Never Give Up

Whatever you’re writing, wherever you are in the writing process or in your career, I have two pieces of advice for you:

1. Finish the book
2. Don’t ever give up.

Nobody said this writing life was going to be easy. I don’t need to tell you about the obstacles – you already know what they are. Only you know how strong your personal demons are and how much energy it takes to overcome them every time you sit down to write. Only you know how hard it is to summon up enough faith to send out one more query. Only you know how deep and dark your doubts are when you’re wide awake in the middle of the night.

Don’t let any of this stop you. If you have the passion, if writing is the one thing that makes you feel fully alive and present in this world, then you must keep on.

Write on the days when the words flow as easily as water. Write on the days when it feels like every word has to be dredged up from your toenails. Write on the days when you feel like the painted ship upon a painted sea, when words are sludge and hope is gone and you know for certain that nobody in their right mind will ever read this tripe you’re smearing on the page.

Some of you are doing Nanowrimo this month. Maybe you’re blazing trails and have left that 50k word count goal in the dust. Maybe what you’re writing is sheer brilliance and you are riding a writing high. But if you happen to be three weeks into Nanowrimo and your word count is falling behind, don’t give up. Keep writing. If you can’t quite make the word count, focus on making a word count.  If the end of November comes along and you’ve only got twenty-thousand words, or ten, that’s more than you had at the beginning of the month. Keep going. Don’t let some airy-fairy idea of failure make you stop.

If you’re above ground, if you’re still writing, you haven’t failed.

And when you finally finish your draft and you read it and you’re sure it totally sucks, see if you can make it better. Then move on and write another book. And then another and another. Focus on making every new book better than the last.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t revise the sucky draft. You probably should. Most first drafts are wormwood and despair. They need a lot of work to turn them into masterpieces. By the time I’m done revising and rewriting, I generally have as many words in what I call my “Darlings” file as there are in the finished novel.

But there is a danger in getting fixated and stuck on one novel. I see writers working on the same book forever and ever, like they’re Sisyphus pushing that damned boulder up the hill, day after day after day. The energy leaks out of the book, or it becomes a convoluted mess. The writer lives in a state of desperation and despair. This is not good for either book or writer.

Sometimes you have to step away for a bit. Find a new idea. Write another book. And then another one. Every book will teach you something new about your craft and lead you closer to mastery. And then, maybe, one day, you’ll go back to that sucky Nanowrimo draft and realize you now have the skills you need to fix it.

Look what I ran across the other day:

 

Notice the date. Yep. Dead Before Dying was written five years ago, and is just now on its way to publication. Since the time that draft was completed I’ve written four other books and three novellas. Dead Before Dying had to wait its turn until I’d figured out what it needed. That first draft was a mess. The POV was all wrong. It didn’t fit any genre category known to humanity. And Maureen, my feisty lead character, wasn’t even in it.

I didn’t know any of that. All I knew was that something was wrong with it. I never abandoned it – I always knew I would come back to finish it. But I had to go build some writing chops on other projects.

My point with all of this is exactly what I said at the beginning. Whatever you’re writing now? Finish it. And then write something else.

Don’t stop.

Don’t give up.

Writers write. You are a writer. So go do the thing you’re here in this world to do, and don’t let anything or anybody stop you.