Writing in the Muck and the Mire
We need to talk.
I’m going to be honest with you: you’re going to have bad days. Lots of them. You’re going to have times where you wish, more than anything in your life, that you’d never even heard of whatever your preferred writing platform is. You’ll be locked into situations that you would give anything, everything, to no longer be involved with. And if you want your career to move forward, you’ll often have no choice.
Even if you are armed with the necessary items for a modern successful writing career (good looks, good connections, or notoriety from another career you can leverage), these moments will still haunt you.
Writing is a unique pursuit, because nothing about it ever changes. The bestseller formula has been locked in for the better part of forty years. If you’re an author like me, that’s longer than the number of trips around the sun you’ve made. It’s not really changing, either. If anything, it’s becoming more and more unyielding as time moves on. Nothing about the act of writing itself has change any either. From your first book to your twentieth, nothing about making them varies. You go through the same motions, the same scenarios played out on repeat. You write, you edit, you do a second round of edits, you submit them. So the dance goes, back and forth, until the manuscript is done. Then, you start again, only this time maybe it’s in space. Or there’s a cowboy. Or there’s a cowboy in space.
What the mind-numbing sameness of the writing process does is force you to do is to become very familiar with your demons. All of them. You start naming them eventually, just to keep track. I have one that I like to call Buzzkill. Buzzkill isn’t unique to me, nor is he particularly threatening. His whole job is to rob the wind from my sails with every achievement. Did a great job of being a good father and husband? So? Everyone does. Do a fantastic job writing and editing thousands of words in one night like a beast? So what, hundreds of people can do that way better than you anyway, and you don’t hear them bragging about it. Kill it at work, wearing three hats and generally being a badass? Yaawwwwwnnnn.
It’s not the same as being shown your failures over and over. I call that one nitsuJ, and he’s just a dark reflection of me. No, Buzzkills sole purpose in this life is to make sure that nothing I ever achieve is allowed to stay an achievement. There is no act in my life which has withstood Buzzkills tender ministrations. You see, when it comes to writing, every time I am at the keys I have not done, nor achieved, anything at all according to him.
What I have come to realize, and to train myself to embrace, is that Buzzkills mantra is accurate. I am nothing special. I haven’t really done anything worth noting yet, nor will I. My past achievements are underwhelming. Such realizations do sap the wind out of your sails.
But that’s the whole point. You don’t want wind in your sails.
“But Justin” you cry “writing should feel like giving God a high five 24/7.”
No, it shouldn’t. Because I’m going to be doing a lot of writing, have already done a significant amount of writing, and so will you. This doesn’t make us special, or unique, or anything else. It’s just work, a long and hard slog through mud until we arrive at our destination, get a chance to hose the mud off, and then resume swamping right along. That’s not a glamorous thing at all. Having the wind at our back doesn’t help us sail through mud.
Writing, by it’s very nature, is never going to be some amazing thing. You’re not a heart surgeon. A wordsmith is no more talented than a blacksmith, and no more special than an accountant. So when I sit down now, and Buzzkill does his thing telling me how my following is still nothing special, how my writing still has a long way to go towards relevancy, and how nothing I’ve finished yet has become a thing worth noting, my only response is to give him a high five.
It frees me to wallow through the muck without splattering mud on the small shreds of ego that I do hold dear. It makes it so that I’m not constantly washing grime off the other parts of my life. Buzzkill allows me to write, and to leave all the other trappings and miseries of my life at the door. He lets me focus on the act of putting one word in front of the other without worrying about my greater legacy, or my past achievements (or lack thereof).
It’s not easy to use your demons to your advantage, but it is going to be necessary. If you want to write, you’re about to spend a lot of time with them.
The only sane thing to do is to make them work for you, rather than against you.
Demonfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
