People 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?

Tags: process, writing
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At last year’s World Fantasy Con, I had the good fortune to hear Ken Scholes read his work.  One of the questions asked was  “What books are you currently reading?”  Ken’s reply was that, in his case, writing used the same brain muscles that reading did and since he was deep in a writing process he wasn’t really reading anything at that moment.  I was intrigued by that answer, heard the ring of potential Truth there, and started to pay more attention to what I read.

Everyone who’s a writer in a serious way will tell you – if you want to write, you need to read.  This is true.  When I’m not neck-deep in romancing a manuscript, I read voraciously.  Lately, I’m almost always neck-deep in writing, so I’m not as currently well-read as I’d like.

When I’m actively working on a manuscript, I make time to read works by friends (a way big enough pile that I’m always behind anyhow) and sometimes reread favorite books.  I can pick up those, read one page, or ten, put the book down and go back on my merry way until I have another ten minutes.  If I start up reading a NEW story?  Six will get you ten it’s start to finish, baby, and if I get four hours of sleep and feed my family around the edges it’s a great day.  I have to block out ‘works by friends’ time, because otherwise not much of my own writing gets done.

Then there’s research fiction I read while writing.  It’s usually in the narrow spectrum of what I’m writing.  What the hell is research fiction?  Well, while I worked on Bone Orchard (written in between surgeries and the nerve condition in my arms/hands), I tended to read books like ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley, and books by Edith Wharton and Anthony Trollope.  They’re ‘research fiction’.  In those cases they were books I’d read before, but I needed to be thoroughly reacquainted with Gothic (in the classical sense) and Victorian writing and I chose books whose tones had commonality with what I was writing.

Then there’s reading for research of facts.  For my current project, I read Her Majesty’s Spymaster, by Stephen Budiansky, which was a fun read, because I find Francis Walsingham in all his type-A hyper-intelligent fanatic Protestant anti-glory to be fascinating.  Then there’s some nice light stuff like ‘The Revolt of the Netherlands 1555 – 1608‘.  ‘Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England‘.  ‘The Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century‘.  Sometimes research reading is Really.  Not.  Interesting.  Unless you’re me, and sometimes not riveting even if you are me; and if you are, would you fold that load of laundry?  Thanks.  Four books here, out of about three dozen quite dense historical reference works and I’m trying to get hold of more even as I move forward in my writing this manuscript.

For me, it’s not necessarily about how many cycles I have to devote to reading vs. writing.  Quite a lot more sharply it seems to be reading time vs. writing time.  If you don’t read, you probably won’t learn to write really well.  If you don’t do the keyboard time, you don’t get anything written.  The time I spend reading, I’m most often reading toward my writing.

Writing vs. Reading.  If you do both, how much of each?

Tags: process, reading, writing
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