I spent years searching for the magickal pill of writing. I tried so many different things. Classes. Books on how to write. Rituals. If I conquered this one fear, read the right book, or did the right spell, everything would fall into place. I just had to find that one thing, the pill I had to swallow, and I would find success.
It took me a long time to realize that was bull.
The secret to writing is writing. You sit in that chair. You put a pen to paper. You type. Words come out. You read. More words come out. You make what you wrote better.
There were many false paths. I tried one method after another. So many plans fizzled out. So many “I am going to do this” that never came to fruition. I got discouraged. I took breaks. When on thing didn’t work, I thought it would be the next. I never have a problem getting ideas, my problem has always been figuring out which idea is the one that is worth developing and sticking with one project.
Strangely enough, I can’t say all of my false starts were wasted time. I learned many things not to do. Some types of writing I can do around activity and with distractions. Some I can’t. Some writing work that is not writing can be done while listening to podcasts. Certain types of music open my writing brain. Other types distract me.
Mind you, classes and the books and the like are a definite help. You do need to get feed back to improve your writing. But nothing replaces sitting in that chair, day after day. Writing becomes better writing after spending time working on it. There is no one secret and it all falls into place. There are many secrets, and improving as a writer means finding the ones that work for you. The lie is to think there is one secret to discover, and that one secret will lead to success.
Its true I have obligations. My partner, the wee dictator, and working full time, not to mention the other time commitments of life. Its too easy to give up my writing time for one of the many tasks on my to do list. While there are more efficient ways to write and less efficient, the simple truth is you still need to put in the time. Even on days you don’t feel it. I have had plenty of times I sat in front of my work, not sure what to do with it. I reread it. I fixed typos. Before I knew it, I was redoing sentences. Maybe it wasn’t perfect after a little revision, but it was always better than before. The advice I got: find the cracks. Find the space between.
It wasn’t until I said “I am going to do a bit of this every day. Maybe not for a long time every day, but a bit every day,” that I really started putting in the time. I do still have days where I don’t get as much time in as I wanted because, well, stuff. But I realized I have habits that are time suckers, and learning how to curb them has been a boon. Now, instead of being stuck on my phone, some nights a week I go straight to the computer and type. I submitted a short story to an anthology, and when I opened up my spreadsheet so enter where I had submitted it to, I was shocked to realize months ago I had put down a few places but had submitted it to none. I got discouraged, I forgot about it. While I do need to be a realist about my other priorities, nothing is going to get written if I don’t write it. Nothing will be published if I don’t send it.
Yes, there are rejections. Yes, there is a whole lot of bad writing. I think for my latest project my cut scenes are almost a novel by themselves. But I have noticed for the last few years even the quality of my rough drafts is improving.
There isn’t one decision that I can point to. Its many small decisions that make up my writing path. That is true for many other areas of life. We want that definitive turning point, which makes a great story. But real life is a lot messier than the literary arts.