Loyalty to the Unknown Reader

I was giving writing advice to a friend of mine. Here is a snippet of the conversation I’d like to share in case it inspires another would-be author out there:

“But you will not do better unless you take up your pen and write. Set yourself a quota of a page count or a number of hours devoted to the novel. Eliminate all distractions during that time and hold it sacrosanct.

“You need your wife’s permission and cooperation to do this.

“If you feel writer’s block coming on, go out, away from all distractions, and do lawn work or chop wood or do pushups or other hard manual labor until the ideas start flowing again.”

I did not tell my friend, but this is the advice of Gene Wolfe, not my own. When I have writer’s block, I merely talk to my wife, my pet muse, and command her to solve it for me, imperiously snapping my masculine fingers. She then works out how to solve my writing problems, and I chain her up in the kitchen again, barefoot, until needed. (I think Neil Gaiman wrote an episode of SANDMAN about me. I come to a messy end.) 

((NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: that was a joke. The guy in the Gaiman story kept his mused chained up in his attic, not his kitchen. Completely different person.))

“So called writer’s block is inevitably a sign that your muse is telling you something you don’t want to hear (usually, you don’t want to hear that   whatever you just wrote is going down the wrong track). When that happens, throw out the chapter and start again from ten or twenty pages ago.

“Write! Your future fans are weeping and waiting! Have pity on them!”

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.