Read This: One Continuous Mistake
Now that we’ve established that you should ignore the NaNoWriMo naysayers, I’d like to share with you two complementary bits of advice I’ve found online and one book that I think get at the heart of the spirit of National Novel Writing Month, for those of you who have chosen to participate in it. A few months ago, John Scalzi wrote a short essay in which the takeaway line (at least for me) was, “Either you want to write or you don’t, and thinking that you want to write really doesn’t mean anything.”
“Do you want to write or don’t you? If your answer is ‘yes, but,’ then here’s a small editing tip: what you’re doing is using six letters and two words to say ‘no.’ And that’s fine. Just don’t kid yourself as to what ‘yes, but’ means.
“If your answer is ‘yes,’ then the question is simply when and how you find the time to do it. If you spend your free time after work watching TV, turn off the TV and write. If you prefer to spend time with your family when you get home, write a bit after the kids are in bed and before you turn in yourself. If your work makes you too tired to think straight when you get home, wake up early and write a little in the morning before you head off. If you can’t do that (I’m not a morning person myself) then you have your weekend… And if you can’t manage that, then what you’re saying is that you were lying when you said your answer is ‘yes.'”
Last year, Merlin Mann offered very similar advice, elaborating on the importance of keeping up your momentum: Start writing, and keep writing! He also warned about paying too much attention to creative writing advice: “When I’m reading about writing, I’m not writing.”
That said, I do want to take a quick moment to plug one of my all-time favorite books about creativity and writing, Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake. Its core message is straightforward, best expressed by two of the four “noble truths” upon which Sher builds her advice. “Writers write,” she says. “If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.” The rest of the book is about opening yourself up to the process of writing and teaching yourself to get out of your own way. The chapters are short, but each one is packed tightly; in a way, the book is more useful as a devotional-like object than as an argument to be read all the way through. Because, after all, you really should be writing.
5 November 2010 | books for creatives, read this |
Ignore NaNoWriMo Scoffers & Keep Writing
A little over five years ago, John Scalzi observed that “the seven most damaging words in the English language for the reputation of any novelist might very well be ‘I just wrote an article for Salon.'” The same might be said of its regular “literary” columnists, whose own contributions to the site’s status as, in Scalzi’s words, “that miasmic hole of self-regard” is not insignificant. Two nights ago, for example, Laura Miller belittled National Novel Writing Month along with just about every aspiring writer who participates in it:
“Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it’s likely to produce more novels I’d want to read… The last thing the world needs is more bad books. But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced.”
Miller goes on to describe NaNoWriMo as a particularly nasty symptom of what she calls “the narcissistic commerce of writing,” which is basically her way of saying she heard secondhand about some people who said they wanted to write books but didn’t actually read much. She then remarks that “there are already more than enough novels out there—more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it’s our job to do so.” Now, she’ll grant you that there’s some value to continuing to write books, even if we already have plenty to read, because her favorite authors might come up with something new; heck, she’s even willing to concede that somebody she’s never heard of before might be able to write a book she would like. It’s just that NaNoWriMo probably isn’t going to produce anything like that, so what’s the point, really?
4 November 2010 | theory |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
