I spent last weekend at a steampunk convention as one of their author guests (I was supposed to be there in 2020, but…). It was the first time I’ve gone to a con since 2019, and it was refreshing, in spite of my various travel glitches (I left my knitting in the train station, forgot some Very Important Stuff I’d intended to bring, etc. It’s like I’d forgotten how to travel for some reason…)
One of the things I like about conventions is talking to other writers, especially newer ones with interesting problems. One writing problem that kept coming up this time, over and over in various disguises was people trying to avoid one aspect of the writing work or another. And the first and biggest difficulty people had was that they didn’t see avoidance as the root of the problem.
One writer thought their problem was plot, which, yes, was pretty much at the elevator-pitch stage, but the characters sounded interesting, and so did the setting. Another writer was having trouble with characters, which, yes, were kind of stick figures. But their plot and setting were great. A couple of others were looking for specific historical events that would “solve” various modern cultural problems by preventing them from ever happening (on the order of preventing gun violence by creating an alternate world in which gunpowder was never invented…unfortunately, history doesn’t seem to work that neatly, especially when you’re talking about social/cultural changes).
In all these cases, the real problem was that the authors had hit a piece of the writing process that, for them, was no fun, and that was going to take a bunch of, for them, unpleasant work to develop properly. The plot-problem writer sounded as if their real difficulty was with multiple-viewpoint structure as much as with fleshing out the plot, but they kept turning the conversation back to setting after a few sentences. They were clearly in their comfort zone talking about setting, but totally out of it with anything else.
The writer with the stick-figure characters either needed to develop them more in advance, borrow them from elsewhere, or trust their writing process, all of which suggestions made that writer obviously uncomfortable. Another one thought their problem was with style and pacing, but every time we started to talk about their stylistic choices, they went back to their plot and why their readers needed to see things in the order they’d planned, once again defaulting to the “fun-for-them” part.
And the folks who wanted a nice, easy, specific tipping point for a major cultural shift needed to either do a lot of historical research on how and why and where things developed and revise an enormous amount of human history and development (because I am not an expert historian, and even to my eye, the things they were proposing as simple solutions to complex social/cultural problems would not have worked as cleanly as they expected, even if they could find a single event that would somehow change everything), or else they needed to invent an entire imaginary world that simply worked the way they wanted it to.
In all cases, the actual solution to their writing problems involved some level of sitting down and focusing on a not-fun-for-them part of writing. There are a few possible shortcuts—both plot and characters can be borrowed from elsewhere (I’ll try to get to this in the next post), and sometimes simply presenting a revised world without explaining how it got there works—but such shortcuts don’t always work out, and if the writer dislikes the problematic bit enough, even a shortcut is difficult, unpleasant, and likely to prompt avoidance behavior.
Writing is a job, an art, and a craft, and not one of those things is 100% fun, 24/7. In order to get a good quality product, one has to do all of the job, not just the fun bits. The not-fun bits still have to be there, and they still have to hit some minimum standard in order for the whole to work. A fancy sports car may look great, but it won’t run far or fast if the gas tank leaks or the engine is gunky. And the only way to fix that situation is to do the unpleasant, dirty job of patching the gas tank and cleaning out the engine.
“In order to get a good quality product, one has to do all of the job, not just the fun bits.”
When I tackle various non-fun bits and put in a large and painful effort to do the job, I’m too often left with a sinking feeling that the result is mediocre at best, rather than a good quality part of the product.
The knowledge (or delusion) that one is doing a good job is a marvelous anesthetic, even when the effort is time-consuming and exhausting.
Oh my gosh, that exact problem is my biggest struggle. From there, it’s so easy to get demotivated or to invent other problems and hurdles in the way.
When I was a teen, I discovered that whenever I sat down and read a pile of half-finished stories, the common problem would LEAP out at me.
It’s true; like every other kind of work, there are the fun parts and the drudgery parts. No matter what career or avocation one chooses, one has to accept both sides of the deal.
Rick