The Grasshopper #25: Patience
Whatever you define as success, it will take time
Getting started as a writer can be daunting. If you’re writing fiction and have a goal of writing a novel, studying authors you love, either by rereading from a writer’s POV or finding process interviews (do both!) can be discouraging, at first. How do you get from zero to a body of work? How do you find an agent, get a deal, make a living?
Or, if you write non-fiction, how do you build a following, find ideas, and develop a unique voice and point of view?
All of this can have the cumulative effect of blocking you before you even get started. It just seems too hard. And, beyond all this stuff, you have to learn to write well! Yikes.
Setting small goals is the approach that worked best for me. Small challenges, small wins.
Small wins add up
Writing is a vocation that requires patience, sometimes infinite patience, or so it seems. Many writing programs encourage students to keep a daily journal. While I do not journal, and never have, I can see its value in developing the habit of writing daily.
Writing every day is simply the most valuable piece of advice I have for a new writer. But this is where I differ regarding journals, which are essentially letters to yourself, not intended for others.
Writers, real writers as opposed to writing as self-therapy (more on this in a bit), write for a reader other than themselves. It pains me to use the phrase ‘real writers’ because it implies a kind of class system, but my intent is to have a new writer aspire, from the beginning, to be read by others. And to get paid.
To think of yourself as a professional, in other words.
This is much more important than it might seem. Writing is sharing and a very intimate form of sharing. It’s you and a reader and a story. Though I get a fair amount of reads these days, I never think of what I am doing as a broadcast. I’m sharing my ideas with individual readers, one on one.
While writing a journal may be useful for getting started, it mostly serves as a form of self-therapy, a way of working through something you are trying to understand. That has value, but there is another form which I think might be more useful as a teaching method.
Letters. A lost form in these days of instant and highly compressed direct communication. Many famous writers in the past wrote letters almost daily but the art has been lost. A letter is a very intimate form of communication but, unlike journaling, it will have a reader with a different set of perspectives and reactions.
This forces us to clarify our thoughts for another who may not know their underpinnings. It might be a useful exercise to find a willing recipient and start writing letters to them daily. But I think the concept is useful as a metaphor- think of the writing you are doing as having a reader, ready and waiting to see what happens next.
It occurred to me as I wrote this that I am literally writing a letter to my readers right now, as are the thousands of newsletter writers out there today. So, I guess I’m practicing what I’m preaching. Hi there.
At the beginning of this issue I listed the daunting number of hurdles a new writer faces if you want to become a professional on some level. But every one of those hurdles requires one first step. You must write and you must write every day until it becomes a habit, an enjoyable and necessary habit.
We have a unique advantage that writers in the past did not have. We have the ability to put our work out there in real time and gauge reactions to it via instant statistics. That’s why I think platforms like Medium.com and Substack are so valuable. For fiction there are sites like Wattpad where you can build a story over time. With these public platforms we get to practice and refine our craft in public.
Maybe only a handful of readers will read your stuff, but knowing even a few people will see it changes the entire writing process. You start to develop a dialog mindset and learn how to put together a story, beginning, middle, and end, that another person can understand.
Now you are thinking like a writer.
Nobody starts out as a great writer or even a competent one. This is true of any skill. Those young writers who come out of the gate with a work of genius at age 25 or even younger? They are drawing on every bit of life experience they have and they are pouring it into a work.
But we, as readers, don’t know how much writing they have done that never saw the light of day. I started writing when I was very young. I had a little room in my parents house with an ancient IBM electric typewriter that my mother had rescued from the law office she worked in.
When you flipped the switch to turn it on it came to life with a roar like a vacuum cleaner. I loved turning it on, loading paper into it and writing the little tone poems that were my first attempts at ‘real’ writing.
I was probably ten or eleven. By the time I got my first book deal, a how-to book, in my late twenties, I had been writing for twenty years. So there wasn’t really a lot of luck in getting that deal. I knew what I was doing, or thought I did.
I know a little more now.
In most art forms we have what is known as the ‘one hit wonder’. The songwriter who releases an amazing album or song and never reaches that pinnacle again. Ditto for the novelist with a promising first novel who gets blocked or writes something that is curiously empty as a follow-up.
I have a theory about that. With that first work, you empty all your collected experience into it, everything you’ve got. Then, when you face the next work, you’re running on empty. Expectations create a set of pressures not conducive to good work.
This is why experience beyond the act of writing is so critical. We, as writers, need to get out into the real world and engage with it. It might take time but that is how you refill the tank.
Just be patient, keep practicing, pick a platform and publish, learn to edit, and fill your life up with experience. You’ll get there.
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