Greetings, writers—
After I’d written Wednesday’s newsletter about my book being quicksand and sucking me down, I texted a friend about how embarrassing it was. It wasn’t that I minded admitting failure and frustration—that was fine. We all know writing sucks sometimes. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” said Thomas Mann, which sounds counterintuitive but isn’t. If every shred of your ego is invested in how good your sentences are—if you think you might explode if you don’t figure out what happens next in your infuriating novel—then yeah, writing words is hard.
I didn’t like the Substack because I felt like it veered into self-helpy “just keep on going” territory. Keep on going is, of course, the only advice one can give in this situation; I’m not saying it’s not valid. But I didn’t want to end on a note of encouragement (let alone the “relentless encouragement” my welcome email promises, ugh). I wanted the piece to end down in the muck, where I still was. Where I probably still am.
I say probably because I spent yesterday working on my project with James Patterson, so I was magically airlifted out of my personal quicksand. I worked hard, without any self-excoriation at all: what fun! When I saw Lauren Groff at a writer’s roundtable at Literary Arts, she talked about always having multiple projects going at once. “You have to be able to go to where the heat is,” she said. My heat yesterday was an upcoming deadline and the fact that I’m not alone on this particular book; I don’t have to figure out what happens next because James Patterson knows everything. Collaboration is amazing!
I don’t know what I’ll work on today yet, besides this note to you right now. For my alleged novel (my beloved first editor, Dan Menaker, loved that phrase; I stole it from him), I have a stack of index cards on which I’m supposed to be writing down ideas for scenes. This strategy is designed to take the pressure off. You (or I in this case) just write a couple of measly lines—here’s the scene where the main character goes to a weird garden party; here’s where she watches, with her boss, a scene from a BBC nature show best described as a squid orgy—which means you can just throw any idea you have onto those little rectangles. You end up with, in theory, many more potential scenes than you’re ever going to use, and then you pick the absolute best. These cards are rearrangeable, changeable, discardable. Makes it easy, right?
Uh, yeah, well. For some reason I’ve been looking at those cards like they’re stone tablets I’m about to carve something into. I can’t really understand why. If I put down a really bad idea (squid orgy I’m looking at you), I can just recycle it. So why are all my middle-of-the-novel cards still blank? It’s not as if I have no ideas!
Well, we all know that writing is a process, and sometimes that process is just recognizing that you have weird hang-ups. So the index cards don’t work today; maybe they will a different day. Or maybe you (I) need to make an Excel sheet of plot points. Or you draw things out on a big sheet of drawing paper. Or maybe you just grit your teeth and forge ahead blindly, or half-blindly, like that Doctorow quote we’ve all heard ten thousand times. (This is probably what I really want to do.)
But you do keep on going. Because you have to. (And today I mean this more than Wednesday.)
So what is today’s prompt? Let’s see. How about this: Try something different. It’s Friday, go nuts.
If you’re working on a collection of poems, take a stab at flash-fiction. If you’re in the middle of a novel, turn your attention to the germ of a story idea. If you’re outlining, try free writing (and vice versa). And if you’re one of those people who likes reading these prompts but does not do the writing they suggest, then write something. I will even give you a special and different prompt, which is:
—Write a scene about trespassing.
Interpret this however you want. Maybe the scene’s about someone crossing a literal boundary; maybe it’s about someone reading private correspondence; maybe it’s about one squid making the moves on a squid who’s already with someone else. JUST KIDDING. Make the trespassing as subtle or as grand as you wish. But write it.
Happy writing. Happy keep on keepin’ on—
Emily
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