An Inspirational New Year

If you’re an aspiring writer you are almost certainly not alone in approaching a new year with renewed determination; determined to be inspired, find your muse and crank out that bestseller you know you have within you.

But perhaps all too often you feel yourself agreeing with Neil Gaiman when he says that “being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” Or maybe you can sympathise with George Orwell in that “writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness.”

It’s true that many a writer would agree with Dorothy Parker, “I hate writing, I love having written,” or nod at Kurt Vonnegut, “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

So it would be wise to take Jack London’s words to heart. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

You therefore pick up pen or keyboard determined to, as Gaiman puts it, “make good art” and follow Ray Bradbury’s advice to “write every single day of your life.”

You come to the conclusion that you agree with Tolstoy, that “the best stories don’t come from ‘good vs. bad’ but ‘good vs. good.’” You vow to be concise. As Thomas Jefferson says, “the most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”

And as you become stuck along the way, you remember the advice of Terry Pratchett, in that “there’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.”

In trying to make your novel mean something, you realise, like Lloyd Alexander that “fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”

You are filled with doubts but like William Faulkner you vow to “get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”

But try as you might to set schedules for yourself, you find yourself agreeing with Douglas Adams – “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

Eventually, the novel will be complete and you will find yourself feeling like Truman Capote when he said that “finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”

“Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten, Including your own” Michael Crichton tells you. “It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.”

Finally you will send your masterpiece off, hoping for publication but remembering John Scalzi’s words – “Engrave this in your brain: EVERY WRITER GETS REJECTED. You will be no different.”

Rather than get disheartened you take to heart the words of Edgar Rice Burroughs, that “if you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.”

If truth be told, no-one can know your process but you. As W. Somerset Maugham advises, “there are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

So maybe after all this, you end up concurring with Ernest Hemingway. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Title image by EvasPhotogarden .

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