I want to be a writer, but . . . .

Originally published at Robin Hobb. You can comment here or there.

1. I don’t have time.

2. I’ll never be good enough.

3. I don’t know how to start writing my book.

The time has come for me to break the web of silence and give you the secret and arcane knowledge that you must possess to become a writer. I warn you that it may make your eyes bleed and your stomach ache. But it’s a small price for becoming a writer. Right?

1. I don’t have time. I’m going to wait until I graduate from school, until after I get a job, until my vacation, until after my wedding, until after the baby is potty trained, until the kids are in school, until I retire . . . . .

Okay, you get it. Big events fill up our lives. Day to day grinds take our every minute. We get home from work or school exhausted. The kids NEVER go to bed at a decent hour. By the time the house is quiet, all I want to do is turn off my brain and zone out with a TV series or Bejeweled.

Sorry. That is not on your ‘be a writer’ agenda. The truth is, you will never have more free time than you do right now. Your life will always fill up with stuff you need to do. Even after you are successful and no longer have a day job, you will still need to get the car serviced, pull the weeds, pick up your friend at the airport, call the plumber and mop the floor, oh, and since you ‘don’t work’, can you watch your friend’s kids this afternoon? Life does not stop so that you can write a book.

So here is what you do. Get a notebook. electronic or paper, I don’t care. Paper ones never need batteries, and tend to fit better in you backpack, diaper bag or purse. I like paper. Then write. Write on the bus to work. Write while waiting for the dentist. Write between classes. Write on your lunch hour. Write during the kids’ soccer practice. In the evening, leave the room where the television is and write. It can be done. In fractions of hours, throughout the day, you can amass words like a squirrel storing nuts. At the end of the day, sit down at a keyboard, and put those words into a document. (They will magically grow as you do so, for you will realize you need to tell what sort of a tree it was, or describe exactly how her lip curls.)

Once you start doing this, you will find your writing time. It’s there, in your life. You just need to find it. (Hint. Your writing time is not on Facebook or Twitter. Do not look for it there.)

2. I’ll never be good enough.

Good enough for what? Can you talk? Do you tell your friends, spouse or kids what you did today? Then you are telling a story. Use your own voice and write words down. Mickey Spillane did not write like Professor Tolkien or e e cummings or Lois McMaster Bujold does. But I think we can all agree that they are extremely readable and enjoyable. So stop holding on to that self fulfilling prophecy and write. Spellcheck will nag you to fix your spelling while grammar checks will show you new and interesting ways to be wrong. Just tell the story. Get it nailed to the page. Re-writing is where you go back and make it pretty, and put in foreshadowing and create the witty repartee. But, to get to the re-writing, you first have to do the writing. So turn off the television and Facebook and twitter and WoW and write the book. So you can re-write it and make it good.

3. I don’t know how to start writing my book.

Neither do I. So I never start writing a book. A book is big. It’s lots of pages and many many words. No one can write a book tonight. But what you can write is a scene. Write a fight scene, or describe the village in the fold of the mountains or delineate exactly how his muscled back looks in the moonlight. Write something that excites you, that scene that you think you have to wait until the middle of the story to write. Write that. You might just discover that, truly, that is where your book is supposed to start. Or, once written, you may back up and start framing that scene with the other scenes that will give it the full impact. But don’t try to write a book.

So, sorry, I lied to you. Fiction writers do that a lot. There isn’t a secret to being a writer. Just a piece of advice that no one, not even me, wants to take.

Go write.