The Writer Behind the Words (7 page)

If You’re Feeling the Blahs Try This

• Hide. It’s okay to not want to talk to anyone. To spend all day in bed. Pull the curtains because you hate the sight of the sunny day; unplug the phone. Eat what you want to. Read, listen to music, or cry.
  
 

• Get a friend to help you with the tasks you’re too tired to manage, such as mowing the lawn, washing your hair, washing the dishes or ironing your clothes.
  
 

• Staying in a cluttered environment or feeling ugly can compound your depression, so have someone help you clean up. If the lethargy slips into the next day or into a week, please schedule time with a trusted friend or a counselor. It may be something more than the blahs.
  
 

• Schedule some down time every week. If you have a habit of feeling down, you may be pushing yourself too hard.
  
 

• Daydream about how things will be when you’re past this moment.
  
 

• Get out.
  
 

• Talk to someone.
  
 

Suicide is a frightening reality in this field. Being a writer is a solitary endeavor, and it can be painful. It is one of the most overcrowded arts and you will get little respect. In no other field are beginners expected to be giant successes after the first try.

If you were a new doctor, no one would expect you to become an internationally known specialist after a year of practice. But publish one book, and people will ask you why you didn’t make
The New York Times
Bestseller List, sell movie rights, or get a $100,000 advance like the teenager they read about. Ignore them. Guard your joy. If people ask you how much money you make, ask them their salary first then tell them if they’re close. Or don’t respond at all.

It’s okay to be a beginner. It’s okay not to make six figures with your first book (or sixth book), or a thousand dollars for your first article. You are on your way.

E
xcuses are one of the biggest dream killers in a writer’s life. Something happens and you’re knocked flat. Excuses give you a great reason to stay down and never get up again. They are prevalent and insidious, causing a lot of untold stories and ideas to remain so. Why? Because everyone believes them.

I can’t write because I don’t have time.

I can’t write because I’m too old or too young or too hip or not hip enough.

I can’t write because I was awful in English or never went to college.

I can’t write because I don’t think I’m good enough.

I can’t write because I have an illness and that makes me tired all the time or I can’t see clearly or my arthritis acts up.

There are many excuses, but I’ll address the three most common.

Sure you do. You’re just not spending it on your dreams. Like money, time is something you spend and many people waste hours. They say they’ll wait until their kids are grown, or until they have a better job or until an extra hour is added to each day. The reality is that time will always be taken from you, if you don’t know how to steal it. When I was going to college, working full-time and shuttling my mother to and from different doctor appointments, I would write in the waiting rooms, during my lunch break or on the metro. Another writer strapped for time hired a babysitter, another talked into a tape recorder while driving to work. Learn to seize sixty minutes out of every hour or sixty seconds out of every minute. Become a crafty thief of time.

How to Steal Time

• Make a list of what you do each day. Find one activity that you can farm out or stop doing all together. For example, is there a TV show you must see every day? Why not tape it? Do you commute by bus, metro, or carpool? Write on the way to work or on your lunch break. If you don’t take lunch breaks, start.
  
 

• Use a tape recorder in the car, while cooking, folding clothes, walking.
  
 

• Go to sleep a half hour later or wake up a half hour earlier to write.
  
 

• Write in five to fifteen minute intervals. Just to jot down an idea. In the kitchen, while boiling water, scribble down a sentence.
  On Sunday, Malcolm discovered the body.
  Good you’re done for the day. Tomorrow you’ll add something more and the day after that even more. It doesn’t matter how much you put down, just that you write something. It’s like using drops of water to fill a bucket. Eventually, each drop will accumulate into a story. Slowly you’ll eke out more time to write.
  
 

Don’t let time be the enemy of your dreams. Don’t dream of the day when you’ll have all the time you need to write. Make time now.

You are smart enough and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I doubt my fourth grade teacher would believe I’m a writer now. I missed most of recess that year because I was kept inside to redo my English tests (grammar, spelling etc.), but I still wrote stories and poems and plays. I kept writing. Successful or smart people recognize their limitations and hire others to compensate for them. You have all the skills you need to make your writing dreams come true and one of those skills is delegation.

Use other people’s strengths to your advantage. Are you unsure about your subject? Talk to an expert. Grammar not a strong point? Read a book, hire someone, or get a trusted friend to look it over for you. Are you a poor speller? So what. Write the way you think the words are spelled then look them up later or just use spell check on your computer or have someone proofread. The one thing you need to remember is that readers want others to instruct them or to tell them a good story. They don’t care about your limitations or shortcoming as long as your words do their job. You’re only limited by your fears.

I will in no way belittle the burdens of a disease, but don’t let it stop you. The writer Christy Brown (the subject of the movie
My Left Foot,
a great inspirational movie) had a major handicap and still made his literary contribution. Debbie Macomber overcame dyslexia to become a
New York Times
Best-Selling writer. Eva Rutland is blind and uses speech recognition. After his near fatal accident, Steven King continued to write through the pain. There are authors who have continued writing after surviving cancer, struggling with muscular dystrophy, dealing with diabetes and coping with many other ailments.

I, too, struggle with a chronic illness that impacts my “quality of life.” I faced ten years of being undiagnosed (and at times, misdiagnosed) and I continue to struggle in managing my illness, but my writing kept me going and continues to do so. I don’t focus on my illness and I encourage others to do the same. Your words are needed.

