Beth Lyons

If you hear a voice within you say ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

The Chinese poet Lao Tzu wrote, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Your writing journey doesn’t begin when you put words on paper. It starts earlier than that: it begins when you claim the title Writer.

You have stories within you; you must otherwise you wouldn’t be here, reading this right now. You have stories within you, but maybe you can’t get them to come out. Maybe you jot a few ideas down. Maybe you don’t even get that far – you shrug your shoulders and say “Some day.” Some day I’ll write that novel. Some day.

Start Now

No one is guaranteed a tomorrow. If you have a desire to create stories, you must begin now, today. And to begin this journey you need to do two things. First you need to say aloud, “I am a writer.” And second you need to ignore the voices in your head telling you that you are not a writer. These are two separate acts, designed to handle two parts of your psyche.

Names matter and if you claim the title “Writer” for yourself, it’s like a magic spell. Say “I am a writer”, and it’s true! The phrase “I am” is powerful. You are staking a claim to time to think, time to dream, time to write. You may feel foolish affirming your identity as a writer, but it is vital.

For some time you will be the only one to acknowledge this truth about yourself. As you begin to share your work with others, they will help you affirm this mantle you’ve claimed, but no one can claim it for you. It must come, like creativity itself, from within.

Writers Write

For a long time I had to have a second part to my mantra because each time you sit down to write it is a leap of faith unlike anything else in life. To combat the fear I would say, “I am a writer. And what do writers do? They write. So get going.” I had to do this every. single. time. For about a year. Was it tiresome? Yes. Did it help? Decidedly. I completed a novel. It wasn’t very good (more on that later), but it was the best story I could tell with the tools I had available.

The second part of the strategy is learning to ignore the negative voices in your head. As the Van Gogh quote above illustrates, ignore the voices; they will fade. Notice I didn’t say “The voices will go away.” I can’t promise that. I can promise that with time their volume decreases, and their import in your life dissolves.

Build confidence by Doing

Each word you write, each paragraph completed dampens the voices a little more. As you write each day, your skill and confidence grows and that also tunes out the voices because the voices are fear-based. I guess ultimately they think they have your best interest at heart. They want to protect you from the mean old world. Isn’t it better to stay safe in this dark room than to venture out into the scary world? That’s what the voices say. That’s what they promise: safe, beautiful stagnation.

Dare

Dare to create. Dare to tell your stories. You won’t likely be very good at first, but practice does make perfect. In the same way that you can’t sit at a piano as a novice and start playing a concerto, you can’t sit down with notebook or netbook and create a bestseller. You learn and practice and fail and succeed. It’s a journey, a glorious journey.

When I sat down to write what would become my first novel, I had just three things. A burning desire to write, the bones of a story, and years of exposure to great storytelling. I would argue that’s all you need. The first one will get you over the worst of the doubts. The second one will keep you coming back to the page, and the third one is your basic toolbox. I went time and again to one of my favorites – JRR Tolkien – when I needed an example of how to put an action in the middle of dialog or how to do a paragraph break in the middle of a speech or how to set up a description of a setting.

If you hear a voice within you say ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced……
Van Gogh’s quote presupposes that you have a yearning to create. If you didn’t, there would be no need for the voices to tell you not to. The fact of the negative thoughts, that alone tells you what I cannot – it tells you that you are a writer. Take that name; wear it proudly; dare to dream. It is a journey worthy of you.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb…. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Perhaps it’s unusual to look to a president for writing advice, but Silent Cal sums up the grit you need to write. That writing is lonely work is a cliche, except that it’s true. And even more, writing is screaming into the void. You have no idea, as you are putting words on the page, if anyone will ever read them. There is no guarantee – especially given the sheer volume of words being churned out for Amazon Kindle alone – that anyone outside your immediate family will ever read your work.

Forward motion

You have to put those thoughts out of your head during your writing time (and try to keep those thoughts away even when you’re not writing!) You must face true north and keep moving forward! Persistence will serve you well. The difference between Stephen King and your friend who says that he’s got a million great ideas is persistence. King has famously talked about his rejection letters. We all get them and that’s fine; it’s part of the process. The way to become a better writer is to write. And that means persistence of action and determination of purpose.

Goals

Writers need goals. Set a meaningful goal for yourself – something do-able but just slightly uncomfortable. If you think you can write 500 words during a session, set your goal to 600 words. Set a goal to write a first draft in six months and then map out the word count you’d need to have a 60,000 word draft ready in six months. If that seems too easy, great! Nothing wrong with easy. The point is to finish the draft.

There will be days that you don’t want to write. It will feel useless, pointless, fruitless. Too bad! Do it anyway. No self-fulfilling failures here. We are determined to create a new piece of art. We will persist in our quest to tell our story. We will not be discouraged.

Discouraged. What an interesting word! The absence of courage. We don’t think of it quite that way when we use the word. We’re not thinking in terms of being courageous or fearful. We mean that we’re feeling down and dejected, but as Coolidge put it in the opening quote, persistence is the key! I can’t think of a more courageous act than creating art because you want to see it. You create something that didn’t exist before! It’s nothing short of a god-damned miracle, when you think about it.

Courage

I still need courage pretty often – I’m not exactly a huge success in the book world (not yet anyway!), but my feelings when I sit down in front of the computer are different than when I was writing that first novel. Every day of creating that first story felt like I was walking a tightrope – and I’m afraid of heights! My hands would shake sometimes from the emotion of it. The bad thoughts in my head – the fears that we all face when we dare to raise our hands – I had to push them away. Sometimes it felt physical. I had to consciously, forcefully think a new thought. I had to consciously, forcefully turn myself back to true north and start typing again.

