One of the things that is inevitable in a writing career is that sooner or later, you will face an experience that seems to have utterly destroyed your confidence and/or your will to write.
It may be a long-time reader saying that you really blew it on your last book. It may be an editor saying “Well, if you really want to write that, I’ll look at it” in that tone that means “I’m humoring your dumb idea” about the idea you are totally in love with and (until that moment) incredibly excited about. It may be an Internet troll or six. It may be a trusted beta telling you they find the current ms. boring. It may be when your highly anticipated breakout book … flops.
It doesn’t matter whether it is something like a giant book flop, where anyone who looks at it will say, “That’s horrible!”, or whether it’s some offhand negative comment that 95% of your friends will look at and say, “Why are you fussing about that?” (which just makes it worse because you can’t get it out of your head). What matters is that it smacked you right in the confidence, hard.
Whatever it is, the very first step in dealing with it is to admit to yourself that it happened and it sucks. You cannot get back on the horse if you are sitting on the ground denying that you ever fell off.
Admit it sucks, and leave it at that. I guarantee that spending time brooding about whatever it is will only make things worse. Fretting over how your career is ruined and you’ll never sell anything again will make it much worse. Convincing yourself that everyone hates your stuff and you have made yourself look like a fool in front of millions of people is … obviously contradictory, and don’t even start with trying to figure out which piece is more likely to be true. You will drive yourself mad.
Telling yourself all sorts of positive stuff about your skills won’t help, either … at least, it has never helped me. If you don’t believe what you are telling yourself, you have just demonstrated that you are a liar on top of being a horrible writer, which will further erode whatever shreds of confidence you have left.
Getting back on the horse is an action. Brooding and worrying are not actions. That’s why those first two steps are important: admit that a really rotten thing just happened (and that it is really rotten), and letting go of it. Until you quit worrying about what falling off the horse means for you and your writing and so on, you are not preparing to get back on the horse.
The key to getting back on the horse is this: reminding yourself that you love writing. Almost none of the writers I know started writing because they were thinking about a career. Sure, a lot of us hoped we would get published eventually, but most of my writer friends started writing because they had stories they just had to get down on paper. Everything else came later.
Which means that the best way of reminding yourself that you love writing is to get to work on something that a) you are really excited about writing, and b) you know will be fun and interesting to do, and that c) you can bully your brain into not caring about anyone else’s reaction to. c) is important. It means you deliberately don’t care whether it will sell or whether anyone else will even like it. You’re doing it for the love of it, the way you started; everything else will come later, if it comes at all.
Note that I did not say this is easy to do. If you have enough clarity about your skill level, you might want to write something you are sure you are good at, just to demonstrate to yourself that you are good at it, but it isn’t necessary. What’s necessary is that you write something FUN that you really want to write, that you can get excited about. Publication possibility is irrelevant, and sometimes counterproductive.
Some folks are excited by a challenge; for others, that would be one straw too many under the circumstances. If the thing that gets you excited is the thought of writing a fanfiction one-shot in which the reader(s) and editor and Internet trolls are eaten by Cthulu, go ahead. Catharsis is good. If what excites you is writing a kid’s picture book about a talking piano, great. Escape is good, too. If you are excited by the idea of turning “Star Wars” into a nonlinear post-structural narrative that explicitly parallels “MacBeth,” go for it. Learning new skills is also good.
You don’t have to write something long, and you don’t have to stick to something short. You don’t have to write lots of things and you don’t have to limit yourself to only one. You don’t even have to write a complete story – doing some writing exercises or working from some one-sentence-a-day prompts may be just the thing (it is usually a lot easier to write one beautiful sentence that you can admire before moving on, than it is to write a paragraph or page of beautiful sentences that hang together, much less five or ten pages that make a coherent story).
It doesn’t matter what you write as long as you are excited about it and have fun doing it.
You don’t have to show this to anybody. In fact, you probably shouldn’t, at least until you stop feeling shaky about writing – after all, outside opinions are what got you into this state to begin with. The point is to remind yourself what you love about writing, by writing.
That’s it. Write. Write fun stuff. Get excited about what you are writing. Repeat. Repeat again, and again, until you are back on the horse.
