The Reality Check You Don’t Want
In response to another reader’s comment, a few days ago, this comment was left:
Nothing personal, but this is exactly the kind of grandiose, self-indulgent bullshit that aspiring writers say when they’re in denial about the fact that they’re too lazy to do the actual work of writing. Writing, like any art form, is a job like any other. People who sit around talking about “giving birth” and “nurturing their children” are phonies. What writing is, at the end of the day, is sitting down and putting one word in front of the other until you have a book. This Romantic nonsense about “the muse” and feeling your ideas “growing inside” you is just that: nonsense, and even the Romantics knew it. In a recent interview, Neil Gaiman addressed this exact issue:
“If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.
You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.
The process of writing can be magical. … Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.”
This is good advice. Your comment, aside from being entirely non-responsive, is really just a way of making yourself feel better about the fact that you haven’t sat down and written anything. You haven’t “yet written one word for publication”? That’s fine. Get back to me when you do. Then I’ll listen to what you have to say about the writing process.
I agree with the sentiments above wholeheartedly, although it upset the person it was directed at. Which bring me to my point: as I observe in the introduction I’ve just written, to the upcoming guide to self publishing of which I’m a contributor, people rarely want advice. They want to keep on doing exactly what they’re doing, even if it brings them no happiness whatsoever–in fact, creates the opposite.
Succeeding at something you’ve never succeeded at before means doing something you’ve never done before. Doing the same thing over and over again, day after day, is a recipe not merely for failure but for misery. There’s a big difference between advice and a pep talk and while both have their place, they should never be treated as indistinguishable. They serve, or should serve, two completely different purposes.
Take, for example, this guide to self publishing: if it contained the all the same “you can do it”-type bloviating that every other guide did, it wouldn’t be worth much. Or anything at all. Why pay someone to tell you what you can tell yourself, for free? No, I think the purpose of any guide, just like the purpose of in-person advice, should be to give you something that you can’t get on your own.
I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot, lately, since one of my projects is doling out what will potentially be unwanted advice. That people seek something out doesn’t mean they want to find it–at least, not if it clashes with their expectations of what they should hear. But, that all being said, I’m interested in your feedback. What would you like to see in such a guide? What topics do you feel are inadequately covered elsewhere? Incorrectly covered? Does the industry even need another guide of this kind?
