Guest Post: Why Do You Write? Part Two

Every writer needs to know why they write. Being honest about your goals and your motivations will save you heartache in the long run. If you understand why you are embarking on a project, chances are you will have less once-promising projects gathering dust in the corner. In Part One, I made the case for why introspection is important to writers. The first two reasons for writing that were covered in Part One were “because I can” and “because I want to”.

For the majority of self-directed writers, “because I can” and “because I want to” cover most of the reasons why we embark on a particular project. We want to take pleasure in our craft, and/or we want to say something with our work. But now I want to come to grips with the final two reasons for writing. I will preface by saying that these two cases pose their own special challenges, and might suggest to you that some of your problems with your writing project come from the type or quality of writing that you are doing.

Why do you write the particular project that you are currently working on?

Because I need to. There is an important difference between want and need. Whereas want is defined by how it adds to what you already have, Need is defined by its absence. When you aren’t fulfilling a need, some part of the whole is suffering. When you are fulfilling a need, you feel normal. When you are writing from need, the writing makes us feel human again. Anything less than that is a want.

To write because you need to write is a matter of no small importance. There are a number of reasons why people need to write, and I won’t speculate too deeply about the underlying reasons (because they are usually of a personal nature). The first reason is for cognitive or social aid. The second reason is for relief & closure. The third (and least distressing) reason is habit. I have written for all three reasons, so I’ll do my best to explain what these three things mean to me.

The “cognitive or social aid” is like Leonard Shelby tattooing crucial names, dates, words on his body in Memento, but not because you can’t remember things. This is the kind of writing that you do to put your life in order. Using writing to make to-do lists or work schedules is fairly common; but need can be more advanced than that.

For ten years I carried a journal with me at all times. When I felt overwhelmed (in a “I am going to vomit all over this Turkish rug” kind of way), I would find an empty chair and open my journal. I would jot down words, phrases, people’s names, descriptions of the ceiling, the walls, the decor, the food–sketching out the scene before me like I was writing novelisitic exposition. All of the things my brain could not process–as I wrote them, bit by bit, reality would reassert its hold. The panic would subside and I could get on doing what I was doing. Without the journal, it was all but impossible for me to function in a social world. The upside was that I had lots of scraps of well-sketched places, of emotion crystallized in its heightened state. Being a frugal writer, I never want to throw out anything I do. So I incorporated these descriptions into short stories or poems; I used these passages to springboard into story ideas.

The “relief & closure” reason is probably the most familiar to us as writers. Who hasn’t taken up the pen (or keyboard) after a blow to the heart? I started writing daily in my late teens. The relief I was looking for–the relief from mood swings the size of a Texas prairie. I would track these moods and puzzle out wildly exaggerated reactions to mild slights. Journaling was a way to get at the cause of a low self-worth and anger.

This writing was a mental health tool.  It didn’t have an immediate project around it. I had just wanted to feel better. Over time, however, the journaling became the project that I needed to collect & polish into a novella. The crisis came to a head during my senior thesis. To graduate from my program, undergrads had to put together a long paper or a creative project. I had started and stopped a collection of short stories that were pretty objects without any real emotional heat. My love of a 3rd person objective voice didn’t help the bloodless, above-it-all-ness of these stories. All of my writing projects were falling flat. My thesis adviser finally sat me down and asked me about it. I told her it was because the story I needed to tell was suffocating my ability to feel sympathetic towards any of my other protagonists. It was scuttling all of my other stories before they were even told. Clearly, she said, that is the story you need to write. You can’t be a writer until you tell it.

The worst part of this story was that my need to tell it made it take a high toll on my relationships. It was a story of trauma, and it became difficult to continue. To continue meant to relive the pain like a blow to the body.  To alleviate some of that too-close-to-home-ness, a writer is advised to disguise the story. If the trauma you suffered was physical, then make it emotional instead. If it was sexual, make it psychological instead. Just bring the need and the pain with you to the keyboard.

When you are writing for relief or closure, it is desperately important that you push through the pain and finish the project. Sometimes it means that you feel lighter when you’ve finished. Other times it means you feel pressed thin–like you’ve given some essential sliver to the page. It is impossible to tell whether writing will be felt like an unburdening or a wound, but it is crucial that you find out. Because leaving that one large project unfinished means that you can never quite close the book on the event that caused it. It will rankle. And it will spill out into every other project you tackle.

