Day 1

Today I began the first draft of my new story, The Robot Changeling. I wrote 1217 new words, adding to the 450 or so I had written a few weeks ago while I was bored and thinking. 

I dawdled a fair bit this morning before sitting down to write. Excuses came easy: I need to finish that manga before it’s due at the library tomorrow, I need to take down all the papers and notes for my last story that is cooling off in a drawer right now, waiting for me to come back to it in six weeks or whenever draft 1 of The Robot Changeling is done.  

(It’s not literally in a drawer-- it’s sitting on a shelf. In a binder. Because I printed it out. Used up an entire black ink cartridge and them some. The last few chapters are rainbow colored.) 

But before the excuses drowned out my entire day and I just gave up, I remembered the most common and most important piece of writing advice I’ve ever gotten: just write. No excuses. No fear. Just write. It’s going to suck and be bad and not be anything you ever want to show another human being. That’s okay. Just write.  

And that’s not abstract advice to me anymore: it’s also something I learned for myself during the majority of 2018 as I wrote my practice novel (it’s fanfiction and no you can’t read it when it’s done.) (Well, maybe PM me and we’ll see.) I called it a practice novel because that’s what it is, but doing so took the pressure off me in a big way. Who cares if it’s terrible? It’s just practice. But this morning, as I faced down my barely sketched-in outline and thinly fleshed-out characters and major plot holes, I realized that I can just treat this thing like practice too. It’s only the first draft. Nothing to get all worked up about. 

Stephen King said “the first million words are practice”, and I’m nowhere near that yet, so for the next few years, everything I write will be “just practice”. But also, momentum helps. I had days on my practice novel when I wanted to give up, when I knew it was terrible and nothing I did would make it any less terrible. I had days when I was sick and didn’t write very much. I had days when I hadn’t written for a week and I had gotten so far out of the story I could barely remember why I was writing it anymore. But I kept going. And I finished. 

And when I began work on the second draft, it was-- well, it wasn’t easier exactly. But I already had 50,000 words written over the course of two or three months, and so even though I had to rearrange some really big plot elements and make some hard decisions about cutting subplots, I had that ugly monster to look back to for guidance. It was something. And that made it a lot easier to put fingers to keyboard and just write. Because I was already so far, stopping would have been harder than not stopping. 

I’m starting this blog to keep track of my progress. It’s going to serve as a reminder to me that this process kind of sucks a lot of the time and that’s normal. So that the next time I start something new and I get nervous, I can look back and be reminded that the fear of starting something new is, well, nothing new. But also, I’ll be reminded that I did it anyway.