Why Writing is Like Commuting

It should come to no surprise to any regular reader of this blog that I feel writing is a pain in the neck. It’s hard. It’s slow. If it’s good, it requires you to lay yourself out on the pavement on a hot day and let people walk all over you, making comments. Some of them stand there for a long time (which can contribute some much need shade, so there’s that). And even when it comes fast and high like a home-run pitch, and you feel that connection when the wood meets the ball just right in the sweet spot,* you still have to run all those bases and there’s a good chance that at any point you’re going to be thrown out.

Yes, writing is like baseball. But I’ve already done that one. So in this episode, we’re going to examine how writing is like your daily commute.**

1. You have to do it every day. (Some of us do take the weekends off.) And unlike commuting, you don’t typically have to watch for people cutting into your lane when you write. But you do have to watch to make sure someone else didn’t just write that story about the robot Romeo and his gelatinous Juliet and sell it to Asimov’s…d’oh!
2. It can be a real slog. Sure, some days there’s no traffic, and it’s all clear sailing, but usually on holidays when you shouldn’t have to be commuting in the first place. But there you are, driving to the office–and knowing that when you go home, your night job will still be waiting for you to finish that chapter.
3. It’s a long way to get to somewhere you already know. Okay, there are writers who don’t know how their books are going to end. To me, that’s like driving to a job when you don’t know where the office is. You may get there in the end, but it would be a lot easier if you looked at the map first.
4. You don’t know what you’re going to find when you get there. This isn’t the same as not knowing where you’re going. This is the uncertainty of what’s going to happen to that story when it’s finished. Will someone buy it? Will you get a good rate? Will there be coffee in the pot or has that guy from Personnel just left an inch in the bottom so he wouldn’t have to fill it up–again? Because if he has…oh, sorry, off-topic.
5. Tomorrow it all starts again. You know this. It’s going to be like this every day until you retire. Or get a better job…

Yeah, like there’s a better job than this. That’s the bonus round in “How Writing is Like Commuting”: You don’t do it because you want to; you do it because you have to. Just like commuting is part of your job, writing is part of you. And that’s why you do it, day in and day out, hoping for one of those days when traffic and your stories are all sails.

*Yeah, I said “wood.” None of this aluminum for me.

**Ironically, if you write for a living, you don’t have to commute.

#SFWApro

 

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What Is It that We Do, Again?

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally getting to the point where I’m not embarrassed to call myself “a writer” in the right circumstances. Trust me, it’s taken years. It’s one of those unsung hard parts about being a writer, taking yourself seriously. Another is finding time to write. It’s not the hardest part, but it’s tough. Talk to any writer and he/she will tell you it’s never easy. There are a lot of reasons for this…

For example, I’ve just crossed the 50,000-word mark on my work-in-progress (WIP), a novel I’ve been working on a over 18 months. Now, even for me, this is slow. (And it’s gruesome death when you’re self-publishing. But that’s another topic.) In my own defense, however, I had some personal issues last year that sucked my will (and time) to write for many months. And after that, I faced the Demon of Writer’s Block. (Some writers don’t believe in writer’s block. They probably don’t believe in Santa Claus, either.)

I’ve gotten past the DWB recently, and started working with a new energy. (Then I got side-tracked by another project, but at least it was a writing project. And it might actually bring in money in the foreseeable future, as opposed to a book which isn’t even finished and based on its history, may not be during the current Administration.) But while renewed energy is great, maybe crucial, there’s still that problem of finding time to write.

Now, the conventional wisdom is to set up a standard time and sit down to write every day at that time. Terrific idea. In theory. In practice, Life gets in the way. I don’t have kids, and I have trouble simply attending to household duties and spending time with my wife. How writers with children manage to finish anything at all has always been a mystery to me, and I hold them in high esteem.

Yes, conventional wisdom says, but you have to treat writing like a job: Do it every day even when you don’t want to. And there, I believe, is the problem.

You see, a lot of people don’t like their jobs. They spend much of their working time devising schemes on how not to work, or how to minimize work. If you tell them writing is another job, it’s liable to suffer from the same maladies. I know that I like to set a minimum daily word count, but I don’t beat myself up if I don’t meet it, because if I work just to get to that limit, then I stop when I get there. Because it’s work, and I’d rather be reading or surfing the net.

There’s also the fact that if this is work, you want to get paid a lot more for it. So in order not to quit as soon as possible, and not to worry about pay rates, some writers tell themselves it’s only a hobby. Hobbies are extra activities you take on in your spare time. Hobbies are fun. Wouldn’t you like writing to be fun? Well, yeah, but hobbies are also things you do when you have time. And if you wait to write until you have time, then you spend 18 months writing 50,000 words.

So what is writing, work or hobby? Seems to me it should be something in between. Something you spend a regular, meaningful amount of time on, but not drudgery, not something you scheme to escape as soon as possible, even if it’s only for a long lunch. Writing isn’t one thing or the other; it’s kind of the “brunch” of careers.

I guess you could call writing a “wobby,” but I don’t think it’s going to catch on. We need someone who’s good with words to work on that.

#SFWApro

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