“I want to be a writer when I grow up.”

Sure you do, kid. Sure you do. I wanted to be an astronaut once upon a time, but then I realized, I’m afraid of outer space. Well, not so much “outer space” as the “space dragons that live in outer space.” Oh, I know. You’re saying, “Chuck, dragons do not live in outer space,” and to that, I scoff. Just because CNN isn’t talking about it doesn’t mean our astrophysicists don’t know the truth. Dragons hide behind moons. And they wait there for unsuspecting astronauts so they can plant their spiky dragon ovum into the moist orifices of our space-walking heroes. This is all true, don’t look at me like that.

Okay, one part of that isn’t true: I never wanted to be an astronaut. I pretty much wanted to be  writer from like, eighth grade on. The point I’m illustrating here is that, were I to desire membership in the great fraternity of astronauts, I would be deemed UNFIT by a big red stamp on my Astronaut Application Papers. Reason: “Unready due to unreasonable fear of space dragons.”

Unreasonable. Uh-huh, NASA. Sure. *wink wink*

We both know what’s up.

Anyway, point is, you’re maybe sitting over there thinking it’s time to hike on the ol’ hip-waders and go slogging through the mire that is the life of the professional writer.

And I’m here to tell you that you might not be ready. You might earn a big red stamp — *fwomp* UNFIT — on your Authorial Acceptance Exam. Not sure if you’ve got what it takes to carry the pens? To churn and burn through barrels of ink? To march forth across the bleached and cracked earth with only your word count on your back?

Let’s check you out, then.

You See Yourself As King Of This Castle

It’s easy to feel like King Shit of Turd Castle when you’re a writer. You sit there in your impenetrable bubble of creativity, banging out masterpiece after masterpiece that nobody ever sees, a Muse in your own right, one of Hell’s own glorious maestros. (Or Heaven’s, but let’s be clear: we probably see ourselves more as diabolical geniuses than as the artificers of God’s own glory.) Time to lance that blister, Sugar-Boobs. Being a writer means lurking far lower on the totem pole than you’d prefer. I don’t mean that to be a good thing or a bad thing: it’s just a thing. A thing you can’t change except by getting better at what you do and earning respect. But even still, you are ever at the feet of clients, publishers, and editors. Check your ego — which has swollen in isolation, like e. coli on an agar plate — at the door.

I Still See That Glint Of Magic And Hope In Your Eye

At a distance, writing is a magical thing: it’s candy-floss made of God-stuff. It’s the weaving of tales, the singing of bard-songs, the creating of characters that will gain life like Frankenstein’s monster with a bolt of lightning shot from your own magnificent mind. A lot of things look nice at a distance. Hell, I flew over Detroit once, and I was like — “Aw, what a nice-looking city.” Once you get up close and personal with the writing life, though, the magic dies on the vine. You rip down the facade and find there a kind of abattoir, the floors thick with the chunky blood you’ve spilled in order to make a deadline. Somewhere you hear the sound of a saw chewing through bones punctuated by the hoarse wails of the broken and deranged.

You cannot maintain the illusion of writing being this precious act when you’re working to make a living wage. I mean, I guess you can if you’re Stephen King. But me? And you? This illusion is dismembered by the reaper’s scythe. Writing is a job. A wake-up-at-the-perineum-of-dawn-and-churn-out-a-fast-two-thousand-words job. The kind of job where, if you don’t write, you don’t get paid, and if you don’t get paid, you will die in a gutter wearing only that one pair of pants you own. (Who am I kidding? We do not wear pants.) If I can tell you a little secret, though, this, to me, is a kind of magic all its own. Er, not the dying pantsless thing, but the “writing as a job” thing. But it’s a real magic — or, rather, a science. And science is hella tits. (Do the kids say that? “Hella tits?” Spread that lingo for me, will you?)

You Still Suffer From Writer’s Block

Living the life of a professional writer will either a) remove your illusion that writer’s block is a real thing (it isn’t) or b) remove your ass from living the life of the professional writer. Writer’s block is not real. It’s just some fake-ass mental shit that writers made up (during the Grandiloquent Penmonkey Council of Dusseldorf in 1456) so they can excuse a day of not-writing. You get writer’s block, you don’t write, and you don’t write, you don’t get paid, and, well — see earlier comment, re: gutters, pants, death. You don’t hear about other professions suffering this kind of nonsense, do you? “I’ve got Spreadsheet Malaise.” “I suffer under the callous yoke of Engineer’s Ennui.” Writer’s block? Pfft. When your actual income depends on the words you produce, you get shut of that shit reaaaal quick, hoss. The only writer’s block that matters is the kind where a horse steps on both hands and breaks all your fingers. That’s all you get.

