Do It Write!
Is Writing For You?

The short answer is YES, if it’s something you want to do! ^_^ If you dream of writing ‘the next great American novel’, or you have an idea that you’ve been kicking around for years but never found the time to write out, then yes, writing is for you. It’s just a matter of putting in the work.

After writing Solstice, I had many people ask me how I did it. How did I write a whole novel? Well, I mean no disrespect when I say that there’s really no big mystery to it. All it takes is an idea…and a lot of work and discipline. It takes perseverance, because 500+ pages aren’t going to write themselves. And while I know a lot of people (including myself) feel intimidated by the huge undertaking that is writing a novel, there’s something else that comes up a lot in my discussions with people: a lack of self-confidence.

Not to be cliché, but if I had a dollar for every time someone told me that writing is something they “could never do,” or that they have “no talent,” or that their stories just aren’t that interesting, well, I wouldn’t need to work a full-time job. ^__^ The way I see it, if you want to write, you’ll write. Everyone has some level of talent; we all just need to develop it. And, well, no matter how uninteresting a story idea might seem to you, chances are a lot of other people will think the opposite.

I want to stress my second point—that we all need to develop our talent. Let’s be frank: no one’s going to write a bestseller their first time around. For the most part, writing will take lots of practice and patience. It’ll take lots and lots of revisions. It’ll take lots of reading, rereading, rewriting, revising, you name it. That’s not meant to discourage you. Far from it.

I hear a lot of people say something like, “I started writing this story, but when I got to page 50, it completely sucked, so I stopped.” But that’s just it; most first attempts probably won’t be the best. But that’s all they are: first attempts. And a first draft is a first draft (i.e., the first of several, with each subsequent draft showing notable improvement). No writer, no matter how good, is not going to write perfect prose in a first draft.

So if you’ve started a story, and you think it stinks, don’t give up! Don’t just throw it away! If anything, take some time off it, then come back to it. With a fresher set of eyes, you might find immediate ways of improving it. You might find a way to improve on sentence structure. You might hit upon a new plot idea that could help bolster the story.

And if you still think it stinks, keep writing anyway! Because the only real way you’re going to improve is by staying with it! Just keep writing. You’d be surprised how much you’re going to improve just by writing every day and sticking with a story.

I can say this from personal experience. I’m not going to tell you that I’m this fantastic writer, because I still have a lot of learning to do. But I can also say that Solstice is a FAR cry from my earlier fiction. My earlier fiction was just so over-the-top melodramatic, with flaky characters who spoke bad novel-speak (i.e., speaking in ways no normal person would ever speak in real life), and burdened with clunky, awkward syntax and sentence structure that I just thought sounded cool and artsy. Thankfully, I learned along the way that simple is best, that writing cryptically (like you’re trying to outsmart future English graduate students) is the best way to write crappily. But that’s just it: I learned. And because I didn’t stop writing, I was eventually able to write a novel that I won’t deny like an illegitimate love child! ^_^;

Of course, the other thing holding a lot of people back is the scope of a 500-page novel, and the work it involves. Yes, unfortunately, it is work. And I’m not even talking about the research, pre-planning, character outlining, story outlining, location research, and all those things that go into just planning a novel. I’m talking about the actual physical process of sitting down and churning out page after page after page. So yes, it’s work. There’s no way around that.

But before you give up, thinking it’s too insurmountable a goal to top, think of this. When mountain climbers look up at a mountain that’s as high as the stratosphere, they’re not thinking, “Holy crap, how are we going to climb that thing in one, giant step?” No, they’re planning their climb, strategizing on how best to approach it, essentially mapping out their gradual, steady, and systematic climb to the top.

Writing is no different. Don’t look at it as this big, monolithic 500-page block of text you somehow have to churn out. No, a book is a series of chapters. A chapter is a series of pages. A page is a series of words. You can write words on a page. You do so every day at work or at home. Take it a page at a time, or a chapter at a time. Once you complete chapter 1, you’ll start chapter 2. And so on. Before you know it, you’ve reached chapter 10. Before you know it, five pages has become 25, then 50, and so on. Think of a novel as a series of checkpoints you’re stopping at, resting at, and then starting from anew.

The point of this long rant is that you shouldn’t stop yourself from writing if it’s what you want to do. You shouldn’t worry about whether you have talent. If you don’t now, you will develop it if you write. You shouldn’t worry if you think no one will find your stories interesting: if you find them interesting, that’s all that matters. Write to make yourself happy, and the rest will fall into place. Don’t burden yourself with harsh self-criticism and the fear of what others will think. Just write. And don’t worry about whether you’ll have the endurance to finish an entire novel. If it’s what you you’re inspired to do, and if you maintain a steady, consistent approach, the pages will fly by quicker than you can imagine.

Now, how about you get to know your characters?