can make a story from it, right?
More than thirty years of writing has changed my view of this. I can probably write a story from any random idea, but rarely could I write a good story from any random idea. Why not? It turns out that not all ideas are equal. Some are better than others. This would seem like an obvious lesson for a writer to learn fairly early on, but it is a difficult lesson to see with an ego blocking your view. I see it now, though, plain as day. Not all ideas are equal, and for me at least, it doesn’t make sense to waste energy on a lesser idea just to say that I wrote a story about it. With all of the talent I can muster, I’m just not capable of turning a lesser idea into a great story.
How to I know if an idea is good? This is hard to describe because it is instinct. There is a feeling I get when an idea takes hold of me. The idea consumes me. I get excited about it. I pace around my office, sitting, standing, impatient to start writing. The idea is a spark that ignites furnace inside me and I can’t stop until the fuel has burned itself out. This sounds vague, I know, but it is one of those “I know it when I feel it” kind of emotions. Looking back, my most successful stories came from these kinds of ideas. I suspect part of the reason that the very first stories I wrote when I was getting start are so embarrassingly bad in retrospect is not because I lacked talent, but because I lacked a filter for ideas. I wrote stories for every idea I had.
The story I wrote back in January came from a good idea. The furnace burned hot when I wrote it. Ultimately, it because the first story I’ve submitted to a magazine in over a decade. The next story I tried writing was not a particularly good idea and it was therefore doomed from the start. It took me longer to see that, but when I did, and I considered it, I began to see that I’d been thinking about how I go about writing stories almost from the beginning.
While I might be someone who can write a story for any random idea, I cannot write a good story for any random idea. I need a good idea. And while I am rarely at a loss for a story idea (I’ve accumulated so many over the decades that I could live the rest of my lift without ever having a new idea and still have plenty to write), I am not one who frequently has a good story idea. Ego and impatience have conspired against me in this regard. Good ideas come when they come. This is just the way my mind works. They may not come frequently, but they always come, and accepting this has changed the way I think about writing.
There have been other lessons. I’ve always felt the need to track what I write. I’m fascinated by the process of constructing a story. I frequently imagine my favorite authors, sitting in their offices, tapping away at a keyboard, or scribbling on a legal pad. How do they construct stories. And since they are so successful, shouldn’t that mean that if I follow their recipe, I’ll be successful, too. I track my writing so that I can go back and reconstruct what worked and what didn’t. In reality, I’ve probably spent two or three times the amount of time, effort, and creativity on the tracking and the infrastructure, than on the creative act. I’d built elaborate templates, I’d write scripts to automate things, always telling myself that these activities will allow me more time to write, and always spending more and more time perfecting these systems and not writing. I did this even in college, in the early 1990s, creating macros in Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5 to help track my writing. I’ve been doing it for more than 30 years.
Recently, I asked myself why and I didn’t have a good answer. In the past I’ve told myself that I’ve done this to learn about my process: I can go back and see the evolution of a story from idea, to draft, to final draft, to acceptance, to publication and then, like some digital archeologist, dig through my files and discern what I did to make this particular story successful. But in thinking hard about this, I finally saw the two flaws that I’d overlooked all along. First, every story is different and what works in one case doesn’t necessary work in the other. Second: I have never gone back to dig through the history of a story to see what worked or what didn’t. This is one of those ideas that seems good in theory, and is never used in practice.
For a long time I was focused on regimenting my time. I’d work out calendars to ensure that I had time set aside to write each day, and then, when that window came, whether I was ready or not, I’d sit down to write. It was often painful. It took decades for me to learn this, but for me, the creative spark comes when it comes, and I can’t summon it at will, as much as I wish I could.
If I could go back in time and do it all over again, I probably wouldn’t change anything. I know myself well enough to know that I have to learn things in a certain way for them to finally settle in and stick. However, if I were to go forward taking the three decades of lessons I’ve learned from writing, I’d alter my approach in several ways.
I’d curate good ideas. I’d rather be able to say, “Give me a good idea and I’m much more likely to produce an interesting story.”I’d be patient and not stress when well was dry. Decades have shown me that it always fills up again. It’s just a matter of time.I’d write when the mood hit me and for as little or as long as I wanted, wherever I happened to be.I’d eschew all formal infrastructure; I’d no longer worry about tracking my work; I’d open up a document in Microsoft Word and begin typing.It’s been more than four months since the well ran dry, and that feels like a long time, but experience has taught me it always fills up again. And so it has. I’m writing again. I’ve what I think is a good idea that I’m excited about. I’m writing when the mood strikes me, and I’m not worrying about tracking my work.
I’m just having fun.
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