You Are A Uni-Tasker

Ever hear the term “biodiversity?” An ecosystem thrives when it has greater biodiversity, meaning, a greater variety of life forms. Diversity is also the king of investment: if you don’t have a diverse portfolio, then when that one stock you own goes down the poop-tubes, so does your fortune. Once the public learns that Bobo’s Hot Dog Hut uses cat meat to make its sausages, your stock in that company is done for, son. Life thrives with diversity. Financial portfolios depend on diversity.

The writer survives on diversity, too. If you do one thing really well — “I write snarky articles about Doctor Who!” — then good for you. Your blog appreciates it. But that way is not the way of the pro-writer’s life. You best be ready to write all kinds of shit you didn’t expect to write. Thou shalt not earn a steady living as a single-serving uni-tasker. I’ve written: pen-and-paper roleplaying games, video games, articles about video games, essays, transmedia projects, short stories, novels, films, ad and marketing copy, brochures, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, crime, and so on, and so forth. You need diversity in projects as well as diversity in clients. You will learn that, starting out, the word “YES” is more your friend than “NO.” That changes over time as you become more established, but early on, the word “no” might as well be, “no, I don’t want to eat this week, starvation is awesome.”

Linking Writing And Commerce Makes Your Butthole Itch

Writing is the act of putting words on paper. Professional writing is the act of beating oneself about the head and neck with a tire iron putting words on paper for money. That last part is key: “for money.” Some writers, you bring up money and business in terms of being a writer, they twitch and spasm and make faces like you just jizzed in their milkshake. Pssh. Amateurs. These folks are the not-yet-ready-for-prime-time writers. You wanna go “pro,” you have to embrace what “pro” means — which is to say, this is your livelihood. Going pro means doing all kinds of things that go against that idea that writing is this lordly, artsy profession. It means attending to deadlines. It means reading and understanding contracts. It means pushing past the pain and learning how to create a spreadsheet that shows income, expenses, writing schedules, liters of Bourbon consumed, tears shed. It means knowing how to create and send invoices. There’s a whole seedy sub-layer to being a pro-writer that, for some reason, writers don’t want to deal with. Fuck that. That’s like owning a toilet and not knowing how to unclog it. Elves don’t come and handle it, for Chrissakes. This is your job. Keyword: job. Oh, and for the record, if you’re one of those fuck-hats who sneers whenever anyone puts “art” and “money” in the same sentence, do me a favor: take off your shoe, and smack yourself in the crotch again and again like you’re trying to kill a centipede.

You Love Stability, Loathe Disorder

You know how some people make, like, $50,000 a year? And then next year, they make that again? And the year after, they make, I dunno, $52,000 a year? And that’s their life? And you know how these people get things like health care, vacations, 40-hour-work-weeks, and the respect of their families? Wad all those things up in a ball and feed them to a goat. Those are gone. Done. Kaput. Stability and certainty is not the life of the writer. Even a writer who writes full-time and gets all those benefits is more likely on the chopping block because writers are seen as expendable. (Never mind the fact that we write the world into existence. It’s like nobody appreciates gods anymore.) Still, for the most part, pro-writers are freelance, or hop from job to job. As such, your yearly income? Not steady. Health care? Pay for it yourself or be lucky enough to have a spouse who brings that home. Vacations? I just laughed so hard I threw up. Hell, you don’t even get paid immediately for a job. Sure, you wrote “NET 30” on your invoice. You might as well have written on there, “And please deliver my check duct-taped to a pink pony.” That money’s still going to take six months to wind its way through the proper channels to get to you. If there was an ad in the paper advertising a freelance writer’s job, it would read, “WRITING WORK AVAILABLE. MUST LOVE CHAOS AND BUDGETS. ALSO: LIQUOR AND SHAME.”

Check Yourself ‘Fore You Wreck Yourself

Pro-writing is not a gig for those with weak constitutions, frail bladders, or creative integrity. Think very seriously before stepping into that arena, because you walk into that battle largely unarmed and unarmored. You’ve got to measure up. You’ve got to ask yourself the hard questions. I’m not saying it’s not satisfying; it is. But you may not be ready for that kind of life. Not yet, at least.

