Avoid Your Writing Instincts
When you finally decide to make a plan, and build a writing project with a plan, you must stick to the plan. Avoid your instincts at all costs, because they’re probably bad, and definitely will derail your project.
I know this because I spent years writing on two dozen projects, all of which I hoped someday could be a middle-ish popularity pulp YA Sci-Fi novel of mediocre repute. I just hoped I could beg my way into a book deal like everyone else seems to be hoping.
I learned that I need to stop chasing after rainbows, pretending that a novel that will magically appear and have a great character arc and an interesting and satisfying plot and ending. Those are the instincts of a child who is not taking their writing seriously.
You may recognize that method. You may be doing it right now. Stop it.
Those instincts to “just keep writing” are probably killing your ability to master the craft. Eventually, you’ll realize that you need a plan.
You need to be strategic.
You need to set aside all the absurd notions about doing something grand and meaningful with words if you have not yet dedicated yourself to the mastery of the craft.
How do I know this? So happy you asked.
This past week my writing partner and I both struggled mightily to produce our stories for the #AtoZChallenge. We had stopped deciding ahead of time what we were trying to say with each story, and began to lean on our sense of “we’ll figure it out.”
We barely did, and it cost us both some sleep. This weekend we went back to the plan. We set out the objective of each piece. We talked about what we need the next few stories to say about our fictional world, its people and our plot.
This is how we’re finding success. This is how the story is coming to us more easily. We’re not writing useless words that need to be thrown away, like I did Tuesday when I wrote a story twice because the first one was not saying what we needed it to.
Writing something big and difficult requires so many things, but it will never happen if you treat it like a random accident that you’ll stumble into like winning the lottery. Good luck on Wednesday and Saturday, by the way.
Novels don’t happen by accident as it turns out. They won’t happen if you over plan it, either, as we found out last year when we planned all the fun out of our story.
Find your balance between the two that works for you. That’s your plan. Stick to it. All the advice, including whatever you think I’m advising here, should become annoying noise when you know your process.
The writing advice columns that litter the internet are so much distracting “self-help porn” that you should be very wary of. This means you probably should ignore this and stop reading if you have your process and you have overcome your base instincts to try every random idea, or fall back to kid-think and “just write it.”
If this week has taught me anything useful that you might benefit from it is this:
If my instincts were any good I would already be a best-selling author, so I need to lean on process. I need to stick to the plan that forces me to do the strategic things that can make my writing time meaningful toward my actual goal.
I hope your writing process is great for you, and I hope you find the success that is exactly equal to the effort and focus you invest in the craft.
If you want to see what I’m up to in my co-writing project with Andre Fleuette, you can pop in and read the stories around the story of the city of Hatra on the planet Gioveda.
