A Writer's Tale (18 page)

If distractions are the source of your troubles, try to eliminate them. Find a quiet place to work. A place where nobody will intrude on your privacy. If your home or apartment or dorm is too crowded or busy, go somewhere else. Write in a coffee shop, at the library, on a park bench in the back seat of your parked car.

Go anywhere necessary to get privacy and silence.

If you simply cannot
avoid
an environment full of distractions, learn to block them out.

But
exterior
distractions are not always the problem. Often, writer’s block is the result of
interior
troubles.

You might just be tired. Fiction writing takes a tremendous amount of mental and emotional energy. If you haven’t gotten enough sleep, you may sometimes find yourself gazing blankly at a blank page. The solution? Simple and very effective. Take a nap and try again later.

You might be preoccupied. Troubles with finances, health, relationships, etc. can throw major disturbances into your head.

If your life is full of problems, do what you can to remedy them. If they are beyond remedy, ignore them. At least for the hours each day when you need to write, shut them out. Stick them into the back of your head, then go ahead and concentrate all your attention on writing.

One of the most common mental blocks comes from the What-The-Hell’s-The-Use-Anyway Syndrome. You feel that, no matter what you might do, you’ll never get published. As you see it, there are too many other writers out there, you’re no better than they are, you can’t imagine why anyone would ever bother to notice your work, and you don’t stand a chance of succeeding. So why waste your life trying?

If you’re an unpublished writer, you feel sure that you’ll probably stay that way forever. If you’re published, you might suffer from the syndrome because you feel that no matter what you may write it doesn’t stand a chance of reaching the audience it deserves. You’ll remain a mid-list writer until you fade into oblivion. So why even try?

To deal with this problem I advise saying, “Screw it!”

Then go ahead and write.

Write for yourself. “Write the book you want to write.

Forget about competing with other writers, impressing editors, worrying whether anyone will ever publish your book or promote it, or whether it will ever get into any store or into the home of any reader.

Put it all behind you.

Sit down and write.

I know, easier said than done.

Here’s a suggestion. If you can’t get past the “What-The-Hell’s-The-Use-Anyway”

feelings, try reading.

Go to a book store and buy a few paperbacks that have recently been published in the area of your interest. Take them home. Read them…

And grin.

Because if you’re a good writer yourself, you’ll notice that the stuff you’ve just bought is
not so good.

And you’ll think,
I can write better than this!

It’s very encouraging to discover that much of what is being bought and published day in and day out is complete, utter, stinking crap.

The realization is liberating.

Knowing that so much crap is being published, you have absolutely no reason to be despondent about your chances of eventual success. (Many of our greatest books were written by people who picked up their pens for the first time after reading a piece of published junk and thinking,
I can do better than that.)
All you need to do is vigorously, persistently write non-crap.

Of course, a great many editors aren’t capable of distinguishing crap from non-crap, so the journey to success may be long and frustrating. But sooner or later, good material will be discovered and published. I’m certain of that.

Fairly certain.

At any rate, you’d be an idiot to let the What-The-Hell’s-The-Use-Anyway Syndrome hold you back. You have a fine chance of being a successful writer if you persist.

Writer’s block can also be caused by confusion and despair about how to proceed with a novel or story. You’re not sure what to do, so you can’t do
anything.

This may happen when you’re trying to start a new project or when you’re in the midst of one.

When just trying to begin a new project, the difficulty often come from a fear that your basic story idea isn’t good enough.

When you’re first starting out as a writer, you may have an exaggerated idea about what “good enough” means. How can you possibly come up with an idea that hasn’t already been used
and
is something that people may want to read it? After you’ve had some books published, you will probably be faced with competing against yourself. When I finished writing
The Stake,
I ran into a block because I was worried about living up to my own creation.

The Stake
was in many ways a much better novel than anything I’d written before. I didn’t want my next novel to be
not as good
as
The Stake.
Therefore, I found myself unable to write anything at all.

Here’s my solution.

I thought,
Screw it. I’ll write the book I want to write.

I’ll write the best book I can. If it isn’t as good as
The Stake, too bad.

Face it. You can only write as good as you can write. Give them the best
you
can. If they want more than that, the hell with them.

There is, however, life after the “screw you” phase.

Once you’ve determined which story you want to tell, “good enough” or otherwise, you might
still
encounter troubles getting started.

The trick is, don’t let them stop you.

Take a while to analyze possible sources of the trouble.

In my experience, difficulties in getting started often have very specific causes.

Maybe this isn’t the story you really should be writing at this time. You sense that it won’t work, that something about it is beyond your reach. Maybe it’s too complex.

Maybe it’s missing a key ingredient that you can’t quite identify. Maybe you should put it aside and take another look at it down the road. (Many of the books that I’ve written recently would’ve been
impossible
for me to have written in my earlier years. I needed more experience, more confidence, more knowledge.) Your block may be the result of strong feelings, possibly on a subconscious level, that writing this particular book at this particular time is a
bad
idea.

If that’s the case, the cure is to move on to a new project.

However, your difficulty in getting started may have cures that are far less drastic.

A common problem is that you might be trying to start your story at the wrong point in time. Maybe you’re trying to begin the tale too early too many days or weeks before the real conflict gets under way. No matter what genre you’re writing in, the best place to begin is
when the trouble starts.
Begin telling your tale too early, and you might just be floundering around, trying to write scenes that serve little or no purpose. Begin with the trouble, and things should run smoothly.

