Editor’s note: This the third in a series of articles by Paul Bishop that help you write effectively and easily. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
“It is not your obligation to complete your work,
but you are not at liberty to quit.”
The Talmud
In marathon running, it is called hitting the wall. This is the point in a race, usually around the twenty-mile mark, where muscles seize up with lactic acid overload and your body tells you continuing to run is impossible.
As a novelist, I have hit a writing wall with each of my nine published novels around the seventy-five percent completion mark. At that point, the metaphorical lactic acid buildup in my writing muscles brings everything to a screeching halt and I want to throw my computer out the second-story window.
I become convinced my novel is the worst piece of writing I’ve ever produced. I know my editor will laugh demonically as she gleefully rejects the manuscript. I have visions of being forced to return the already spent advance, and watch my career scattering about me in tatters.
Deep breath.
Deeeeep breath.
Okay, I’m better now.
I have finally learned not to panic when this happens. It always happens. If I can just goad, fool, or guilt myself into continuing to put one word after another, this phase will pass and the story threads will suddenly pull together. Like a marathon runner fighting through the wall, I have to persist until my novelist’s second wind kicks in and I find myself speeding toward The End.
It sounds simple – like Nike pompously telling you to, “Just do it!” – but it’s far from easy. Finding the gumption to complete a writing project is to enter into a battle with all of our writing fears and phobias.
Here are some tips I’ve learned that can help you break through your own version of the writing wall and get your manuscript finished. These tips apply equally if you’re writing the next Great American Novel, crafting a poem for your sweetheart, or trying to record your own personal history, so if you want to write anything, these tips are for you.
TIP #1: Embrace Rejection
Fear of rejection can force us to slow down the completion of a writing project. As long as our manuscript isn’t finished, we don’t have to show it to anyone and risk their harsh judgment.
I once received two rejection letters on the same day. The first claimed I wrote crackling dialogue, but stated my narrative was clumsy and colorless. The second praised my narrative as sparkling while condemning my dialogue as dull and lifeless. These contradictory rejection letters were for the same novel.
Talk about mood swings – I went from crushed to indignant to determined.
I still rely on those letters to strengthen my resolve not to let somebody else establish how I feel about my writing. Fear of the dark is not eliminated by turning on a light. Light only eliminates the dark. Similarly, not finishing your manuscript to avoid negative criticism does not stop the fear of rejection, only the rejection itself.
So, what is wrong with avoiding your fears? Nothing, unless you love carnivals but are afraid of rides, dread heights but want to hang-glide, or yearn to be published but fear rejection.
Accept rejection as part of your validation as a writer. Seek it out as a sign you are on your way to success. By embracing rejection, and sending my novel back for more, it sold six weeks later to a major publisher who found both my dialogue and narrative riveting.
TIP #2: Don’t Confuse Editing with Writing
English classes in high school and university can sometimes do more harm than good. All that stuff about spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, grammar, expected length, double spacing, and using five words from the current week’s vocabulary list takes much of the creative spark out of writing.
Are those things important? You bet, especially if you want to sell what you write. However, paying attention to all those half-remembered rules during a first draft can bring the entire process to a halt.
The old saw about writing is rewriting is never so true as when applied to finishing your manuscript. With your first draft, you must feel free to write what is in your head without immediate editing. Getting the words down on the page is the only thing of importance.
Finish the first draft, then go back and apply all those lessons you learned from Ms. Harridan’s Freshman English 101.
When you rewrite, order will come out of the confusion of the first draft, it is the natural way the mind works. Trying to perfect every sentence and paragraph the first time through is not only impossible; it is crushing to the creative muse.
TIP #3: Write the Best You Can Right Now
When I read a seamless novel by a favorite author, I often despair over comparisons to what I see as the patchwork of my own prose. I have to fight the urge to push away from the computer and abandon whatever I am working on as unworthy.
However, I have eventually learned I can only write the best book I am capable of writing when I am writing it. If I were to rewrite my first novel with the experience and craft I have developed through eight other novels, it would be a better book. At the time I wrote it, though, it was the best book I could write.
The first word we write of a new manuscript will always shatter the ideal novel we envision in our mind. The perfect piece of writing doesn’t exist. Our objective should not be to start out being brilliant writers, but to work toward becoming brilliant writers. To achieve that ambition, we must be willing to be less than brilliant in order to learn the craft needed to be brilliant.
