Courtesy Floating Robes
Writers have to write. Just the way that runners have to run, or smokers have to smoke, or brokers have to… broke? Break? Something involving breaking. Anyway, writers are compulsory creatures and writing is a compulsion. It’s felt under the skin. It’s an itch in the fingers, a burning behind the eyes. The fires of the creative mind of the writer are stoked continuously, and without release, the pressure builds to a fever pitch, and the next thing you know the writer is taking chunks of the desk with their teeth because they need to write, dammit!
But writers are also human beings. At least, they are until we perfect the AI that can write novels as well as our current novelists. That means they have things like hunger and depression and anger and distractions and fear and the Internet and bills and porn. A million tiny things can add up very quickly to an obstacle that the writer struggles to surmount, a wall between them and the words. Other than smashing that motherfucker down, what is the writer to do? What do you do when the words don’t come?
The advice I am about to give is, admittedly, advice I need to take myself. And it is influenced heavily by other writers. I am going to delineate it here anyway, because it is my hope that in doing so, my own walls come tumbling down and the words start flowing again. It’s getting backed up pretty bad in here. Kind of starting to stink.
Forget About Yesterday
A big part of what can get in the writer’s way is the writer themselves. Mostly, in the form of looking back over the past day or week and seeing all the words that didn’t get written. Production time is lost, due to research of legitimate related topics or ‘research’ on the optimum build for a Diablo III character or the exact taste of a new kind of beer. Some writers don’t write for a living and need to hold down dayjobs, whose work and commute and responsibilities suck time and energy away from writing the way a vacuum removes dust from lush carpeting. The dayjob also removes things like eviction notices and angry phone calls, but there’s always some good with the bad.
Regardless of circumstances, the best thing to do is to simply forget about the past.
Yes, mistakes have been made. Blunders happened. Forget about them. Leave the past in the past. You only have three temporal perspectives to consider, and I would argue that the past matters the least. Sure, it’s regretable that certain things didn’t happen certain ways. That was yesterday. Today is happening now, and there is always tomorrow.
Or is there?
Tomorrow’s An Illusion
Tomorrow isn’t here yet. You’re not in it. You won’t be for hours. It is, quite simply, not real.
It is going to be real, yes. And you can plan for what might happen or what is going to happen. Sure, no plan remains fully intact once contact is made with the enemy, and the writer’s enemies are many and varied, as mentioned above. But the fact of the matter is, time spent planning for tomorrow is time you could be spending writing today.
So, forget about the past, and fuck waiting for tomorrow. What’s that leave you?
Come on. Take a guess.
Write Today. Write Now.
If you remove the other two temporal perspectives, you’re left with the present moment. It is really the only moment over which you have direct control. Previous moments are immutable, and moments to come are illusory. NOW is the time you inhabit, NOW is the time in which you can wrest destiny away from forces outside of yourself, and NOW is the time to write.
Again, this is advice I need to take myself, and I need to keep taking it every day. I can plan for ways to make it easier for me to do so: get up earlier, get more sleep, stress less about the job, increase energy with changes in diet and exercise, and so on. But right now, in this moment, the choice is really a binary one: write, or don’t write?
It really is as simple as choosing “write” more often than not.
Because that’s how stories get told.
That’s how dreams come true.
That’s how writers change the world.
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