I Got Lost Trying to Find the Proper Path

 
I don’t remember exactly when I decided I was going to be a writer. Before I was a teenager, I’m sure, because I was already a writer as a teenager. I wrote a handful of short stories and had an ever-growing, novel-length work in progress before I was 18. Even wrote a few songs (lyrics only) and had rough outlines of a series (or three) of fantasy novels. I was well on my way to becoming a “real writer”.
 
Then … nothing. For most of the next two decades I made no progress on my writing at all, or at best very little progress, despite still having the dream/goal of becoming a writer.
 
I used to think it was my first encounter with computer programming, followed by college and a Computer Science degree, that took over my life and pushed the writing aside. But that’s not it. Throughout college and afterward, I would think about writing, and think about stories to write, and read about writing. Damn little actual writing, though.
 
Now, with some accumulated hindsight, I think I know what the real problem was: I was trying to go about writing The Only Right Way.
 
I constantly read books and articles and (eventually) Web pages about How to Write and How to Get Published.
 
Of course, I did. I’ve always been a voracious reader. That’s how I learned to do almost everything related to computers. That’s how I taught myself computer programming and video game programming and object-oriented programming (ah, those were the days) and more. I found books on those topics, and I read them and learned from them.
 
There were all those books out there about writing and getting published, so, of course, I devoured them. I read them one after the other, looking for The Only Right Way.
 
This is, I’m sure, at least partially an artifact of my computer programming education and experience. There is (or can be) a real elegance to programming software. I came of age in a period when programmers were still fighting against constraints of memory and processor speed. As a programmer, you wanted to have the fastest, smallest code that achieved the most impressive result. I embraced this to an extreme degree. I wanted my programs to do everything Right. And I wanted them to be Absolutely Perfect the First Time.
 
I spent most of the late 1990′s and early 2000′s fighting past this self-imposed limitation/insanity in my software development. I had to learn how to get past searching for the Right Way, and go with “Good Enough For Now (I’ll Fix It Later, But Only If It Needs Fixing)”.
 
It wasn’t until 2002 or so that I realized a similar mindset had stalled my writing. I finally saw that I had been trying to plot and populate and write my stories and novels The Right Way. Since there is no “right way”, nothing ever made it past a few pages of notes before seizing up and grinding to a halt. I had spent so much time trying to find the Right And Proper Path of Writing, that I had gotten lost and gotten nowhere.
 
It wasn’t until I stopped trying to be “right” that I started making any progress. In the years since then I’ve experimented with a number of approaches to writing stories and novels, and I’ve learned a lot about myself and how I work (and how I don’t work). I’m still experimenting. Not sure I’ll ever stop experimenting.
 
I still have to remind myself that there is no “right way” (in programming and in writing both), but not so frequently as I used to. Which is probably the best I’m going be able to manage. But that’s good enough for now (I’ll fix it later, but only if it needs it).
 
-David
 
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