The Halfway Point: A Pep Talk

[I’ve been slow about posting lately, which I apologize for. I love this Substack, I’ve just had a ton of work—not that I’m complaining, work is what you want in this biz—and my wife’s been traveling, and I’ve had the kids, all of which means that I’ve had to shuffle Last Stop Corbenic to the bottom of the priority heap.1

As an acknowledgement of my failure, I’ve paused payments from paying subscribers—God bless you all—because you shouldn’t be paying for dead air. In the meantime somebody reminded me of this piece the other day, which I wrote as a pep talk for people doing NaNoWriMo. It’s not online anymore, because NaNoWriMo imploded somehow, but I still like it. And reposting it here gives me the chance to fix several embarrassing homonym errors.]

OK, here we are: halfway through, right in the thick of it. Probably at this point the last thing you want is a big lecture on Writing and How Yer Supposed to Do It. So I’m not even going to talk about writing.

Instead I’m going to talk about a metaphor for writing. Better, right?

Let’s say you’re not a writer hard at work on your first novel. Let’s say you’re a Tribute who’s just been selected for the Hunger Games. That’s right: you’re on the train to the Capital. You’re freaking out because you’re facing almost certain death in the Arena. And instead of a published author, I’m going to be that drunk guy who’s supposed to be telling you how to survive.

It’s a good fit. Like Woody Harrelson, I am short and bald. And I like a drink. I may be drunk right now, who knows. But more important, I’ve done this before and lived. So I’m here to tell you: it is survivable.

Which brings me to my first point. Writing a novel belongs to that category of thing—like surviving the Hunger Games, and eating an entire garlic pizza by yourself—that appears to be impossible but actually isn’t. I’ve written four of them, with another coming out next year, and every time around halfway through I get to a point where I say to myself: let’s admit it, this just isn’t going to happen. Given the number of words I have written, and the number of words I have left to write, and the rate at which I am currently producing words, and the crappiness of said words, it is mathematically and physically impossible that I will ever finish this book. It’s like the arrow in Zeno’s paradox, it’ll never get there.

But the thing is, the books do get there. It astounds me every time, but the books get done. How? It’s not about having some triumphant genius breakthrough moment. Those things come and go, and half the time you look at them the next day and it’s like what- was-I-even-thinking. Being a novelist is a matter of keeping at it, day after day, just putting words after other words. It’s a war of inches, where the hardest part is keeping your nerve. The number one reason why people who want to write novels don’t is not that it’s impossible, and it’s not that they’re not geniuses, it’s that they lose their nerve and quit.

So heads up: once you get in that Arena, Tributes are going to be biting the dust to the left and right of you, in graphically horrible ways, and it’ll be because they’ve lost their nerve. But that won’t happen to you. You’re going to keep your nerve. If talent exists, that is talent.

OK, now we’re in the Capital. You’ve got a bitchin’ hotel room. Weird things have been done to your hair. The food is fricken unbelievable. But you still feel like something’s wrong. In the gym, the Careers are doing those weird martial arts things that they know how to do. They’re2 whipping around their nunchucks and whatever in cool patterns. Their jumpsuits are flattering. They look confident.

But you don’t feel confident. You feel like crap. Like you have no idea what you’re doing. Sometimes you pick up your bow and arrow or your throwing knives and you’re like, I don’t even remember how these damn things work. Why? Why are you different?

What is wrong with you?

So this is point number two: nothing is wrong with you. You’re not different. Everybody feels as bad as you do. You are not special, soldier: this is just what writing a novel feels like. To write a novel is to come in contact with raw, primal feelings, hopes and longings and psychic wounds, and try to make a giant public word-sculpture out of them, and that is a crazy hard thing to do. To write a novel is to lose your way and find it over, and over, and over again. When you look at other people’s published novels, they seem gleaming and perfect, like the authors never once lost faith or doubted themselves, like they knew what they wanted to do from the start and just did it. But trust me: they did not know.

What you’re3 feeling is not only normal: it’s a good sign. A writer—someone once said—is a person for whom writing is difficult. That resistance you’re feeling is proof that you’re digging deep. You’ve delved down into the caverns, lo, into Moria itself, and down there you lose your way in the dark, again and again, you fool of a Took. But you have to go down there, because that’s where the treasure is.

OK, now you’re in the Arena! When it started you grabbed some rucksack at random and bolted for the woods while everybody else was getting their ass kicked in the death zone around the Cornucopia. Nice job. But dangit: now you’ve looked in your rucksack, and you didn’t get a bow or throwing knives, you got a pack of ninja stars. Jeez, you don’t even know what to do with these things.

You try throwing a couple at a tree, but you totally miss. This sucks. It’s pathetic. Probably your old buddies back in the district are watching you on TV right now and saying Hunger Games? More like Hunger LAMES! Amirite? Ami? Amirite?

This is my third, final, and most clumsy metaphor, but bear with me. Maybe instead of looking in your rucksack, you’re looking on your hard drive, and maybe you’re not happy about what you’re finding there. You’re rereading your draft and saying, WTF, why is my draft bad? I thought it was good, but it’s not! WTF?!

Let me tell you something: my draft is bad too. No, it’s worse than bad. If one of my early drafts ever leaked into the wild, my license to write novels would be revoked permanently and with extreme prejudice. In early drafts my characters have no personalities, their names change from scene to scene, every word is both a cliché and a homonym error, and continuity does not exist. The narrator makes random assertions about life and the universe that are stupid and moreover not true.

I’m telling you: there are no depths you can sink to that I have not already sunk to. And it’s tempting to take those bad drafts and then use them as evidence against yourself, to prove to yourself that you have no business writing a novel, that your gym teacher was right about you, you’ll never amount to anything.

But you know what? A lousy draft proves nothing. Rough drafts are rough—everybody’s are. Being a writer isn’t like being a musician. You don’t have to get it right every day. The wonderful thing about being a writer is, you only have to get it right once. That’s all anyone will ever see. The only bad draft is the one that doesn’t get finished.

So get back at it. Let the others lose heart and give up. You stay out there in the woods. The weapons of a writer, James Joyce once wrote, are silence, exile and cunning, and probably he wasn’t thinking of the Hunger Games when he wrote that—probably—but it fits the metaphor. While Tributes are falling left and right, you will fashion man-traps from those ninja stars, steal weapons from the fallen, and bide your time, and when you’re ready you will come out of those woods like an avenging angel of death.

Forget that stuff about the odds being ever in your favor. What does that even mean? Screw the odds. You’re a writer, and writers make their own odds.

I’ll see you in the Victors’ Village.