it's time to read Moneyball
Not because Brad Pitt is making it into a movie, but because my writing is stalling. I always say, if you have writer's block, it's because you don't know enough.
The blank page doesn't intimidate me. I like to write and I'm not afraid to put down something terrible. I have faith that editing will take away most of the terrible parts. And I'm okay with the fact that I'm human and, yes, some terrible parts will undoubtedly remain.
Nevertheless, there are times when I sit down to write and nothing comes. I don't know where to begin. There's no loose thread to tug at. None of the characters are talking. They're just sitting there, like Barbie dolls, lifeless, awkward and unnatural. Nothing's happening.
When this happens to me when I'm working on non-fiction writing, it's usually because I still don't understand what I'm writing about. If I understand it, I know what the Big Idea is. I know what the article is supposed to be about and I know how to explain it. What I write doesn't always work, but at least I know where to start and I usually know were I'm headed.
If I don't get it, the blank page usually helps me figure out what's missing. Sometimes it talks back to me and tells me to go back and do my homework. Do some reading. Do some research. Talk to some more people. The blank page is actually a pretty good friend. It's saved me from making some pretty big mistakes.
I've found that the same thing holds for fiction. You might think that fiction, since it's all made up anyway, is kind of easy to write. But it's not. Tons of research goes into fiction writing. Maybe that's obvious. But maybe not. I think the stereotype of the author sitting alone at a little table with a typewriter — an image I saw recently in a Time Magazine article about Jonathan Franzen — is pretty well burned into the American psyche. Remember that movie Funny Farm?
It's hard, sitting here at my small table in front of my little laptop, alone in the house, not to beat myself up for my stunted creativity. It's also hard to get my butt out of the chair and to invest my time in "research" for my "novel." It is easy to feel ridiculous about yourself when your work is, essentially, self-indulgent mental masturbation. It gets even weirder when you spend the rest of your spare time telling everyone about it.
But here's the thing. If you do that research, and you really synthesize whatever it is you're taking in, what you end up is something authentic and original, which is the whole point. Fiction should be as true as nonfiction. You have to do the research. There is no other way to make it real.
So I'll start with Moneyball and see where it takes me.
