Ignoring the Voices In Your Head

Part three of the transcribed, tweaked notes from last weekend’s lecture, to be gathered into my first writing book: “Write a book a year with a sentence a day”

###

“Writer’s block is anything that stops you from writing, finishing what you write, submitting what you write, continuing to write the next project, continuing to grow, on a steady basis”

That definition will save your career, because all you have to do then is to identify and integrate the habits, beliefs, habits and allies that enable all of those things. Unless you’re on that train, unless you have ALL of those pieces in place, your career will crash and burn.

Assume that you are not yet where it is that you want to be. If you subtract where you are from what you want to go, divide it up into bite size chunks, and start eating. It’s that “how do you eat an elephant? A forkful at a time” notion.

You just have to have faith, that if you do this long enough, you’ll get there. Imagine that you had a baby who was trying to learn how to walk. The first time she waddles toward you the baby falls down. You don’t say “baby can’t walk!” You say “good baby!”, don’t you? You’d better, because that baby is looking at you. And she is asking a silent question: What does it mean that I fell down?

If mommy and daddy go, “oh no you fell down”, baby will cry. But if mommy and daddy go, “ yay, good baby!” that baby will laugh, and she will keep trying until she can walk.

And that’s what will happen for you. If you are doing the right things, and you do them consistently long enough, you will get there. So the minimum amount that you can do, to consider yourself a writer would be once sentence every day. If you did a sentence every day, you’re a writer and now all of those voices in your head saying, I’m not a writer, I didn’t do it, I’ll never get there, can shut the @#$$ up.

BECAUSE YOU ARE WRITING. You did it. You know, it’s like if you’re doing the thing, and the voice in your head says you’re not doing the thing, then for the first time in your life, you may have absolute clarity that the voice in your head is lying to you. And then, you actually get to get on a really interesting bus. And this bus is the one that takes you to some genuine wisdom.

And it is this, you are not the voices in your head. You are the one listening to the voices. You have to ask yourself, “who am I? Who is the one listening to these voices, whose voices are they?”

In my case, the voices that said that I could not, were my mother, who was terrified that I was going to fail in my career, teachers, friends, society, everybody say you can’t do this, you can’t do this. All the fears inside myself, all those voices, they were all there.

So you have to learn to do the thing anyway, in spite of the fear. And there are many different ways you can do that. There meditations, and journaling, and therapy, and all manner of resources. But just understand that the process of writing, is the process of discovering who you are as a writer, and as an observer of humanity. Being someone who answers the question, What is reality? Because your view of what the world is, of the ethical structure of the universe and so forth, will be reflected in the choices you make in plot.

A plot is nothing more than the way the universe responds to the actions of your characters.

Your character is revealed through their actions, your cosmology, your view of the universe will be revealed in what happens when they try to escape pain or gain pleasure. Is the universe kind? Is it benign? Is it malign? Is it malevolent?

That’s up to you, and you can play all sorts of interesting games in there. But ultimately, the meaning of any art is to ask two questions, the same two questions that are asked in philosophy. What is true? And, who am I? Who am I, is in your characters. What is true, is in your plot. So, is that one sentence a day thing clear here?

Because if so, we can move on to the second rule: Write one to four short stories a month. Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, were both friends and heroes of mine. And they both checked in with some serious advice about the structure of writing, and how to build a career.

And that relates to this next principle powerfully. Let me give you an analogy. If somebody wanted to run a marathon. And you ask them, “well, how many miles do you run a day?” And they say, “oh, I’ve never run” Not even around the block?

“No, that’s not the distance I’m interested in. I want to run a MARATHON!!”

You’d know they were crazy, wouldn’t you? A book is a marathon. A short story is a run around the block. Everything that you need to write a book is contained within a short story, seriously, everything. It’s just recapitulated in larger structures, more time, in a fractal expansion of the basic units of action, reaction. The same tools that you would use in a short story, you’re going to need in a novel, the only difference is it can take you years to write a novel.

Let me tell you a story. A long time ago I knew a guy who wanted to be a writer. So I said, great. And he said he’s working on a short story. I said, great. A few weeks later I ask “how’s the short story going?” He said, “well you know, it’s getting a little long. I think it’s turning into a novelette.”

I said, “oh great.”

A couple months after that I said, “how’s the novelette going?” And he said, “you know, something, it’s getting bigger. I think it’s a novella!”

I said, “oh, wow, sounds terrific” but I’m starting to feel uneasy. And so, a few months after that, I said, “how’s the novella going?” He said, “you know, I think I’ve got a novel.”

I said, “great. Great, yeah.”

A couple of years after that, I asked him, how is the novel? And he said, you know something? I think it’s a trilogy. After college, years past, my wife at the time and I were driving on the East Coast, and we knew that this guy had moved to the East Coast, this was like 15 years after college. So we stopped in to see him and his wife. And while we were there, I said, by the way, how’s the trilogy going? He said, “oh God, I got bogged down in it, I got tired of it. I just put it away.”

I said that I could understand that. He said “I am working. I got a new idea. I’m working on a short story” . I said, that’s great, he said, “but it’s getting a little long…”

I will never ask him about his writing again. Because what is clear is, He’s terrified to finish.

If he finishes, he’ll have to deal with rejection. He’ll have to deal with fear. He’ll have to deal with bad reviews, he’ll have to deal with the voices in his head. If you spend years working on a piece, and it gets rejected, it can shatter you.

This was PRECISELY why I left college: one of my instructors had a novel he’d been working on for ten years, and never finished. I was terrified that I’d soak up his failure patterns like butter soaking up stink in the refrigerator.

These people have horrible, career-destroying writer’s block, but if they keep working, they might never ever have to deal with that truth. It is disguised in the lack of “finishing” and “submitting.”

But if you commit to writing a short story a month, or a short story every week, by the time the rejection comes through your down the road another couple of stories, you can look at that and pay little attention. One of my wife’s writing instructors, said a real writer papers her office with rejection slips.

And if you quail at the thought, if it terrifies you, wouldn’t you rather discover that in a week or a month, rather than in a couple of decades, or never? Because once you have identified your flaws, the break in your “chain” you can say: “oh! I have a problem here. Let me heal that so I can move forward.”

Would you rather diagnose a problem so you can fix it? Or wait until the end of your life, snuggled into your death bed, and suddenly have the insight that you’ve cheated yourself?

The choice is yours.

Namaste

Steve

(a free copy of the entire “Book a year in a sentence a day” lecture is yours at: www.lifewritingsentence.com)