If your plot doesn’t
have
trouble, drop it. Because if you don’t have trouble in your story, you don’t have a story.

You may be surprised and delighted to discover how easily the words flow if you skip the preliminaries and start your tale at the moment the trouble first rears its head.

Another possible cure for difficulties in getting started on a new project is to
change the point of view.
Time and time again, I’ve had problems with a new novel until I realized that I was trying to tell it from the wrong viewpoint. Some stories might require third-person viewpoints of multiple characters, while other stories might call for a first-person viewpoint. Sometimes, just realizing that you
have
to tell it in a very subjective first-person voice instead of in third person can make all the difference and clear away your writer’s block.

You may be starting to tell your story at the right point in time, and using the best possible viewpoint, but then run into difficulties because you’re planning to focus your plot on the wrong character. You run into the block because you know something isn’t right but you don’t know what.

When making my preliminary notes for
After Midnight,
I thought my story would be about a teenaged boy looking out his bedroom window at night and seeing a mysterious young woman lingering in his back yard. Though I made quite a few pages of notes about where to go from there, I felt
wrong
about it. But suddenly I thought,
What if we reverse roles? A woman looking out her window sees a mysterious guy!
It changed everything, and I knew it would work.

When trying to develop
The Stake,
I figured to have a man find a stake-in-the-heart body while digging a hole in his back yard. From there, however, the plot was pretty much up for grabs. I didn’t know where to take it until the notion popped into my head that the man should be a horror writer. After that, everything fell into place as if pre-ordained.

Trying to develop
Out Are The Lights,
I had nothing more than a book about a movie theater showing snuff films until I realized the potential of making my main character deaf.

Moby Dick
was probably a pretty ho-hum idea for a book until Melville decided to take away one of Ahab’s legs.

My suggestion to get past the block: ask yourself how the story might go if you made it happen to
someone else.
Play with the ages of your characters, their genders, their careers, special interests, etc. You may stumble onto a notion that will suddenly bring your story to life and blast away your writer’s block.

After you’ve decided that your story is starting at the best point in time, that you’ve found the right point of view and that you’ve selected a terrific cast of characters something else may be still prevent you from getting started.

But you don’t know what.

My advice is to sit down at your pad of paper, typewriter or keyboard and simply
play around
with your story. Don’t try to write it. just toy with it. Ask yourself what sort of
events
you envision taking place. Who does what to whom? What leads to what? Just fool around for a while and see what happens.

More than likely, you’ll very quickly astound yourself by discovering what you want to do, where you want to go.

So then you immediately go to a new page, write “Chapter One,” and have at it.

If all else fails, do what Hemingway said.

Begin your story by writing one true sentence. Then follow it with another. And keep adding sentences. Don’t worry about where they are taking you just follow them. Soon, you’ll find yourself telling a story.

If you run into a block in the midst of a project, you should stop and think. Somewhere nearby, you probably took a wrong turn. You made something happen that shouldn’t have happened. You had the wrong character do something. You forgot to put in a necessary scene. You’re letting the plot bog down.

Or you’re
about
to head off in a bad direction and the block is trying to warn you off.

All you need to do is identify the problem, find the better way to go, and go there. You’ll leave the block behind.

In many cases, writer’s block is actually your friend. It warns you of something wrong about the story you’re writing or about to write.

All you need to do is determine the source of the problem.

When you correct the problem, that form of writer’s block will vanish and you’ll be able to plunge on ahead.

The key, always, is to plunge on ahead.

Let nothing stop you.

On Rejection

REJECTION SLIPS ARE BADGES OF HONOR.

Purple Hearts.

They mean that you’ve done your duty. You’ve written your stuff and sent it out. You’ve done your part.

Show me a writer who doesn’t have a stack of rejection slips and I’ll show you an unpublished writer.

The rejections can feel like a kick in the stomach when you get them, but they are part of the life. They’re the receipts you get in the mail each time you pay your dues.

Eventually, if you are persistent, you’ll open an envelope that isn’t self-addressed, it will contain a letter of acceptance, and you’ll be a “published author.”

In a period of five or six years, I collected at least thirty rejection slips from
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine,
fifteen or twenty from
Ellery Queen,
and numerous rejection slips from other magazines.

They’re not fun to get.

But what you must understand is that
a story can be rejected
for any of several reasons.

True, maybe it’s just a lousy story. Or not a
story,
at all. Maybe it’s badly written. On the other hand, maybe the editor had a headache when he or she read it. Or maybe the magazine had recently bought a story with a similar plot. Or maybe your piece is too violent for their taste. Maybe the editor thinks it is sexist. Maybe your story has a dog in it, but the editor is a cat person.

Maybe the editor thinks your main character is too pushy or not pushy enough. Or maybe the publisher has a backlog of stories and just isn’t interested in buying
any new
ones just now.

Your material
might
even be rejected because it is too unusual, too original, doesn’t fit the stereotypes or the editor’s expectations of what a story
ought
to be. Maybe you’ve dared to enter unknown territories and the publisher is unwilling to risk the adventure.

In other words, it ain’t necessarily a bad story.

This is true of any manuscript you submit, whether it’s a short story sent to a magazine or a novel sent to a publisher.

It may be a perfectly fine piece of work.

More often than not, its rejection will have little or nothing to dc with the work’s intrinsic merits.