Write for five minutes a day. That’s all. It will add up.

It’s the act of movement that differentiates the winners from the losers. Winners keep moving like the turtle, unlike the hare that finds reasons to stop. Get moving. Toss away excuses, they have no place in your dream plan.

Excuses are easy to fall into and are the enemy of resilience. When you have written only three pages of a three hundred-page novel, the “I don’t have time” excuse will pop up. A rejection turns into an “I’m not smart enough” campaign. You see a fresh-faced young writer get a million-dollar contract and you tell yourself that you could have written that book if you weren’t always so sick.

Excuses are the perfect shield for fear and the longest and most painful road to regret. You can be yourself (flawed, imperfect) and succeed. Get rid of excuses and take responsibility for your dreams.

I know this section might make some of you angry. Many aspiring writers write me and say, “You don’t understand! I have a really good excuse!” You probably do and that’s fine. I just hope that it’s good enough to combat regret.

After excuses, the next dream killer is the Poverty Complex. Many people think that writers are either very rich or very poor. But there are plenty of writers who are making a good living and you can be one of them. Don’t fall into the Poverty Complex. Here are a few tips on how to avoid it.

Make Money Matter

Because the thought of poverty is a dream killer, think of riches. Yes, there are people who will write for free. This fact can make it difficult to earn a living. Don’t worry about it. Set your standards and go for high markets. Make sure to work with those who value your skill and will pay for it. Kill the starving artist stereotype. Unless it gives you pleasure, pay no mind to the statement “It’s impossible to make a living as a writer.” It’s a poverty trap. People won’t pay for writing if they can get away with it. But don’t let them.

As a professional, demand to be paid. If it’s a low paying market, make sure you’re in it for the right reasons (good exposure, to get clips etc.) but don’t stay there. Branch out into bigger markets.

Make money matter. You don’t want to live on noodles for the rest of your life and you don’t have to. You don’t need to be greedy or obnoxious, just business savvy. A check always helps the ego.

Develop the key attitude that you deserve to make a living as a writer: Whether that is through self publishing, charging $100 an hour or demanding an advance of $15,000 or more. Don’t fall into the starving artist trap. The world at large will trick you into thinking that you must love what you do at the expense of money. But you have to eat. A person who hands out fries gets paid and so should you.

Book publishers don’t make most of their money on books, they make it on selling the rights to those books. You’re selling information that can become much more. Synergy is the name of the game: learn how can you take one idea and transform it into different forms.

Audio, scripts, articles, merchandise, try to see the bigger picture
before
you hand over all your rights. Be strategic. If you decide to take a low advance because there are other benefits to the deal, that’s strategy. Taking a low advance or low pay because you’re grateful someone’s willing to pay you, that’s a poverty trap.

I
’ve met many individuals who want a career as a writer, but who won’t make it because they haven’t mastered the first step. They can’t get started. They do a lot of busy work, but no writing. This isn’t uncommon; it’s a safety net. You can’t criticize what is not written. You can’t be judged on what you haven’t done. Unfortunately, dreams can die in the process.

Page fright is a common malady among beginning writers and even among some professionals. It panics writers until they’re buried under how-to books, overwhelmed with lecture notes, have watched numerous documentaries, read biographies and done
everything
except what they need to do — write. Similar to experiencing stage fright, you encounter a blank page in all its brilliance and as you stare you feel yourself grow smaller and your ideas grow less significant. You worry about revealing yourself to be a fool, an uncreative fool with no original thoughts or ideas, no ability to add to the millions of works that came before you. You know the first sentence — no the first word — is important, but how can you compete with:

• “Call me Ishmael” (Herman Melville,
  Moby Dick
  )
  
 

• “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” (Franz Kafka,
  The Metamorphosis
  )
  
 

• “Jack Torrance thought: officious little prick.” (Stephen King,
  The Shining
  )
  
 

• “Death with all its cruel beauty, lived in the bayou.” (Nora Roberts,
  Midnight Bayou
  )
  
 

Soon drops of sweat moisten the page or keyboard and you know there’s something in the kitchen that needs to be cleaned (the knives look kind of dull).

Halt! Stay where you are. This is not a time to flee; it is a time to fight with words. Any words. Your first try need not be brilliant. Why do you think there are erasers or delete buttons? If you don’t have access to either of those, use Wite-out®. Write badly, you’re allowed to. No one will see. You don’t have any ideas? Try these:

• Write about the stain on your carpet.
  
 

• Create an imaginary feature story.
  
 

• Write about the next door neighbor’s screaming parrot.
  
 

• Write about how you sometimes wish your family would disappear.
  
 

• Write about a talking pin cushion.
  
 

• Rewrite a fairy tale.
  
 

• Change the ending of one of your favorite novels or movies.
  
 

• Write a letter to an invisible friend.
  
 

• Create a diary entry of a crazy afternoon you never had.
  
 

• Pretend you’re a famous novelist. You receive hundreds of fan letters a day, the critics love you, your editor adores you. The world can’t wait for your next book. They don’t care what it is as long as it has your name on it. Now get started.
  
 

• If that is too far fetched, pretend you’re somebody else. Create a different persona. Now write.