At some level, the writing game has only one rule: keep going.
I forget this rule all the time and end up wondering if I should quit and be happy.
The thought process goes a little something like this: I’ll start a project and it’ll feel great and around 20-30,000 words I start to wonder whether writing this thing is really a good idea and whether I shouldn’t try a different craft and hadn’t I better quit before it turns out to suck because otherwise I’ll just be disappointed in myself and, anyway, I don’t think I have it in me to finish a book length project.
Play this on loop 1,000 times a week. (I am genuinely curious if other writers have similar thought processes!)
Most of my life is littered with half finished projects that got sabotaged by some form of self-doubt or displaced by other responsibilities. I finished a book length project in high school thanks to NaNoWriMo (do not recommend) but until my dissertation, no book length project was finished.
Getting my PhD was, at some level, about learning how to finish a project, how to find an idea worth writing about and sustaining that writing for a significant amount of time. It was also about studying literature as a way of finding out what my own voice sounded like, what my concerns were relative to the canon. So my intents were slightly mercenary: I was there to ransack the library, so to speak.
My dissertation was the first long-form project I had finished that might actually go somewhere. I mostly finished because I wanted the credential and because I had a committee that knew I was writing something. I couldn’t look like a failure: I had to finish the dissertation.
Similarly, when I had a publisher for my first book, University for a Good Woman, I couldn’t quit. There was someone waiting for the manuscript. This was a great situation for me to be in as a first-time published author. Without that contract, I never would have written that book. I used the proposal and contract as a way to lay out the book and it gave me concrete deadlines to work with, not vague self-imposed ones.
Anyway, as I wrote University for a Good Woman, I put aside doubt and just added to my word count every day because I had to get it to the publisher on time. Or else. (What the or else was, my brain wouldn’t tell me, but the threat was useful.) That is all you need to get a first draft. For me, generating words is the hardest, most grueling part, the part where I can easily talk myself out of a project because it is so labor intensive. Editing, though, is the most pleasurable part of the project. There is something much more enjoyable about working on prose when you’ve written it already. Doubt is replaced by a much meaner critic, but I’m working on that part.
Now I’m working on (among other things) a novel that no one is waiting for, a novel whose sole audience, at the moment, is me. The book is tentatively titled Dinner at Silvio’s and it’s about some restaurant workers who are trying to get a union together. Chaos ensues, as does hilarity. I wanted to experiment with voice and style as well as challenge myself with a new form. I’ve been reading a lot of Terry Pratchett who has taught me about the value of humor and redescribing our strange world in funny ways.
I started the project with the idea that I wanted to have fun so the reader could have fun. My friend recently told me he enjoyed writing his dissertation and it made me wonder whether I could come up with a project that was about enjoyment. And writing this book really has been enjoyable. The humor and happiness has kept me coming back to add at least 500 words five to six days a week. I can run long on word count, if I want to, but 500 is the minimum. And doing so, I have already accumulated 38,000 words. Previously I would have either already given up because I’m no good or I would still be thinking about writing in the abstract instead of actually doing it.
And while I see the mountain of half-finished projects and wish my younger self hadn’t dealt with so much doubt, I am very proud that I did what I could to keep writing–even if that meant sometimes that “writing” was reading 150 books a year trying to find a voice and subject matter that I cared about.
Writing is a long game, like any other craft or sport. I used to be enamored with those who published their books young or who wrote quickly. Usually, these types are middle class or have some sort of support; not to diminish their achievements, but often their success is held up as indicative of their individual strength rather than the success of their social support. Knowing what I do now about the class politics of writing as well as its basic difficulties, I no longer find such phenomena interesting: there is no inherent value in doing things quickly or at a young age. I’m more interested in people who sustain their practices for years as they have competing responsibilities, or who publish in their forties, sixties, or eighties.
All this to say: keep writing.
Kaelie Giffel 