Tag Archive for: Rebecca Tsaros Dickson

Crap someone should have told you writers by now

Sometimes, you don’t need preamble. Sometimes, you need someone to give it to you straight.

Hi. *waves*

This is for every writer on this whacked out planet.

• Your early work will suck.

• Your later work, in its early drafts, will still suck.

• No one cares about your writing unless you’re at (or near) the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

• Seriously. You could win the Pulitzer in literature and your friends would be, like, “Yeah, she’s writing or something boring like that. What a waste of time.”

• You cannot please everyone.

• YOU CANNOT PLEASE EVERYONE.

• So don’t try.

• Write for yourself. Failing that, write for one person.

• Listening to ten other people means ten extra people in your head when you write.

• That will fuck you up faster than a Sarah Palin gaffe.

• Example: “Polls are for strippers and cross-country skiers,“ Palin said at a Tea Party rally in Iowa, on Sept. 3, 2011.

• Polls are actually for finding out what people think about stuff. Which is your job as a writer.

• Because truly great novels, odes, short stories and even songs show what is happening around them.

• It’s worth repeating: Before you’re great, you will suck.

• You will latch onto words or phrases and repeat them throughout your work.

• The words and phrases you repeat will change over time.

• The habit of repeating shit will not.

• You may never feel good about what you write.

• Write anyway.

• It’s better to lack confidence. Shitty writers always think they’re great.

• Never let anyone tell you to stop doing what you love.

• EVER.

• The only “equipment” you need is a writing implement.

• Pen is nice because you can write on your body if you can’t find paper.

• Pencil is nice because it works in any weather and never runs out of ink.

• You will never have time to write.

• If you’re a writer, that won’t stop you.

• We all crave validation.

• You may or may not get it.

• Write anyway.

• You need an editor.

• If you are an editor, you definitely need an editor.

• At the beginning, being edited hurts more than childbirth.

• No really. I’ve had two kids.

• After a couple months, being edited will feel more like a mosquito bite.

• Not in the sense that you forget how painful it was. (That only applies to childbirth.)

• But you will feel less protective of your words after you build a relationship with your editor and realize he has your best interests in mind.

• You’ll find out who your real friends are as soon as you publish your first book.

• Don’t work with a coach, editor, publisher or anyone else without a contract.

• Read the fucking contract and understand it before you sign it.

• You’re worth more than you may ever realize.

• Your story could save someone else.

• It happens all the time.

• That’s what they mean when they say, “You could change the world with your writing.”

• You will not get rich writing.

• Write anyway.

• Because what you may lack in cash flow you will more than make up for in enrichment and mojo.

• Writing helps us make sense of our world.

• If we didn’t do it, we’d probably completely lose it.

• Most of us are on the edge already.

• We have to be in order to do a job that doesn’t pay, won’t make us famous and, oh yeah, is among the most difficult.

• I’m not kidding.

***

Why you shouldn’t be a writer

For every person out there who writes the book he’s dreaming of, ten more sit on their hands and whine. Trust me. I hear from them every day.

I’ll never get published anyway, so why bother?

I work 12-hour days. I’m exhausted.

I have kids and a husband and a full-time job.

Good, then go take a nap and quit bitching about the novel in your head. The rest of us stay up late and get up early. We function on four hours of sleep (sometimes less) and all but kill ourselves to get the words onto the fucking pages. Because. We. Must.

Because the burn – the desire to write – is so great, we can’t sleep anyway.

I’m officially declaring war on bullshit excuses

I work with writers who get up at 3 a.m. and write until they have to get the kids off to school. Some stay up until dawn instead. A few do both. Some writers use their lunch breaks. Some record their words on their cell phones during the commute.

“My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve,” Ray Bradbury once said. “So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.”

But I’ll be too tired to work.

But my kids need me.

But my relationship with my spouse will suffer.

Really? Your family won’t understand if you need an hour or two to yourself every day to do what you love? You can’t muscle through a workday on too little sleep? Or is the truth simply you’re afraid you’ll fail?

Ernest Hemingway – Nobel Prize in Literature, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Bronze Star Medal – said the most terrifying thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.”

Writing is hard. It’s not lucrative. It’s isolating and often heartbreaking. So if you’re not getting it done, don’t beat yourself up.

Not everyone is meant to write

Not everyone has the fire, hears the thunder, feels the promise of the moonlight.

And that’s okay.

But the rest of us can’t help it.

Nelson Algren, who won the National Book award for his novel The Man With the Golden Arm, spent five months in jail for stealing a typewriter. That is dedication.

“In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me,” Kurt Vonnegut said.

Perhaps the late, great E.B. White said it best: “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

So decide. Are you finally ready to write your book?

No one one will blame you if you’re not.

But if you are, take every excuse and flush it. Pick up the pen, the keyboard, the freaking crayon, and get to work.

Then go here to see what we can do to help you WRITE.

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Subscribe in the upper right hand corner and grab my free book A Writer’s Voice, designed to help you write like YOU. So you can say what you want to say, how you want to say it – and stop worrying about what everyone else thinks. (And quit writing like a pretentious asshat). It matters.