Writing Wednesday: Being a Writer

There is something that happens between the time when you want to be a writer and when you want to write a specific book that I think is very important.

I remember wanting to be a writer for a long time, in elementary school, in high school, and then in garduate school. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up as a kid, I would always tell them I wanted to be a writer. It seemed like it fit my personality and my interests. I loved books and I wanted to write books—like that. I knew that writers actually wrote things, and so I wrote a lot of different things. Mostly, I wrote things that were like the books that I read that I liked, though this was sometimes conscious and sometimes not.

I have various pastiches of Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, and Star Trek, as well as a painful YA problem novel that I pounded my way through. It probably wasn't until I wrote the first novel I submitted to a publisher in high school that I think I began to change from wanting to be a writer to wanting to write a specific book.

Probably half the people in the United States think they want to write a book someday. Few of them will actually sit down and do it, but for those who do, congratulations! It's quite an accomplishment to finish a novel, just as it is to finish a marathon or an Ironman. You don't have to set a world record time to finish. But it's also true that finishing a book is only the beginning of writing it. Saying you want to be a writer is a lot like saying you'd like to play the piano, which is to say it doesn't mean very much unless you're putting in the actual time to make it happen, practicing. But finishing a book also doesn't mean that much. Let me explain why.

By the time I went to college, I had written about ten novels, and one of them might have been remotely sellable. But they were all first drafts, and I never tried to rewrite any of them. Why? Because I kept having a new, shiny idea and I wanted to work on the new idea rather than the old one. There's nothing really wrong with this. I still find myself distracted by shiny new ideas all the time these days. But it's also true that a first draft isn't going to go very far. And if you never want to fix a first draft, if you never care enough about the idea to keep working on it, you may never actually move from the “I finished a book” stage to the “published author” stage.

It's one thing to enjoy the process of writing (or not to). It's another thing completely to love one particular book so much that you keep throwing yourself at it. It's one thing to read a novel in a genre and think—I could do this. It's another thing to write a book that you are pretty sure will never sell because it doesn't fit into any categories, and write it anyway. Because it's the book that speaks to you, that demands that you tell it, because only you have the skills and the word view to write that particular book.

I'm not saying that there isn't a time to let a manuscript go. I've been around long enough that I have seen people who hang onto the same book for twenty years and refuse to try a new one, just keep tinkering with that one, changing paragraphs here and there, or maybe changing a little more than that. But never able to reinvent it enough that what they've learned over the years makes a difference. I suspect that this is a kind of mental illness, the inability to move on and try something new.

But there are also people who write something so different that everyone tells them it will never work. And they do it anyway. And they keep sending it out, and maybe it never does get published. But maybe it does, because they were right. And then they write something else completely different and get rejected some more.

Being a writer is more than having a knack for words. It's more than loving books and wanting to write “one of those.” It's more than sitting down and hammering out a first novel. Being a writer means giving yourself over to a book idea that is absolutely crazy, that is bigger than you are. Being a writer means doing something impossible. Being a writer means sticking with a book after umpteen revisions, and even hating it for a little while, and then falling in love with it all over again. Being a writer means trying ideas and then realizing that this time, it didn't work and that you “wasted” all that time. And that's OK, because you're going to try something else and it's going to work at some point, or it won't.

Being a writer means taking chances and letting go and taking new chances, constantly taking new chances. Being a writer is sitting on a high wire and being sure that you're going to fall, and then standing up and acting as if you know how to do this, and you're going to be just fine.