Jul
15
2010
Lies About Writing
Author: Sara MuellerPeople tell lies about writing. Writers lie to themselves sometimes, or sometimes people tell us lies about our work. We get over these lies with help from our friends and mentors. Sometimes we have to get over the same lies repeatedly. What in the hell am I talking about? Below are the first two lies that leaped into my head, that I’ve heard professionals tell me over and over are lies.
Writing isn’t a physically strenuous career…
LIE. This should be an obvious one, though the strains on your body aren’t of the football or construction kinds. By now probably everyone with a computer has heard of Repetitive Strain Injury, of which Carpal Tunnel is probably the most famous. There are a whole host of them, and they’re all nasty. Focusing on a monitor glaring at the same distance all day is bad for your eyes. Sitting still in a chair all day is generally not good for your body. After a while our bodies will tell us about the strains in hateful ways.
Read up on ergonomics and apply it to your writing everywhere we reasonably can. Particularly true in my case, where nerves in my arms and hands remind me almost daily that they’re screwed up. Do not break your body if you can possibly avoid it.
Along with ‘sit down and write’, many professionals have said, is a need to find some form of exercise and DO it. Sounds fabulous and easy. If we don’t have this as part of our life, shoehorning it in can be a challenge. I struggle with this one. I stopped horseback riding years ago. Right in the wake of that, I ended up with a series of open-body surgeries that put me in bed for weeks at a time. Now, getting my butt up to exercise takes some motivation because I stopped exercising. I’m supposed to ‘Just Do It’? Are you freaking kidding me? I need a reason to do it, because I have just piles of reasons not to exercise. I don’t feel too good today, and maybe I’m sore from trying to exercise once already this week, and I’m way behind on (task du jour) so I don’t have time today… whine grumble, bitch moan. Words to live by from Jenny Gibbons to her husband – “But babe! You need to do cardio! You don’t want the zombies to catch you!” Those excuses back there? The ones dressed up as reasons not to get off your butt? They’re the zombies, and they’re coming to get you.
I need to be inspired to write…
LIE. Evil, evil lie. If we seriously think a Special Snowflake Fairy is going to make us into writers all of whose work is birthed only in the Flow of Artistic Inspiration, we need a slapping. A brisk stinging slap the first few times. Further infractions qualify the writer for a ‘clue x 4′ to the back of the head. Writing when we’re not inspired may well result in a page full of crap, but in the immortal words of Kath Nyborg - “We can edit crap. It’s impossible to edit a blank page.”
Realize that no one ever has to see our crap but us, and we can edit it. So face the fear of writing crap, take up the implement of your choice, and bloodily chop this lie to bits every time it crops up. Like fixing the first lie (or like fighting zombies, come to think of it), this is not as easy as it sounds. There’s a gajillion ways to get over this, and I sure don’t know them all. Here are two I’ve used.
If you have no idea where the plot is going, and you’re looking out at a directionless sea, and you have no friends to go to lunch and plot with, there’s always the most dreaded advice I’ve heard a professional give to me. “Just write a (expletive deleted) synopsis. It’s not going to kill you.” It didn’t kill me. In this case it took me to the gasping edge of death by boredom… and hey, wait… where did I get bored again? Oh! Right around there! So what’d be more evil there… Go to the beginning and just make a list of what happened in the story so far. It’s distressingly mechanical. It has NOTHING to do with inspiration, but sometimes it helps to get some distance on a project so that you can see where you’re actually going with it.
If you have some idea of where a plot is going, you can just recognize that the next bit’s going to feel like slogging through the Sea of Crap, pull up your hip-waders, and head in the general direction of that far off shore ‘The End’. Try to find as many hummocks of decent ground as you can along the way. You might have to double back a lot to find the right direction. You’ll probably have to come back once you’ve blazed a trail to ‘The End’ and cut out stretches of crap and replace them as needed with better stuff. You might very well find the Flow of Inspiration again, hidden below the surface somewhere along the way. You darn sure won’t find it unless you wade in.
I’m sure I’ll think of some more lies that professionals have, over the years, told me were lies. I’m sure I still tell some to myself, because I’m not perfect. What are some of the lies about writing that you’ve fallen victim to? How do you try to fix them?