JUST WRITE (Or, A Response to NaNoWriMo's critics)

antonyjohnston:

“If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.”
    – Me, in a Scrivener user forum thread, some years ago. It’s a long story.

Every so often (that we don’t do it regularly is a great irony) I and my friends in comics figure out how much we’ve written in the past few months and tweet it.

No other medium is measured in pages output. A 300pp novel can easily become a 200pp novel by printing with smaller type; a 100pp screenplay can potentially become a film of between 60-140 minutes in length; a 200pp stage play could be performed in anything from 30 minutes to four hours. For all these media, the script length is agnostic to the final work.

But one comic page is one comic page, no more and no less. We actually write around the page as a unit, and a script for a 20pp comic will always produce a 20pp comic.

So that’s one reason. But there is another.

BEING PROLIFIC MATTERS.

I sometimes see People On The Internet decrying work-in-progress tweets and posts as worthless. “Measuring output by quantity rather than quality is dangerous,” they say. “More work doesn’t mean better work!”

These same people often dismiss NaNoWriMo as an exercise in futility. “Yeah, so you’ve written 50,000 words,” they say. “But that doesn’t mean it’s a good story! You’re just hacking it out to meet a word count!”

Here’s the thing: none of these people, not one of them, is a working writer. I say that with 100% confidence, for one simple reason – a reason that by definition only working writers truly understand.

WRITING MORE MAKES YOU A BETTER WRITER.

Woah, there. Controversial?!

No, not really.

Look: anyone can sit down and write two pages of a novel, then forget about it, and a week later write five pages of a screenplay, then forget about it, and a week later start another novel… etc, etc.

That shit is easy. Everyone (yes, even working writers) has a ton of projects they’ve started but never finished.

But writing a whole novel? Or a whole screenplay, or comic book, or stage play, or whatever? Actually seeing it through and finishing it?

Well, now. That shit is hard.

You learn from it. You learn how to sit your arse down and write, even when you don’t feel “inspired”. Even when you just want to play Peggle all day. Even when your dog is puking up because he ate something dodgy, and you’ve got a dentist’s appointment this afternoon, and by the way this room could really do with a good dusting couldn’t it, and, and, and you write anyway.

You improve. It’s impossible not to, because you have something finished, to review and assess in its entirety. And when it’s finished, it inevitably comes up wanting. What you write is never as good as what you had in your head when you started – never, ever, ever – so you make a promise to yourself, to do it better next time.

You can’t do that if you still haven’t finished this time.

Finishing something is the hardest part. You know it’s not as good as you hoped. You know there are plot problems. You know that by finishing it, you’re saying – even if only to yourself – “This is the best I can do.” And because it’s not perfect, that’s really hard.

But you do it anyway.

Will most people’s NaNoWriMo novels be awful? Sure, maybe. Guess what? Most people’s first novels are awful, period. Whether it takes four weeks or four years, it’s going to stink.

But that’s OK. Knowing it’s bad is half the battle.

If you can finish NaNoWriMo, then look back and think, “Wow, I did that… but it could be a lot better,” then as far as I’m concerned you’ve succeeded. Because that’s the point. It’s what “sort[s] the wannabes from the gonnabes”, as my friend Andy Diggle once put it.

If you make it through NaNoWriMo, and then later you write another novel because you want to do it better, congratulations: you’re already doing more to become a working writer than 99% of people in the world.

DON’T SIT AROUND WAITING FOR INSPIRATION. JUST WRITE.

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(If you want a permalink, this post is also available in the Articles section of my website.)

fr3ight-train:

acutelesbian:

fat-thin-skinny:

acutelesbian:

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

this fucks me up every single time

I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.

This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now