Creative writing is harder than I thought it would be. My respect goes out to all the great writers who have built amazing new worlds for us to explore and lose ourselves in. I now know how painful and arduous the journey is.
I was at a friend’s house recently for a get-together, and someone asked how my “work” was going. My standard answer nowadays is that I have a dual identity, that of a novelist and a game designer, and that the game designing was easy and moved along at a consistent pace, whereas the writing was far more challenging.
I reflected on that answer. It was true, but why? What was the difference in the two kinds of creative work?
I think the difference is in the lack of external stimuli or challenges that make it harder to move forward in writing than in game design. On an average day, most of us go to work with the aim of solving some problem or finishing some task. There’s a question to answer, a form to fill in, papers to collate, documents to file or staple. Stuff to box up, stuff to build. Things to clean, things to cook, things to pack, things to move. There’s emails to reply to, research to be completed, calculations to be done. Judgments to be pronounced, opinions to be expressed, choices to be made. It’s iterative to some extent, reactionary as well. It’s like playing tennis or volleyball – you hit the ball and it comes back to you later.
Creative writing, especially for novel-length works, is not like that. There’s no list of things to just get through and then a novel appears. You have to invent. You have to imagine. You have to create. You have to craft. You have to figure out something out of thin air. You have to build worlds and characters that didn’t previously exist. And this doesn’t always come easily. You can’t tell someone, “alright, sit in this chair and don’t get up until you’ve written a concerto”, or “I’m locking you in your room until you come up with the next chart-topping pop song”. It doesn’t work that way. Inspiration can’t be forced.
And yet, what happens when you seem to lack inspiration? Sit there and do nothing? Do something else? For me, the game design provides a way out so that I’m still “productive” in a relative sense, but the book still remains unwritten while I’m working on the games. That’s not the solution to this particular problem.
Thus, the time-honored advice by some of the best and most prolific writers in history is simply – “sit down and write anything.” Literally. Even if it turns out to be junk. Especially if it turns out to be junk, don’t give up. There’s a few important reasons why:
(1) Writing is hard work. It requires discipline. And discipline needs to be trained. So forcing yourself to sit down and write everyday is part of overcoming the lazy and unmotivated part in all of us, and building the habit and discipline of writing.
(2) Don’t underestimate momentum. Sometimes, while writing a stream of junk, you begin to build up some momentum and then suddenly you find yourself writing pretty decent stuff which you can actually use.
(3) There’s the occasional pearl buried in the muck. You might write 90% junk during one of these uninspired moments, but somewhere in there, you find yourself penning that beautiful verse, that fantastic comeback, that plot-fixing element, that delicious verbal exchange. Throw the rest away, save that. It could be the gem that elevates what you eventually write to a new level.
(4) Quality is subjective. There’s no objective scale for measuring quality in creative works. One man’s music is another man’s noise. One woman’s gastronomical delight is another woman’s gastrointestinal disaster. Sometimes, we can’t even decide whether what we’ve written is good or awful. And it may just come down to our mood at that very moment. So it could pay off to just leave the “junk” that you’ve written to sit for a few days, before returning to just glance at it. You might surprise yourself that it ain’t as bad as you first thought it was.
(5) And finally, the most important. Just like for other kinds of “work”, just like for my game designing, it’s easier to move forward when there’s something tangible to tackle. In this case, if you’re written pages of “junk”, you actually have in front of you a first draft. And it’s far, far easier to make progress improving a first draft than coming up with a first draft at all. That’s how to get a book written.
So, in summary, creative writing means forcing yourself to sit down everyday to put in the hours to write. Get something out. Anything. Then take it from there.
All the best to the rest of you writers and aspiring writers. I’ll be in the trenches every day, just like you. I know how it feels. Don’t give up.