After all, Here There Be Space Dragons.

“I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream; that’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor… and surviving.”

— Kurtz, APOCALYPSE NOW

There comes a point during the writing of a novel when, in the thick of it, some 30 or 40,000 words deep, you look down and wonder, how did you get naked, exactly? Where are your clothes? Why are you covered in grass-stains, your flesh marked by thorn-scratches? Why in your hair do you smell boar’s blood and the mating fluids of forest nymphs? Time is lost in clips and stretches. You feel disconnected from your body. You see a fly on the window batting its wings and you’re like, “I could eat you. I could sustain myself forever on you. Or I could shrink myself teeny-tiny-itty-bitty and ride you into battle against my foes.”

It’s time then to realize you have, as they say, bugged the fuck out.

I just finished a novel, and I had moments where I rubbed elbows with a crazier version of myself, a version of myself with blood in his beard and the flesh of the imaginary pterodactyl ‘neath my fingertips. But somehow, I kept it together. I dared not lose my shit because, Sweet Molly McGibbons, I was on deadline. You fuck with a deadline, you get fucked by the deadline. That’s freelancer law.

I figured that it might be worth it to try to figure out exactly how I stopped myself from going off the reservation to live in the mud and the leaves, and here’s what I came up with.

Together, we shall stave off this indefatigable novel-born madness.

Lay Down Breadcrumbs

Writing a novel is just freaking weird, man. Feels like you’re wandering through a dark forest with a lantern whose meager light is cast by a flock of disgruntled and unpredictable fireflies. It’s like a Miyazaki film up in this bitch. It’s hazy and dizzy and dreary and giddy and did I mention weird? Weird. Weird, weird, weird. It is exodus, epiphany, and egress all rolled into one.

So, it helps to have a plan. Further, it helps to track your plan as you go. Now, that doesn’t mean having an outline if you don’t want it — though, an outline is certainly one way to do this. But even if you just figure out how much you need to write per day to get the novel done by so-and-so deadline, you’re already a little bit ahead. Word count matters. Your schedule matters. Track that shit on a spreadsheet — no, no, I hear you, a spreadsheet will burn the tender fingertips of the creative writer the way an angel’s lusty secretions will blind a demon by cooking his eyeballs in his fool demon head. Still, I’ve learned to love the spreadsheet, just so I know where I’m at on my word journey.

You have all manner of plan at your disposal: spreadsheets, mind-maps, outlines, treatments, beat sheets, notebooks filled with your lunatic scrawls and inked in your own tears and urine, etc.

Use them. It’ll help put a boot on the neck of your sanity as it squirms and screams and tries to escape your house through the cat door. Anything to keep yourself on target and not ape-bat insane.

Sprint Now, And Thank Me Later

What I’m trying to say is, “Get a little bit ahead.” It’s like investment banking: save up some extra word count early in the process and that shit will pay in dividends later on. Because inevitably you’re going to have a day where it’s like, “Oh, the dishwasher exploded? And it took out the stove? And now the kitchen is filled with both soapy floodwater and jetting fire? What’s that, you say? Goblins have colonized the attic? I’m not going to get any writing done today, am I?” And then, voila, you whip out that banked word count and you’re like, “Magic! I did my writing for today, I just happened to bank it last Tuesday.”

You’ll feel like a mad genius, you will. You might even go back in time to thank yourself.

ASAFPMF*

* As Soon As Fucking Possible, Motherfucker.

Don’t wait. Write as early in the day as you can. Get it out. Exorcise the word demons. On an average day, even the best of us build up bad energy the way boat hulls collect barnacles, and with that scummy aggregation you start to lose intellectual energy. Mornings tend to be when your brain is at its lemon-scented freshest, so hop on pop and get moving. This also means you’re giving fate a reduced opportunity to saddlebag you later in the day — 4pm rolls around and suddenly it’s all, “I forgot that I left my children at the reptile house at the Zoo. Or was it the primate house? Ooooh. Uh-oh.” There goes your daily word count as you battle howler monkeys and hooded cobras in a battle for your children’s allegiance.