I’m here to say that it gets easier. My compass tends toward true north now. I rarely have to battle self doubt – not while I’m writing anyway. Persistence and determination are mostly baked-in now. I persist in creating new stories, and I’m determined to share them with the world. And as I think about it, that makes me a success.

The world is full of people who want to be writers, of people who are “working on a novel”, of people who started stories and haven’t finished them yet. That’s all fine; we each have our journey. For me, writing is one of the most important actions I take on a daily basis. It’s one of the most fulfilling parts of my life, and I want other people – people who crave that experience – to know that it is attainable.

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
~ Virginia Woolf

While there could be many reasons why someone starts writing a piece of fiction and then never finishes it, one big factor is other people. Other people! Whether people we know or the faceless specter of The Reader, other people and their opinion, reaction, perception can derail even the most motivated of writers.

The Virginia Woolf quote comes from A Room of Own’s Own and whatever else the essay may do, this powerful quote transcends gender and circumstance. We must write first for ourselves. Write the stories that you want to read! You see that advice in lots of places, but you usually don’t find out why it’s important.

Writing is hard work. Writing with an eye to publishing is even harder because you have to revise and polish and rewrite the piece several times. It’s a marathon. It’s being trapped in an elevator for a day – you better like the people you’re trapped with because otherwise it’s going to suck. So if you dislike your main character, that’s a problem. How in the world are you going to devote the effort needed to write the best story you can if you can’t stand to be around that character?

It’s foolish to imagine that you will complete every story you begin – ideas are not created equally, after all. It is, however, paramount that you complete a story. I see too many people who say, “I’ve been working on my novel for ten years.” They haven’t finished even a first draft of it. For whatever reason, they remain stuck – literally in a rut that they cannot surmount, and each day the rut gets deeper making it harder and harder to ever escape.

Writing short stories is by definition different than writing a novel, and I am the first to admit that I went about it all wrong. I would advise first time writers to start with short fiction and graduate to long form. Ray Bradbury famously suggested that a new writer write a short story a week for a year as a good foundation for writing. You may prefer, as I do, the long form, but you can learn a ton about writing using the Bradbury method.

What is nice about short stories is that you can complete one with fairly small amounts of pain. You write 5,000 words with a beginning, middle, and end. You edit it, revise, rewrite. And it’s done. You have completed a work – start to finish. And you didn’t stop and rewrite the opening before you finished the first draft. And you didn’t have to quit your day job. And you didn’t put the story on hold while you spent months researching trade practices of 6th century Bedouins. And you didn’t suffer a crisis of conscience about writing a story about a magic-using girl truck driver while people are struggling with real issues like poverty.

You had an idea; you created a main character, some motivation and some challenges; you wrote a bunch of description and dialog, and Bam! there’s a completed work of fiction. Completing a story has built in motivation for you to write more. Tell more of this character’s story; explore this universe more fully; branch out into mystery or horror or romance because you are a writer. You wrote a story that you wanted to read. You created something that has never existed before, and you did it for yourself. Bravo.

While the applause dies down, take a moment and re-read the Woolf quote. She uses the words, “beyond reason.” Don’t entirely discount other people’s opinion of your writing, just don’t let it paralyze you. Likely anyone who is kind enough to read your work will have both good and bad things to say. There will be a passage they love and a scene they hate. They’ll love the opening and not understand the ending. And they might have a really good point! The ending might need work.

So in order to do the thing that we love to do – write stories – we need to write what we want, tell the story in the way that makes sense to us, write it the best way we know how, and then absorb what other people say about it. As you write more and open yourself for critique, you will write better first drafts, and become a stronger writer.

The work comes first. Complete the story. Edit the story, then share the story.

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” — Stephen King

Sign on the door says: “Imagination Wanted”. Some days, I will walk through that door with confidence to spare. Some days, not so much. It’s easy to imagine that other writers — writers like Stephen King — spend their days in an imagination-fueled dream while we fiddle around with fonts (or worse – close the computer all together!) and wait for an idea to hit us.

You can’t wait for imagination to find you — you have to look for it, and the best way to look for it is to write! When I started writing I had one idea. I knew I wanted to tell the story of how two women fell in love while trying to save the princess (sort of). And as I started writing out that story, it grew and blossomed and, and more ideas hit me, every day, every hour. I jotted them down and went back to The Soul Thief.

Imagination is alchemical – the more you call upon it, the more it hangs around. As you begin to flex your writing muscles daily, imagination sticks around to see what you are up to. It might contribute an idea or two, but it might whisper a brand new idea in your head.

The second draft is where imagination really plays her part. The first draft — that’s just you telling yourself the story. But in the second draft, you get to relax and enjoy (and by that I mean embellish) the scenery. You know where you’re going, right? So you can begin to hang some clothes on this skeleton of a story.

What was that? You said that this idea’s been done a hundred times, a thousand times? Yes, but — you haven’t written this story. Your story is uniquely yours. Take the basic idea of a knight saving a princess. If it’s my story you can bet that the knight is female and the princess, she might not want to be saved, thank you very much.

And even if the story’s been done before, so what? There is nothing wrong with using an established universe as a springboard to your own worlds. Many writers like me have used Dungeons & Dragons (take a look at all those Dungeon Divas posts) as a launching pad for our own endeavors. What matters is that you’re telling your tale. Maybe it’s a spin-off of Harry Potter, or Star Trek, or Twilight, but it’s still your story.

Imagination wanted? Imagination is at your elbow, ready to explore whatever realms you want.