Lilith Saintcrow

Ah, the sabbatical. Whole mornings to spend…working out, then bashing at an emergency copyedit. *headdesk* Not that I’m complaining–I do like copyedits. It’s a chance to make mistakes deliberately for voice and characterization, and it also means we’re closer to the point where the book is completely out of my hands. There is a certain relaxation in the idea that I’ve done all I can, and now it’s up to God (or the production department). It’s the same feeling I get from rollercoasters.

As a matter of fact, the sabbatical was so nice I woke up this morning and thought, can’t I have a few more days? To which the Muse replied, I don’t think so, sweets. Get your ass to work.

I actually broke 62K on Flesh Circus this week and am within striking distance of the end of draft zero. So you know what I’m going to be doing this weekend, in between volunteering and grocery shopping.

That’s right, plugging away.

But I promised you a Friday writing post, didn’t I? I distinctly remember typing that last Friday as I announced the sabbatical. The only problem is…CE Murphy did it better.

She does everything better than me, dammit.

Anyway, Kit wrote this absolutely wonderful post about dreams. Go read it–I’ll wait.

Here was the kernel of it for me:

I gather that breaking things down into bite-sized methodical steps is harder for many people than I find it to be. It’s partly, I think, that you have to be confident of what you want. But it’s also the problem of packing up to move house. At the beginning there’s *so much* to do, you just don’t know where to start. But eventually you have to grit your teeth and pick a room. It becomes easier after that. And building almost any plan is like packing. Get a box. You can’t do anything without a box. (Get an artist. You can’t do a comic book without one. Get a pencil or a word processor. You can’t write a book without one. Get a job in the mail room. You can’t become an exec without experience (George Bush nonwithstanding). Etc.) I genuinely think that most goals are achievable, with a determined and methodical enough approach. It’s not a very romantic way to look at it, but I’m working in a business that looks romantic from the outside and which, from within, is a business just like any other. I don’t think people who want to get into it (or, hell, any other career) can really afford to be romantic if they want to succeed.

A note: I suspect that some of this, coming from me, may sound…I don’t know. Superior. Snotty. Something like that. Because my plan has essentially worked: I decided in 2002 that I was going to get published. I gave myself a 3 year window to get my first contract; I got one fourteen months later, and in fact my first book came out within that initial 3 year window. Then I picked up and moved to Ireland, which is one of those “ZOMG I would love to do that” kinds of bold moves that many people talk about doing in their lives. From that perspective I can see pretty easily how a response could be, “Yeah, but it *worked* for you.” And it has, generally. On the other hand, I don’t really talk very much about the down sides: about really honestly not knowing where next month’s rent is going to come from, about not having developed a social network that involves real live people except two or three times a year/having moved away from the small one we had because the town was too expensive, about having been on only one actual vacation with my husband in the eleven and a half years we’ve been married. Yes: my plan worked. But there are distinct and obvious costs to that success, costs which would very likely not be counted if I’d gone and found another job as a web designer instead of having struck out as a freelance writer. TANSTAAFL, and you have to decide how much you’re willing to pay for it. link

Kit makes an awesome point that I don’t think gets made enough. You have dreams? GREAT! That’s wonderful, everyone’s got to have a dream. Get off your ass and do something about that dream. It doesn’t have to be anything huge–ten years of ten minutes a day is far more effective than ten hours and quitting for a year or two. Slow, consistent effort is what will get the boat built, and then you can sail on the sea of your choice.

The slow consistent effort is how anything gets made, whether it’s a novel or inventing a better mousetrap/car/washing machine/airplane/whatever. Part of it is not being afraid of failure (as opposed to being afraid of success, which is another blog post). Another part of it is the discipline to do the damn work, day in and day out.

Of all the pieces of writing advice I give, the “write every day” gets the most violent response. Plenty of people don’t want to hear that hard work every day is the road to getting shit done. Lots of people would rather think that “something else”–something other than just not doing the work, for whatever reason–is the only reason they’re not published and on Oprah’s list or the NYT Besteller list.

The Selkie and I call people who don’t want to work for it “Speshul Snowflakes.” There’s an awful lot of speshul snowflakery (accent on the “flake”) in writing circles. People think that just because they call themselves a writer they’re entitled to a book deal, publicity, and adoring groupies. Sorry, honey, but that ain’t the way it is. The dreams are great, but they die if you don’t feed and water them.

But Lili! someone is bound to say. What if I CAN’T write every day/do the work? I don’t have time/money/something!

Okay. There are lots of reasons why a dream gets deferred. I know some of those reasons intimately. Some of them are economic–when I was a single mother living in a basement, working full time and going to school, I didn’t get all the time I wanted to write. I still finished two novels, because not writing every day wasn’t an option. I made time to do it. Later, when I wasn’t a single mom but I had a four-year-old and a new baby, as well as a house to clean and not enough to stretch around for the bills, I wrote to save my sanity and finished yet more novels. I did it in little chunks every day–ten minutes here, twenty there, balancing them against feeding everyone, clothing everyone, changing diapers, hoovering the house, washing the dishes.

I like to say I got published because I didn’t think of complete failure as an option. (This is more a measure of my complete naivete and stupidity than anything else.) Sure I got rejected fifty million times. I just put my head down and told myself to keep slogging away because sooner or later something WOULD get accepted, if I kept getting better. A lot of the dreams that die on the vine die because people think you have to be perfect the first time.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you do have to consistently work at getting better. The dream will die if you do not feed it with consistent work. The work can be turned into bite-sized pieces–all you have to do is sit down and do it consistently.

I suspect, with Kit above, that some will call me superior or snotty. To that I say, as kindly as possible, You know what? Eff off. I don’t have to give what I consider to be the best advice for people who honestly want to get published and make a career out of this thing. I really don’t. I could pretend there’s some sort of Sooper-Sekrit Handshake or complex arcane process instead of the butt-simple and honest truth: that for every step of consistent work you take toward your goal, your goal takes a hundred steps closer to you.

The Muse is pure magic, yes. The long stretches of writing where I don’t remember putting the words down, the “best work” I find in each book, the places where something else came through me and made an inspired choice–yes, those are FM, effing magic.

But that magic wouldn’t happen if I didn’t show up every day. If I was absent the magic would go undone. A huge percentage of getting better at writing and making a career out of it is just like a huge percentage of sex–just plain showing up. (And like good sex, writing takes practice and the willingness to try new things, occasionally fail, and have a good time.) The dream is a huge jawbreaker, and you make it manageable and get to the center of it one lick at a time.

And then, when you look up after you’ve been slogging for a while and see the size of the mountain you’ve climbed just by taking one step after another…well, that’s an awesome feeling, my friends. Better than just about anything.

Good luck. Keep dreaming.

And keep working.

That’s all I can say.

Related posts:

1. Fever Dreams
2. We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of
3. All Saint’s Day

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Real Life, Writing (About). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.