Why Bother #3

No one's reading it now, and likely no one ever will

This one held me back for years. My husband wasn't that interested. I was shy about sharing with anyone else -even my parents. How could I give them proof that their only child wasn't the next Virginia Woolf?

And I most assuredly am not that. My tastes - you might even call them proclivities - run to a shelf far from Virginia's, at the back of the bookstore. Browsers there make furtive selections. They ask for bags.

More on that tomorrow.

You can write a novel without an audience, but it won't be as good as it could be. Why? Think about it. You clean up your house for guests. You dress up for a date.

Writing improves if it will be read. It will be better still if someone reads it thoughtfully. And comments, gently but firmly.

A very intimate assignment.

How do you satisfy intimate desires, absent willing volunteers? You pay for services rendered. You could hire a reader. That's straight-up prostitution, of course. With the attendant pit-falls.

I put down (a good deal of) hard-earned money to join a script-writing workshop. The authors' equivalent of a singles dance. I was prepared to bail if it was in an way a downer.

I'm lucky. Its just a few other souls, sitting in mis-matched chairs around a battered table. But it works. I'm a regular now, class after class.

Never again will I dance without a partner.

Why Bother #2

Because I'm a miserable person if I'm not writing something.

I won't notice that its about the writing. Not at first. I get mad at my husband. And my kids. And my job. Also politicians, the beauty industry, major corporations, newspapers, courts, television shows, films, etc. etc.

And myself. Especially myself.

Then I get back to writing, and I even out.

That's worth the bother.

100% Unguaranteed Anti-Block #1

I'm reading a book on writing. I don't do this often. Most writer's guides take a "you must" approach. Lots of rules.

This one is no exception, and its a bit preachy, to boot.

I'm still reading because the book considers the problems writers encounter. That's right - problems. Like math, or physics.

How do you introduce a character? How do you get backstory across without boring the hell out of people? How much dialogue is too much? Or too little? When does reproducing a regional accent cross the threshold of annoyance?

The author gives her take on how other writers (none of whom are my favorites) solve these kinds of problems.

These solutions interest me only very little.

What does interest me is the problems themselves. If you can identify a problem, you can fix it. Next time you're blocked, try identifying one problem with your work (even if its only a little one). Then fix it. Now repeat.

Works for me.

Not enough

Not enough time today.

That phrase plays in my mind most evenings. Not enough time to write. What I really mean is perfect time, of course.

Not enough peaceful, uninterrupted time, during which I'm wide awake.

What's too little? A half an hour? Fifteen minutes? Isn't something better than nothing at all?

Not always, at least for me. I have kept personal promises to write daily, even when it meant weeks of writing for less than half an hour at a shot. The result? A lot of fragmented bits, most of which were crap.

I can resign myself to writing a bad novel. I won't write a crap one.

I'm not winning this battle. I think I need to leave the house at least 2 nights a week and write for a few hours.

Which means commitment.

Or I can just keep blaming my lack of progress on not enough time. Funny, that was an appealing option until I admitted it was what I was doing.

Which happened just now.

Day Jobs

I've been busy with my own for the last few days, hence no posts. Dressed in my suit, under flourescent lights, with a bunch of other folks dressed in the same drag.

I like my work. Mostly, I mean. As much as anyone does. By global standards, I'm amazingly, staggerly, heart-stoppingly lucky. I try to remember that. I suppose billionaires try to remember that, too.

I'm a lawyer by the way. For a trade union. That means good pay, great benefits, job security, and a pretty office with walls. And work that's about 80% interesting. I get to help people, which feels great.

But the law does suck up the time when I could write.

I'm way over resenting that, though. I'm certainly not letting it get in between me and my bad novels.

And I am confident that I will eventually evict my nagging fear that it might be getting in between me and a good one.

Why Bother #1

Why Bother When Books are so last Millennium?

Soon even good novels won't sell, right?

Wrong. People need stories. Stories will always sell.

Books, however, are another matter. A quick review:

Most of history. No one has texts. Priests and King's scribes, maybe. No one else. Paper and binding have yet to be invented.

1100s. Books (mostly Bibles) take forever to make by hand. New stuff sneaks in by the marginalia - like that great story about Mary Magdalen.

1400s. Printing = more books. 1880s.Industrialized printing = even more. But books are still pricey. They have to be worth it - leather bound and filled with colour plates, pasted in by hand. Margins are wide. Paper is thick and creamy.

1900s.The Penguin revolution. Cheap paper, cheap covers, thin margins, no pictures. Great, affordable ideas. Genius. 2000s. The net supplies all those ideas, plus an infinity more, cheaper, better and faster.

What a computer can't do is put something beautiful in your hands.

Books need to be beautiful again. We need books that look, feel and smell like luxury. Books that are a status symbol and an accessory. Books that are expensive.

Designers like Chip Kidd aren't the last practitioners of a dying art. They're the wave of the future. We need them to transform our books into masterpieces.

Because there's always a market for masterpieces.

Actually, I'm deadly serious

This is not one of those tongue in cheek things - you know what I mean. I'm not going to go all cutesy and parody common writing errors.

I have many failings. Cutesy isn't one of them.

There is some good writing of this type out there. My personal favorite is a comic called How to Avoid Making Art, by Julia Cameron. An added plus - you can read the whole book in, oh, let's say 10 minutes. Cuteness, like Bailey's, is acceptable only in small and infrequent doses.

If I knew about all those common writing errors, I'd stop making them. I don't know how to write a good novel. I'm not promising good. I'm promising what I can deliver.

If you somehow discover greatness of your own here, please take all the credit.

I'm assuming your current state of progress lies between complete paralysis and a few sputtered sketches or chapters. I can get you beyond this. That may not be much, but its what I've got.

Why bother writing a bad novel? Look, would you want your first girlfriend to be Angelina Jolie? Would you take Versailles as a starter home? Would you consider Secretary-General of the UN for your internship?

Of course not.

So strap on some training wheels. Set your expectations at low to abysmal.

That way, you and I may one day be able to dazzle each other with our adequacy.