Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

I think there are ways to avoid making a period of inactivity worse. Besides acceptance, I think it's helpful to avoid letting everything else go to hell along with the writing. This too is easier said than done, and my current miasma has been exacerbated by a stubborn refusal on my part to do anything else that might make me feel better or might render my life more manageable. I've fallen hopelessly behind in my correspondence, for example. I've let my bookkeeping slide. And I've had a difficult time keeping up with my normal routine. I always feel better, for example, after one of my thrice-weekly visits to the gym, but it is a part of my present malaise that I haven't felt like going to the gym.

I've been making myself go anyway. I don't want to go there, and once I'm there I don't want to be there, and I can't for the life of me see any point in picking up heavy iron objects only to return them to the place I found them. It seems an utter waste of time and energy. But I do it anyway, even though I don't feel like it, and then I take a sauna and a shower, even though I don't feel like that either, and afterward I feel better.

And I do tell myself, from time to time, that I'll get back to work on the book eventually, that I'm not finished forever with writing as a profession, that I'm ahead of schedule anyway and the book will get done when it gets done, and?

And sometimes I believe it.

It's not fun. One thing I've found to be true for most of us is that, whether we enjoy writing or not, one thing we enjoy a good deal less is Not Writing. Unfortunately, it seems to be true that Not Writing is occasionally a part of the writing process. And it's a lot more tolerable, and probably better all around, if I can learn to trust the process.

At least I've written this month's column?which, like everything else lately, I've stubbornly avoided doing. Like my gym workouts, I've gritted my teeth and done it in spite of all inclinations to the contrary, and whether or not it was worth doing is something I'm not equipped to judge.

But I feel better for it.

CHAPTER 17

Do It Anyway

I'VE GOT a friend who's been calling me almost daily for the past couple of weeks. Some time ago he contracted to write the libretto for an opera and he's having a miserable time of it. He fell behind schedule, missed a deadline, and is being gently hounded by those to whom he is responsible. My experience in this area is, to say the least, limited. I've never gone to an opera, let alone written one. But we're friends, and opera librettists are evidently in fairly short supply, so I'm one of several people he calls regularly when he wants to gripe, moan, cry, beat his breast, and solicit the odd word of encouragement.

Of late my words of encouragement have grown increasingly predictable. He'll natter on about how the words won't come, how when they do come they're terrible, how he can't stand to look back at what he's written, how every time he writes something he wants to tear it up, how just sitting at the typewriter has become an anxiety-producing activity, and so on ad nauseam.

Do it anyway, I tell him. Put your behind on the chair and your fingers on the keys and get the words onto the paper. They don't have to be good words. They don't have to be the right words. You don't have to like them. You don't have to enjoy writing them and you don't have to be proud of having written them. You don't even have to believe that the whole process is worth doing. Do it anyway.

But it's no good, he'll sometimes say. It's wooden, it's lousy, it's bad.

Fine, I reply. Write a bad libretto. Do it anyway.

I don't invariably proffer this sort of advice, either to others or to myself. Sometimes when a book doesn't feel right the best thing I can do is put it deliberately aside for a while and return to it when my subconscious has had a chance to sift through it and work things out. Writing, after all, is not like factory work. You can't necessarily be productive?and get paid for your efforts?simply by showing up for work and performing your allotted task. Sometimes persistence and perseverance don't amount to much more than banging the old head against the wall. The immovable wall.

There are times, though, when it is demonstrably more important to get something done than to get it done well. This would seem to be the case with my friend. His choices are not between writing a good libretto and writing a bad one, but between writing something and being relieved of the assignment altogether or failing to fulfill it.

The daily newspaper is often held up as a great training ground for writers, and there are certainly innumerable members of the profession who had their start in newspaper journalism. While newspaper experience will not in and of itself guarantee success as a fiction writer, one can't have spent much time in the game without learning to get things written and get them in on schedule.

In the newspaper business, no story is a