Finally, and least dire, writing can become a need through habit. Dan has highlighted Ray Bradbury‘s description of physical unease at going days without writing. Those of us who develop the taste for everyday writing begin to need it like a drug. Going off of it leads to a short-term feeling of euphoria and I’m-fines–followed immediately by decline and bottoming out. Don’t be put off by that comparison; I’ve heard the same from my cycling-addicting folks. Your body learns to reward any kind of exertion with endorphines, to make you keep doing what you do. Whether it’s 20 miles of biking or 20k of words.

Usually these writing habit grow up around a certain kind of writing. Mine was journaling. Ray Bradbury’s was writing super-awesome publishable fiction.

While it was nice to be writing daily (with a bonus smugness that comes from being able to say that you write at least 300 words per day), after I worked through most of my pressing issues in my novella, journaling wasn’t the kind of writing I wanted to be doing. How, then, could I channel my need to write every day into writing that I wanted to do? I haven’t rightly figured out how to switch that same level of dedication to the more optional “want-to” kind of writing. But I have learned that to make headway in the projects you want to do, you must finish the projects you need to do first. And then learn how to let go of that writing once it is no longer helping you meet your goals.

 

Because I have to. If you have ever had a paid (or unpaid) job where you were required to write, produce, design, draw, or create on a deadline, you know this reason all too well. Depending on how well you do with deadlines (some of us rise up to meet them, some of us procrastinate until we hit them, some of us crumble at the sight of them), this is probably the best category in terms of motivation because it will illuminate your writing persona.

If you are the type to crumble at the face of deadlines (self-imposed or otherwise), there are undoubtedly a host of organizational, motivational, and self-esteem issues lurking under the guise of not being able to meet deadlines. You will need to deal with these issues a step at a time, and to let go of your preconceived notions about what kind of writing you are doing on a day-to-day basis. You aren’t making art, you aren’t making perfection, you are just getting it done.

Grad school gave me a crash course in how bad my procrastination had become when I tried to write two quarter-long papers in the course of a day. I don’t think I have overcome that procrastination tendency with projects that are imposed on me. It is the downfall of the deadline. If you know when it must be finished and you don’t have the spark of passion for the project, the temptation to ride the line may become impossible to overcome.

However, with the “have to” impulse, at least work is produced. If your self-started projects are languishing, the deadline is the single most powerful tool to get it jump-started. Most of us are programmed to respect and/or fear the Deadline; we will produce in the face of one.

If you are writing for a self-started project, you have some flexibility in setting deadlines. In my experience, the solution to this kind of procrastination is smaller, frequent deadlines with a more open-ended date for the finished product. That way work is produced at a steady rate, and the flexible finish-by date gives you a bit of wiggle room if (when) the project takes more time in revision. In my experience, when you are turning okay okay or average prose on deadlines, it takes a bit more work to make it pop when you are shaping it into its final form.

Most of us have the necessary tools at our fingertips: blogging platforms, community writing goals, public accountability. They keep our deadlines honest. Even if you fudge yours, as I am doing for ROW80 (I’m only checking in once per week on Wednesdays), a written log of work you’ve done for your self-imposed deadlines can show you how to chip away at your project, one step at a time.

If neither privately-affirmed nor publically-stated goals have the power to motivate you to work; if you don’t feel guilty/anxious/disappointed/whatever when  you watch your deadlines blow by (or even if you do, and choose to do nothing about it)–at this point I’d suggest taking up a different craft than writing.

 

So. What does this all mean?

A few years ago, I had the good fortune to collaborate with a friend on an epically-scaled project. We were both enthusiastic fans with time to burn, so we decided to create a fan fiction alternative season for our current tv obsession (Buffy). Our fascination with Victorian England led us down a literary fiction route to old Sherlock Holmes stories and H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novels.  We wanted to blend pop culture and Victorian lit, and have a good time while we were doing it.

Production schedules were created, character charts were fleshed out, character artwork was drawn. Amazingly, we had attracted a stable of four writers to write an entire season’s worth of stories.

Of the 140,000+ planned words, only 16,000 of them were ever written. Only one finished episode was produced. The stable of writers evaporated, leaving an unrealized world in shambles. While the planning itself was immensely enjoyable, and I had the pleasure of brainstorming with writers who constantly impressed me, I couldn’t get past the wasted planning.

What happened?

Quite simply, there was a crisis of motivation. All of the writers approached the project with different motivations. Some of the writers saw the project as an opportunity to write “worry-free”–it was just fan-fiction, right? But the moment when they were confronted with a word processor, a story, and some general deadlines, they discovered that writing fan fiction isn’t a magical gateway into writing motivation. You have to be already motivated to write. The writing won’t show up just because you do.

