Storytellersunplugged

The more I do it, the more I become convinced the writing, as an activity, is about learning to hack the wetware.

When you start writing, everything is easy–it’s the effect of what Richard Sennett calls “innocent confidence.” (I know, I know, I keep linking to that article, but I can’t help the fact that it really hit a chord, or possibly a nerve.) So the more you do it, and the more you learn about what you’re doing, the harder it gets and the more dissatisfied you become with your own abilities.

This is–yes, Virginia–deeply unfair.

Now, if you have chosen to make writing not merely a hobby, but an (a)vocation, your problems grow even greater, because part of what that means is that you have to write consistently. And writing consistently is extremely damn hard. Your brain will come up with 1001 reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t or don’t need to write today, and it can become a little like living with the White Queen: “writing to-morrow and writing yesterday–but never writing to-day.”

The hardest thing, I think, about writing is learning to make yourself sit down and do it. Everything else follows from that.

What makes it harder is that–even if you are a professional writer and in theory have other people who are going to give you money for completed projects–outside accountability is very limited. Deadlines can be years away; there’s certainly nothing like–for instance–having to turn your homework in once a week. So when it gets down to the brute drudgery part of the program–as it inevitably will, because anything you do consistently is going to have days like that–you have to find ways to make yourself do the damn work.

You have to hack the wetware, i.e., your own brain, and make it do something which (it will assure you earnestly) it was never designed to do.

Some writers work for a set number of hours a day. Others assign themselves quotas, a certain minimum number of words they have to produce. Both of these hacks are designed to provide structure to a largely structureless enterprise, and they can work very well.

I’ve learned a lot while writing Corambis, but possibly the most important thing I’ve learned is that writing to a quota does not work for me. It isn’t that I can’t produce the words. I can. But, because I am an overachiever and got conditioned in certain ways by being an overachiever, I get hung up on the wrong part of the process. To wit: I get the right number of words, but the words themselves are wrong.

It’s a good hack, but it’s not my hack.

Everybody’s wetware is different; cross-platform compatibility is a joke. You have to find the hack that works for you, whatever it is. Even if it’s writing with your head in a bucket.

Now, the hack that worked for me this past month (and which I hope very much will continue to work, because I really kind of enjoyed it) was breaking the project down into a series of tasks. (That’s the other way to look at writing to a schedule and writing to a quota, by the way: writing a novel is such an enormous, complicated undertaking that you can’t hold it all in your head at once. If you don’t find a way to cut it into bite-sized pieces, you’re going to choke.) And I would say to myself, “Okay, Self, today’s task is to get the scullery boy in position to eavesdrop on the Evil Vizier.”  And we would complete that task.  In general, it took less time than I was expecting, and I could then say, “Okay, Self, we’ve completed our task.”  (Imagine my brain wagging its tail like a Golden Retriever puppy.)  “Now, we could stop for today, or we could go on to the next task, which would be one less thing we have to do tomorrow.”  And in general, because I was happy with having completed the first task and thus enjoying myself, I’d go on to the next task.  (Overachiever, remember?  In some ways, my wetware is pathetically easy to hack.)  This is in distinct contrast to my experience with trying to write to quota, which was that I would get the set number of words, with as much agony as extracting my own teeth with rusty pliers and no Novocaine, and then I would be done.  Nothing left.   Certainly not the kind of vigor and enthusiasm which would lead to getting twice that number of words, or five times that number of words.  Whereas I could set out to complete one task on a particular day and end up completing five.

Partly, I suspect, this hack worked so well because I was under a tight deadline and I knew it.  The option to quit for the day after finishing the first task was pretty much illusory.  (And I won’t pretend I wasn’t checking my word count obsessively, because I was.)   But at the same time, working to an invisible To Do list did make me happy.  It made me feel like I was accomplishing things, and that I was writing, not merely words, but parts of a novel.  It was the best kind of hack, the kind that makes the system not merely do what you want, but actually work better.

I don’t know what my next novel is going to be.  But I hope, with fingers crossed, that I know how I’m going to write it.