Stop Shoveling Garbage Into Your Lumpy Writer’s Body

That diet of caffeinated Fritos and nougat-filled pork rinds is not the breakfast of champions. It is, in fact, the brunch of the insane. What you put in your body during the time of novel-writing genuinely matters. What you eat affects your mental state, and if you’re too sluggardly or cracked-out, your writing for that day is going to be a) not completed or b) as incomprehensible as the chitterings of a distempered raccoon.

Here’s what I did. I drank a cup of coffee first thing in the morning and then, mid-morning, a cup of green tea. Green tea is nice because it keeps you awake and alert but dulls the edge of that morning’s coffee. Then, I ate protein. Eggs first thing (eggs are brain food, or so I’m told). Then until lunch, some light snacking: almonds, cottage cheese, some dried fruit or veggies. No carbs, and especially no sugar. Carbs are for when you need to burn energy. Sitting your pudding-laden bottom in a chair and writing is not the way you expend energy. Finally,  Scotch or Bourbon at night. To clear the head.

I actually lost weight during the writing of the novel, which surprised me.

Maybe I have a tapeworm?

Mmm. Tapeworms.

The Only Thing Left To Do Is Dance

Oh, also, a little exercise goes a long way. I mean, you don’t have to actually dance. Unless the spirit moves you. In which case, move that booty, rump-shaker. Move it like they just made rump-shaking illegal.

Pre-Program Your Brain Like A VCR, Before VCRs Went Extinct Like The Dodo

Seriously, you ever try to find a VCR for sale anymore? You’d have better luck finding an undisturbed Yeti print in your backyard. What was I talking about? Ah. Right. Your brain.

On a day where I have serious word count to attack, I sometimes awaken that morning with deep and freakish anxiety as if I am — well, I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s equal parts, “I’m not worthy of the task that has been placed in my hand” and “OH MY GOD MY BOWELS ARE FULL OF SCORPIONS.” Oh! Oh. You know what it’s like? Waking up the day of a test at school, a test about which you forgot, a test for which you are woefully under-prepared. A test you will be forced to take in the nude. With a dunce cap on your head. A dunce cap full of stinky bowel-scorpions.

Thing is, I find that if I preset my brain like some kind of storytelling slow-cooker, I can wake up without that fear threatening to suck my heart outta my nether-holes. It’s like this: before bed, I take a handful of moments to think about the next day’s work — where are the characters, what do they need to do, where do I need the story to be — then I can go to sleep and let my unconscious thoughtmachine chew on it.

Zero real effort on my part, and it helps to provide focus come morning.

Shit Happens, But Shit Comes Out In The Wash

I said it the other day on Twitter, but it perhaps bears repeating:

Writing is when you make the words.

Editing is when you make the words not shitty.

Writing the novel is the long slog through a deep mire, but it’s not a one-and-done deal. This is just the first voyage West — provided your wagons don’t break down and you don’t murder all your characters and consume their flesh like the icy Wendigo, you’re going to do fine. Once you’ve got the route planned, it’s time for editing. And editing is refinement. It’s all hatchet-and-scalpel.

Writing is art. Editing is science. All of it together is craft.

Calm down about the first draft.

Your story is truly formed during the editing process.

Calm Down, You’re Not Curing Cancer

I don’t know why, but it feels like writing a novel is some weighty responsibility, some cross made of aurum borne upon your sagging penmonkey shoulders.

Yeah, listen. Storytelling is genuinely some epic, mythic, fucked-up magical business. It’s important. It really is. The world is build on the bones of stories. Stories have the power to change lives.

But even still, you’re not curing cancer. You’re not powering up the Large Hadron Collider. A house is not burning down with a basket of kittens inside that only you can save.

Vent a little of the pressure off yourself. Not enough to go slack and stop writing (if you do that, I will hunt you down and beat you with your own swollen indolence), but enough to not feel like you’re carrying the world on your shoulders. Writing is a little bit like sex: there’s a very real “mental game” component going on upstairs. You get too choked up under pressure, you’re not going to finish. Not the sex, not the novel.

How else you gonna reach the mighty endjaculation? After all, “climax” is apropos to both fiction writing and sweet-sweet love-monkeying.

How about you, word-herders and ink-thinkers? How do you get through the writing process from start to finish, be it a novel, a screenplay, a memoir, an endless manifesto of rage-fueled anarchy?

“In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him — all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination — you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

— Joseph Conrad, HEART OF DARKNESS