First Post + Thoughts on Writing
I feel like I always hear about bloggers, but I never actually follow them. There is so much content out there that I wonder how many people still read blogs. I’d assume there are more vlogs now. Why would someone spend their time reading a blog? Probably because they’re highly interested in the content. I follow one blog currently: Patrick Rothfuss’s blog. He’s an amazing author. If you haven’t read his stuff, check it out - start with The Name of the Wind. His writing is light years ahead from where mine will ever be.
Anyway, I imagine that unless you’re a big-time author or influencer, writing a blog is really just for the person writing it. So that’s what I’m doing. I want to post on a regular basis, but I’ll probably just post when I have something to say.
Today, I want to talk about the novel I’ve been working on just about every day for the past year or so. I haven’t posted anything on my website since I created it, and this novel is the reason. When I graduated grad school in June 2023, my novel was at about 30 pages. Now, I’m at about 172. Those original 30 pages are either gone or completely unrecognizable, and I guarantee in a few more months, those 172 pages won’t be recognizable either. 172 pages. Sounds like I’m almost done, right? It’s not meant to be a long novel. Yes, I am almost done… I think. Sort of. Anyone who’s written anything knows that revising takes 100 times longer than actually writing. My book has only started to come together within the past couple of months, and that’s because it was only a few months ago that I truly started taking the piece of advice that all experienced writers give: Just write.
I have sat down with my spouse, my brother, my friends, anyone who would listen to me talk about how I have no idea where my book is going. They’d try to help me outline it, plan it out, but every time, I’d get frustrated and end up throwing the outline away. Now, I finally have a plan. I know how it ends. I know how it ends! I know what I need to add in the middle to make it work. This is a big deal to me. I was writing blindly for a long time, BUT turns out, that’s what I needed to do.
How can you be productive if you go into something blindly? It’s a valid question. It’s one that I asked myself a lot, especially as someone whose job used to be planning and process management. It was a terrible feeling to not have a plan. It made me feel like a bum, a failure. Even though I was making progress, it certainly didn’t feel like the progress I was used to (sprints, anyone from the IT world?). I think - Wow. Look at my spouse. Look at my friends. Look all these people on my FYP and LinkedIn. They are contributing to society, and I’m writing sentences like, “I let the dams in my eyes collapse.” (No, this line will not make it into my second draft.)
This brings me to things I learned about the writing process:
What writing is: Writing is like throwing paper off a building in the middle of a storm. Some of the pages fly and gets stuck somewhere. Some are pushed to the ground by rain only to drowned in a puddle and be trampled by footsteps. After the storm, you go around and try to find each page, or pieces of pages. From there, you dry out the paper, look at what your left with, mix your glue mixture, and build a paper mache sculpture. Building the sculpture is the editing process. It’s where the actual writing takes place. Everything up to that point is just scraps and tools. This is why first drafts are always terrible, no matter who’s writing. The real writing doesn’t start until the second draft.
What writing feels like: You’re going to feel like you’re a shitty writer the whole time. You’re going to think: I should just delete everything and start over. I should just quit now. I’m roughly a month away from a completed first draft, and this feeling hasn’t gone away. I still feel like a shitty writer. In fact, I’m embarrassed and ashamed every time I go back and read something I wrote. Only three things have kept me going:
The knowledge that my emotional scenes have evoked emotion in my readers (shout out to my spouse, Nick, and my brother, Jared). This goes hand-in-hand with their support and encouragement for me to keep writing as well as their brutal honesty when something isn’t working.
This little phrase I read every day: “Do not compare your first draft to someone’s final draft.” It’s easy to do. Reading does make you a better writer, but it makes you feel like a shitty one too.
Changing my goal to be to simply finish my book. Writing a book is an accomplishment in itself because of the dedication, perseverance, and discipline it takes to do it. This is how I’ve reframed my mindset over the past six months. Most people who start writing a book usually have an end goal to get published. Do I want to get published? That’s the dream. Am I going to try to get published? Absolutely. Am I going to self-publish if no agent or publisher wants my book? Maybe. Jury’s still out on that one. But getting published can’t be the only goal. That’s like saying you’re going to start eating well and working out with the sole purpose of losing weight. It doesn’t last long. It needs to become a lifestyle. If my book flops, that would suck, but it’s okay. The most important thing I learned in grad school is that you can only get better at writing if you actually write. No amount of studying or analyzing other people’s writing can get you to a higher level until you actually write. So, even if this book sucks, the next one will probably, hopefully, not suck as much. I look back at my past pieces of work that I remember being really proud of only to find them to be terrible. Ah, the process of improvement.
Knowing that many (maybe even all) writers at some point ask themselves this question: “Who’s going to want to read this?” Two people I’ve heard admit to asking themselves this question are Barbara Kingsolver(about Pulitzer Prize Winner, Demon Copperhead) and Patrick Rothfuss(about The Slow Regard of Silent Things, a novella based in his main series’ world, moved to #2 in the New York Times Best Seller Hardcover Fiction list approximately three weeks after its release and stayed in the top 15 for a month).
The rules of writing: There are none. I learned the supposed rules in grad school. I had one professor tell me, “This story needs to start with a hook, an action scene.” I fixed it, then I took the story to a different class, where that professor told me, “There’s no context for this opening scene. Your story doesn’t have to start with action. Action without a reason is just noise.” Both of these professors were right. Every opinion should be taken into account because it calls out something that could make the story better. The real problem in this story I workshopped was that my character had no purpose. If there’s one writing rule that needs to be followed it’s that your characters have to have a purpose, even if it’s as simple as organizing a bunch of lost things (cue Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things).
The writing process is unique to each individual. We’re told that we need to have an outline before we start writing, but that’s not always true. It depends on the person and the piece, especially when it comes to novel writing. This goes beyond the writing process too. Life doesn’t have an outline, never truly. It’s not: school, college, job, marriage, children, retirement. It’s okay if you don’t know where the story is headed as long as you keep going, stop once in a while to look at how far you’ve come, and smell the roses that are planted where you’re at.
That’s all for now, folks. Thank you to the 1-2 people who read this. Time for me to stop procrastinating and return to the chaos that is my in-progress book.
-Seena
