So You Want To Write A Book…Adorable

Let me guess.

You've had this idea for a while now. A really good one. Life-changing, actually. The kind of idea that makes you sit up in the middle of the night and think, somebody needs to write this. And then, in your most heroic moment, you decide that somebody is going to be you.

So you open your laptop. You create a new document. You stare at it for eleven minutes. You change the font. You change it back. You decide you need a better playlist. You make the playlist. The playlist has 47 songs and took 35 minutes to build and now you're hungry.

And just like that, the book doesn't get written. Again.

I'm not judging you. I'm describing you. There's a difference. And I'm only describing you because I have been you, in that exact chair, with that exact playlist, eating that exact snack, fully convinced that I was "getting in the right headspace."

The headspace, for the record, never arrived. I had to go get it myself.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about writing that nobody puts on a motivational poster: the hardest part isn't the middle. It isn't the end. It's the first three sentences of day one, when your brain is loudly suggesting that literally anything else would be a better use of your time.

Your brain is a liar. A charming, creative, well-intentioned liar but a liar nonetheless. It will tell you the idea isn't ready. It will tell you you need to do more research. It will tell you that you should probably outline first and then when you start outlining it will tell you that real writers don't outline, they just feel it.

Your brain will also remind you, right at the moment you finally sit down to write, that you never called your cousin back. That the car needs an oil change. That one time in 2011 when you said something slightly awkward at a party and everybody heard it.

Write anyway. All of it. Through the awkward party memory and the oil change and the cousin. Write through it.

Because here is what happens when you actually start and I mean really start, past the font selection and the playlist and the snack break…the words begin to find each other. Slowly at first. Clumsily. Like they haven't seen each other in a while and they're not sure about the hug. But then something shifts.

A sentence surprises you. A paragraph shows up that you didn't plan. A character says something you didn't tell them to say and suddenly you're not writing anymore, you're following. And following is the best feeling in this entire craft. It's why you wanted to do this in the first place.

You don't find your voice by thinking about writing. You find it by writing badly, repeatedly, until the bad burns off and what's underneath starts to show.

And the keeping going part? That's just stubbornness dressed up as discipline. Every writer who finished something did it because they refused to let an unfinished draft win. That's the whole secret. There is no muse. There is no perfect morning. There is no version of this where it gets easier before it gets done.

There is only you, the page and the decision to show up one more time.

The book doesn't care about your excuses. It just waits. Patiently. Quietly. Like it already knows you're coming back.

Go write the thing.

It's been waiting long enough.

Marlon Dean, WhiteHause Publishing | The Writerz Block