This is fantastic advice. I actually followed it last November — I was on the verge of giving up writing, because it just wasn’t fun anymore, so I decided to do a last ditch NaNo project and just write and write and write, for no one else to read, just to have fun in the process of writing. The story I wrote then hasn’t sold very many copies, but I love it so much that it’s actually become one of my comfort rereads, and I’ve never written my own comfort reread before.
And it’s gotten some of my favorite responses from readers — one of whom signed her comment with “*still giggling*” which makes me smile every time I think about it. I’m not sure I’m totally back on the horse, because I’m still struggling with my current WIP, so this was an incredibly timely reminder for me. Thank you!
Thank you so much! This is the advice and guidance I’ve been needing, because I am still feeling shaky in the aftermath of my first reader’s disappointment with WIP. It’s book 2 of a series, and she loved book 1 and the characters of book 1 so much, that her disappointment with book 2 flattened me.
I’ve been revising book 2, and I actually feel pleased and somewhat confidant about my revisions (about as confidant as I usually do at this stage), but I still feel really nervous about starting my next novel. Really nervous.
I think your advice is perfect. Instead of diving right into the next novel, I will just write a short story for the sheer fun of it. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
My own experience with actual horses offers a perfect analogy to this.
I had taken a bad fall from a rather tall horse—I literally flipped head over heels and landed on my back; I could barely walk for days, and it was a month or two before I was ready to try riding again.
With some timorousness, I chose a pony this time, known for her docility, but when I got on, she uncharacteristically started to buck like crazy. And the thing is, I was too busy trying to stay on to worry about falling off.
The action of writing is like that. If you’re in the throes of writing, your brain is so occupied with putting one word after another that other considerations (and fears) fall by the wayside.
Not to sound like an echo, but – thank you! (For me, at least, writing something fun and extremely low-stakes can also be a good way to restart/continue writing while afraid of destroying a current work-in-progress for smaller reasons – e.g., moderate fatigue, too many time commitments to allow me to concentrate on a difficult scene long enough to figure out what happens next…)
Also, I’m taking this as a challenge: write a children’s story about a talking piano that *isn’t* escapist. (The piano is warping as rising temperatures cause more and more power outages in near-future Jacksonville, Florida, and its human companions can no longer air-condition their house during the extended summer. Now the piano’s neighborhood is about to flood, and the humans are evacuating; the piano could ask for a ride out of the drowning suburb, but its companions only have access to combustion-powered trucks, so the piano’s rescue would – albeit in a fairly minor way – release more of the carbon dioxide that fueled the seas’ expansion and its neighborhood’s destruction in the first place. Does it ask for a ride out anyway…?)
When I first read this, my thought was, “I haven’t fallen off this metaphorical horse, mostly because I haven’t yet gotten on the horse.
But on further consideration, there is something I want to write and that I’m frightened to write because I’m frightened by how people may react. I want to write a young adult novel with teenaged or even pre-teen characters. And – here’s the kicker – I want to set it in the setting I’ve used for some of my kinky-porny stories.
The story won’t be about “young people discovering their sexuality” and because it isn’t I’ll leave out as much of that stuff as I reasonably can. But the setting has inescapable elements of public kinkiness, and I’m scared that people will point and cry “Unclean! Unclean!” if they see these elements in a YA novel. Worse, I’m paranoid that they’ll cry “Havoc!” and loose the Dogs of Law upon me.
Maybe I’ll have to write this as a deep secret, bottom-desk-drawer thing that I don’t ever let anyone else see. On the other hand, a big part of my motivation to write the thing is to make a big “Damn you to Hell!” gesture at the people who would cry “Unclean!” (Note: Blasphemy, not obscenity. Those people don’t deserve obscenity.)
OK, that was my whine about how it sucks. The Unclean YA Novel is now officially on my pile of things to write.
Thank you for this column! I see so many writers going on and on about what a hard, thankless life is theirs… it’s refreshing to see a reminder of the joy so many of us find in writing. (I do wonder about the hard-and-thankless crowd: if they’re suffering so much, why are they writing? It certainly isn’t for the quick and easy money.)