I am currently striving to make my next novel the best I can write with the skills and craft I’ve honed and earned. It will not be perfect. I will not see it as being up to the standards of my favorite authors. But it will be the best novel I can write right now.
So, do not be discouraged by the luminosity of others, or the flawlessness of writing you have as an ideal. When you sit down at the computer today, or take out your yellow legal pad and favorite pen, strive to write the best prose you can write today.
TIP #4: Creative Procrastination
About the middle of creating Tip #3, as I begun to struggle with completing this piece (I’m not kidding), I began formulating a dazzling story idea set completely in a police interrogation room. The more I thought about this idea, the more dazzling it became, and the easier it was for me to avoid the hard work of finishing this article.
I call this phenomenon creative procrastination. Whenever we are struggling with a project, our subconscious has a tendency to soar off in creative fits looking for easier outlets. Sometimes these new ideas are dazzling, while other times a harsher look shows their flaws.
At the time, however, the temptation is to set aside the current project and throw yourself into the exuberant flush of a new inspiration.
The problem arises when you get into the middle of the new project. Unforeseen problems suddenly demand solving, and your new dazzling idea becomes as hard to complete as the original endeavor. All of a sudden another dazzling idea suggests itself and the cycle continues.
Creative procrastination is a mermaid’s siren. To avoid being caught in its mystical allure, I keep a plot book. This is a journal in which I jot character names, interesting titles, tidbits of overheard dialogue, and anything else I don’t want to lose – including all of those dazzling ideas brought on by creative procrastination. By getting the ideas down on paper, I achieve two goals – making sure the idea is not lost or forgotten (just in case it is dazzling), and I stop the idea from running around in my brain, distracting me from dealing with the harsh realities of my current writing project.
Get those dazzling temptations written down, and then get back to finishing your manuscript.
TIP #5: Goals
Okay, okay, you’ve heard about goals before. You’ve heard about them over and over ad-nausea from any motivational speaker you can name. There is a simple reason for this – setting goals works.
A couple of years ago, I was experiencing a career lull. Tired of my whining, my wife demanded I started practicing what I teach. She made me sit down and decide on some short-term and long-term goals. I wrote them on a white board, gave them completion dates, and we talked together about how they could be achieved. Within six months all but one of the six stated goals had been reached.
You can’t do everything at once. You can’t write your novel in a day or a week. But you can write a page a day. You can write a chapter a week. And, if you do this consistently, you will eventually finish your book.
Cartoonist Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, once related that on the morning of his second day in kindergarten, when his mother came in to wake him, he rolled over in bed and groaned, “What – again?”
To endure a career as a writer is to persist again and again. Set your goals, adjust them if you need, but write them down, keep them in front of you, and focus on achieving them.
TIP #6: You are Not Alone
A colorful quote states there are two types of scuba divers – those who pee in their wetsuits and those who lie about it. To paraphrase, we can say there are two types of writers – those who have trouble completing their manuscripts and those who lie about it.
Statistical probabilities aside, all writers experience completion anxiety. If I ever see an infomercial touting a completion anxiety avoidance pill, I’ll be the first customer on the 800 line. I can hear the announcer now, “For $19.95 you’ll get a thirty-day supply of Dr. Ritemore’s Anxoidance Formula PlusT along with Dr. Ritemore’s patented Fingertip Plot MassagerT, and if you call within the next ten minutes, you’ll also receive the invaluable Ritemore Royalty Statement Decoder RingT.”
Until that time, however, all of us will continue to struggle with the dreaded phenomenon. Knowledge is power. Knowledge that you are not fighting this very personal battle alone is super power.
Remember, writers are the only adults who get to spend all day in their pajamas playing with imaginary friends. We all get to share in both the gifts and the curses of our chosen profession.
TIP #7: Oh, yeah – TIP #7
I am the poster child for procrastination. I’ll get tip #7 to you as soon as I win the next game of computer solitaire, stop worrying if the editor of Meridian is going to laugh demonically as she rejects this article, do some more editing of tips 1- 6, go for a run, do the laundry, convince myself I’m not the only completion challenged writer in the world, and find the gumption to finish this manuscript.
There are more than enough insecure, angst-ridden writers out here, so tip #7 really is don’t do as I do, do as I say. You are all writers endowed with the seeds of greatness. You can finish your manuscript. Just get off the Internet, follow these tips, and come out with your fingers writing.
