False Starts

One of the odd things I learned after (finally) getting serious about writing last year: the pure mechanics of the thing matter as much or more than the quality of the ideas. In other words, writing is as much about sitting in a chair, hands on the keyboard, fingers moving, as it is about having something to say.

You see, inside every writer there's an inner fourth-grader—the one who got beaten up on the way to school, the one who forgot her lines during the play, or, in my case, the one who wore big leg braces and gray-plastic framed glasses thicker than scotch tumblers—who still hates him or herself. This inner fourth-grader says, with a voice in much the same timbre as Carrie White's mother, "They're all going to laugh at you!" So, instead of writing sentence after sentence and piling up draft pages, you end up killing everyone in sight with your telekinetic ability. Well, maybe nothing so extreme, but you don't write any drafts. And this leaves you feeling like killing everyone in sight with your telekinetic ability.

Without a draft, there's nothing to edit. With nothing to edit, there's nothing to send out. And so it goes.

It works like this: you wake up with an interesting thought. You lie in bed for awhile with this interesting thought. This thought is good. This thought is better than good—it's book-sized. This thought has energy, profundity, it is so great and so huge it will spill over from chapter to chapter until you have a manuscript, perfect and precise and ready for the printer.

You get out of bed. You make a cup of coffee, tea, what-have-you, and you sit down to write. You write two sentences. You sip whatever is in your mug. The sentences don't look so good. You revise them. That's better. Now what comes next? Ah, one more sentence. No, that's not going anywhere. More sips from the mug. I'll start again, you think. And you erase the meager sentences you have. And the page remains blank. Or you write a little more and then erase again. And now the idea is gone.

The inner fourth-grader has just played a hideous false note on his saxaphone, and, instead of continuing the solo already in progress at the school talent show, he reddens and starts over, and starts over again, until he finally quits the stage in tears.

At some point, you must let the fourth-grader make his mistakes. It's too difficult to shut the poor bastard up! Trust me, he's 10. He knows how to annoy. He will provoke, wheedle, and irritate you right out of productivity with his constant questioning and self-reproach. It doesn't matter if the solo sucks—let it rip, kid. It doesn't matter. Nobody's really listening, and you can go back and make it better or cut things out when you are editing.

Of course, it's easier to do this if you imagine completing something manageably short each day. I write 1,000 words. My word processor has a nifty word count in the lower right corner that lets me know how far along I am. Most of the time the writing is crap. But it doesn't matter. No one cares. Save caring for the revision.

I know these things; still, I have quite a few false starts this month. Each false start is now between 1,000 and 2,000 words long instead of just a few sentences. The new problem is that I have a finished manuscript with which to compare what I'm working on today. The fourth-grader still won't shut up, and he's found new lines of attack—what if it's not as good as the last one? shouldn't this manuscript be longer? your characterization sucks compared to last time! you call that plot development?!

So the fourth-grader never goes away, I guess. Fortunately, I can remind myself I don't care what he looks like anymore. It doesn't matter. It never really did.