Here’s a fun question to ponder. What do The Stand, The Hobbit and A Christmas Carol all have in common? The answer is simple. Too simple. Horrifyingly simple. A few years ago I decided to write a novel. I had characters all outlined and plot points galore. I had my settings down pat and a nice storyline that would illuminate
main character’s journey into a self-activated person, hopefully sending a touch of inspiration my reader’s way when they turned last page of my novel. I had a large amount of notes in an even larger amount of notebooks. I was a writer. Right? Wrong. I wasn’t a writer yet because I was still enchanted by Writing Fairy. You know what Writing Fairy looks like. She is that magical creature that will take dialogue running through your head and place it onto page. She is person that will fill in those little blanks that don’t seem worth worrying about while you’re in brainstorming stage. She is mythical beast that will take all of your imagination and creativity and turn them into a book for you. The Writing Fairy sits on your shoulder every time you pace up and down your room thinking up great new ideas for where your characters are heading and convinces you that you are on your way to being an established author. The Writing Fairy’s touch is only thing you are waiting for before you begin to actually sit down and pound out pages of your manuscript. Yes, as soon as Writing Fairy says that it is time, you will begin to write in earnest. I have news for you. The Writing Fairy is none other than you because you are only person who can do these things for you. And moment you are waiting for? I have some news concerning that, too. That moment either comes right here right now, or it never comes at all.
Am I saying that brainstorming about characters and muddling over speeches is a waste of time? I most certainly am not. What I’m saying is that you reach a certain point where your outline doesn’t need to be refined any more, where it’s time to put it onto page and nail it down in a more concrete sense. The Writing Fairy will make you hesitate to do this, promising you that thinking really hard is writing. She’ll tell you that you aren’t ready to put anything down on page yet, or you’re not ready to go on with next scene because everything just doesn’t seem right. Don’t believe her, she’s deceiving you. I’d like to say that she is flat out lying, but she’s not. Things aren’t going to seem right when they first start to appear on page. This is what seems so contradictory about writing process. Your dreams and aspirations seem to shrink down once you actually put them into writing. Being creative seems harder and harder as more and more words get put down. Don’t worry though; your dreams are big enough. Acknowledging that your finished piece is not going to live up to sparkling gem you have inside your head is something that every artist goes through…it could be reason why so many of us seem a little bit crazy. Pick any piece of art. Now, as great as that finished product seems to you, there is not a single book, painting, opera, movie, whatever, that came out exactly way its creator intended it. That is a very large part of creative process: surrendering to its limitations. And accepting this fact goes a long way towards chaining down that Writing Fairy and actually producing some work. Don’t listen to her siren song. Don’t think that it should feel one hundred percent right first time. It won’t. That’s what rewriting process is all about. Believe me writing is truly in rewriting. Even Kerouac rewrote his stuff. However, in order to start rewriting process you need a hard first draft to pick over and toy with. You need something concrete to look at and see which scenes fit and which don’t. You’ll find that a lot of your brainstorming gets thrown out window. This isn’t a stifling of your creativity, is channeling your creativity into your selection process. And it doesn’t matter how horrible and off mark your first draft seems to be turning out, you’ll polish all of that out later. But you need that first draft to really start things off, and it will never get finished if you continue to believe Writing Fairy’s misleading comments.
Take another look at opening question of this article again. Any closer to an answer?
I have more bad news about Writing Fairy. Simply sitting down in front of your keyboard and starting your novel cannot vanquish her forever. She’ll be back. She always comes back. Here and there she offers a much-needed break and a much-needed step back from your work to rethink things. More often than not, though, she’ll pop up as you write more and more detailed character sketches, or get sucked into researching something for hours and hours and days and days. She is very good at convincing you that more outside work is needed and that you don’t need to sit down at your keyboard quite yet. She must be stopped. When you really hit a roadblock, you’ll know. If you just need to sort some things out that does not qualify a three-week break from your manuscript. That’s Writing Fairy singing her sweet song. You need to do more then just sit down and start in order to silence Writing Fairy. You need a schedule. “But how can you turn your writing on and off like that? How can you force yourself to write if you aren’t feeling it?” I imagine that some of this is flowing through your head right now. The answer is that you can. It’s that easy. I’m not saying that you’re going to sit down and write Nobel Prize winning page after Nobel Prize winning page. But you must keep writing. Keep fleshing out your story and your scenes. Keep plowing through with your writing when you say your going to even though it doesn’t seem to be very good. You’re not going to submit it as it is anyway. The ending of my novel changed about three hundred times in course of writing it. What’s more, I never would have reached ending if I had continued to go over and over my first twenty pages wanting them to be perfect. It’s really silly when you think about it. You don’t have an entire book yet, how can you make sure opening is perfect if you don’t know where it’s supposed to lead reader? You don’t really know your characters yet, how can you expect them to be just right? Believe me, it is better to write it horribly wrong and then fix it than to never write it in first place. Keep plugging away, keep going, keep heading towards that ending that doesn’t seem to fit and that you don’t really even like. Carve a few hours out of each day and just type away at keyboard. You can always make a scene longer. You can always take out some dialogue. You can always change a character or a point of view. You can really do anything you want to, which is why it’s easy to get bogged down in beginning. Keep in mind that while you can always change it, you have to write it first.
