Professional authors no doubt spend time thinking about which of their books are selling the best, how they feel about their agent, the kind of demographics their stories are marketed towards, and so on. This blog has nothing to do with that. Let’s talk about the things that are inevitably on the mind of the beginning, amateur writer. More specifically, what are the problems or benefits of certain ways of thinking? What kind of Mindset is most likely to yield a better writing experience?
First, it needs to be said that there are a lot of very
common pitfalls that we will encounter that won’t be avoidable – neither should
we attempt to avoid them. For example, you dive into your creative writing
project, and after 50,000 words or so, you’ve realized that your technical
ability for writing prose has increased so much that the first few chapters are
now on a much lower level than your most recent few. And if you muster enough
willpower to actually go back and re-write them, it will probably take so long that
now they will have left the latter half of the story in the dust. It might be a
mess. Don’t worry about it.
Second, if you’ve embarked upon a reasonably involving and
lengthy project, you might have found yourself more inspired or side-tracked by
other story ideas that are now more appealing to you – but you haven’t got anywhere
near finishing the first story you started! Don’t lose any sleep over it. Just
make the judgement call to give up on your existing work, or persevere with it,
but keep writing either way. Your first dedicated attempt at a serious creative
writing project will likely be viewed later as merely your lesson in what not
to do. Such a cold truth, I often wonder whether new writers would be better
off not believing it until they experience it.
You’ll find that the more you develop and add to a fictional
universe, the harder it becomes to keep it consistent, you’ll find more things
you don’t like about it, you’ll wish you’d made alternative creative decisions
(because there was such a sheer number of them, you can’t get it right every
time), and there won’t be any way to unravel the whole thing, because as soon
as you start backtracking and trying to reverse things you did, you’ll just
find new problems to solve. This is natural, and not a problem that is unique
to your writing approach. Just get the story across the finish line and then
start something new (and way better), or make what changes you can without
getting to a point of diminishing returns relative to effort.
Note that all of this has to do with process and perceived
result. Let’s now look at two very different Mindsets, commentary included.
The wrong Mindset – in Luke’s opinion
“It’ll be great to see my first book finished and on the
shelf.” I think it’s important to have goals, even ones that are only there to
motivate us forward. Writing is very hard, so it can be useful to have some
visual, emotional reward waiting for you. Something like this can work against
you though. What if the finished book goes up on the shelf and just sits there
as a reminder of all the things you got wrong when you wrote it? If your main
measurement of success is getting a whole book across the finish line, is your
motivation for writing going to take a nose-dive if you can’t get anywhere that
goal?
“I just want one person to read it and like it. I’d be happy
if I sold even one copy.” No you wouldn’t! If you really did finish it and that
was the result, you would mentally shift those goalposts. You’d be pushing to
find more people, if that’s really the attitude you had starting out. Also, you’d
be giving up the result of your efforts to something you have little control
over.
“I’m gonna keep trying/keep working on it/keep submitting
it/keep editing it until it gets published, then I’ll be happy.” As stated in a
previous blog post about getting a work published, publishing isn’t really
about you. Besides, how would you feel if you accomplished that (rather empty)
goal, only for the publication itself to deliver a result that was the opposite
of what you hoped for? What if it only attracts negative reviews, low/no sales,
and actually makes it harder for you to get anything else published in the
future due to the impact on your reputation? Again, such a cold and cruel
thought for any aspiring writer, but consider the world we live in. Ask
yourself whether such a thing happens to other people who have been published.
A better Mindset – in Luke’s opinion
“Writing gives me the chance to directly exercise my skills
when it comes to creative, correct, and tasteful use of the English language.
It’s satisfying to observe great use of grammar, and writing gives me the
chance to be in direct control over whether a piece of writing succeeds
according to technical criteria or not.” Luckily, the rules of language are
there for everyone to understand and use, and with this approach you are in
direct control over your relative success. Actual effort and perseverance
will be directly proportional to how much literary ass you kick.
“I’ve read a lot of stories and explored a lot of other
people’s fictional universes. I want to get the most out of developing my own
one. The most enjoyable part of a creative writing project is coming up with
and developing the really interesting story ideas that propel the writing as a
whole. Physically typing out the prose is almost like a homage or tribute to
the fact that I love these ideas.” This is a focus on one of the main positives
of writing, and centralizes everything on process and person. At a later stage
your mission can be to effectively communicate the value of these ideas to an
audience, but your passion and drive for the conceptual side of it should come
first.
“Solving a crossword puzzle isn’t about writing up a tally
of how many crossword puzzles you’ve solved, or being the person who has solved
the most of them or the hardest ones. It’s about the pleasure of solving the
puzzles. Once solved, it’s not worth anything anymore. In the same way, writing
is about the joy of finding the best word to use, inventing the best character
for the role, building a world that is worthy of your imagination. Writing
purely for the purpose of getting the piece done and on a shelf is like doing a
bunch of mundane chores without being paid.” Let’s not kid ourselves too much –
we do want completion, accomplishment, and recognition. But we’re more likely
to get there, and less likely to suffer if we fail to get there, if we are
doing it for the sake of the journey.