In fact, most of the project writers (myself included) chose to try fan fiction because they were having trouble with “serious” writing. Each writer had a novel that they would take off the shelf to tinker with. This shiny new fan fiction project promised deadlines, editors who cared about their work, and rigorous fore-planning. As each of the writers had crises of motivation–some caused by the amount of work they were putting into the project, some caused by the stress of writing itself–many of them asked the question, “why am I devoting so much energy to this fan project? Shouldn’t I be doing serious writing?” And honestly, I would have to answer yes, why the hell are you wasting time on my project? It wasn’t their vision after all.

My motivation was different; I wanted to see if I had the ability to self-start, finish, polish, and publish a single story. I hadn’t written a single finished story in workshop; I hadn’t written any kind of fiction in more than a year. I wanted to know if I still had the stuff. From this initial spark, my run-away enthusiasm of working with like-minded writers inflated the project well beyond the bounds that any of us intended it to (as noxious gases tend to do). The production schedules were a part of that bloat… they didn’t reflect in any way shape or form my honest motivations for starting the project.

Although the failure of this project squatted in the “regret” portion of my brain, it took me awhile to recognize that I did in fact accomplish my original goals. I wrote, and I revised. I wrote “Eleven Quid” in about a month; I finished it, polished it, and published it. (After its website went defunct, I slapped it up on Fanfiction.net.) By that measure, the project was a success. Had I kept a clearer focus on my goals–on my own reasons for writing–I would either kept the enthusiasm from running away with itself (haw!) or realized that the project’s dissolution wasn’t a waste of time. I got what I came for. And based on the subsequent creative output of a few of the other project members, they too found the motivation they were looking for.

The reasons a writer writes, how they started, what their goals are, and why they choose to work on a particular project have everything to do, then, with what projects get finished and which ones get discarded.

So. Why do you write?

 

 

Guest Post: Why Do You Write? Part One

It was balmy March afternoon in 2008 that I sat down to chat with my good friend and writing support group of one, Dan Swensen. At the time, my main energies were directed towards posting on message boards about writing. I had set aside my habit of daily journaling.  It had been years since I had written a poem, and more than 18 months since I’d even sniffed at a short story. With a tinge of sadness, and a feeling of defeat, I remember typing, “I’m not a writer. I haven’t been for a while now.”

Those words crushed me, as I had stumbled across a fundamentally true thing. A writer writes. They don’t just read books about writing, they don’t just chat about writing, they don’t just make plans about writing. A writer writes something. I wasn’t writing anything.

This epiphany ate at me.  I’d like to say that I went on a writing tear, that my entire attitude toward writing transformed. No. It took a few months. And when I started, I started small. A few poems while I was doing live-in work in Idyllwild. Then, a few articles for a creative magazine.  A few more poems. Another pause. A few more years.

It wasn’t until this January that a question reared its head and demanded my full attention. “Why the hell am I not writing?” The fuller implications of this question were, “why are you letting bad workshop experiences limit your creative output? Why are you letting your old work languish? Why are you not actively shaping your creative life?”

This second epiphany lightened the heaviness of being a failed writer that I had been carrying with me. To be a writer, all you have to do is transform motivation into writing through the alchemy of keyboard, pen, paper.

The key that I had been missing was motivation. The reason I’d been lacking it was because I had a dearth of honesty. I had not answered the very simple question that big mucky-muck writers and writers down in the trenches get asked but few answer in a comprehensive way: “why do you write?”

Why do you write?

This seemingly simple question actually has three components to it (hence the likelihood of getting an abbreviated answer when you ask your other writer friends): “what are your general goals for your writing and/or what do you hope to get from your writing,” “how did you get started writing / why do you continue to write,” and “why do you write a particular project.”

So. Why do you write?

It is vitally important to be honest here.

If your answer is full of fakery and pretensions towards art, fame or money that you don’t actually want–or are able to achieve–there will be a nagging gap between the work you are doing (or procrastinating) and your ultimate goals. The greater share of writers that I have known have been filled with anxiety over their ability to achieve either artfulness in their writing, or the ability to feed themselves with their work. Then I left workshop, and met writers unconcerned with either goal; these writers worked (one, two, three) other jobs, and tried for skillful writing, but didn’t erect A LIVEABLE WAGE or the PROGRESS OF ART as their goalposts. And they were all the more successful (according to their goals) for it.

You are courting disaster if your goals even include a seemingly more modest goal of WRITING A POPULAR NOVEL. Basing your goals on the tastes of audiences is like drying your laundry in an oncoming storm. Some novels are popular; most are not; and even if you write something popular, chances are slim that you could ever name-drop your novel at a party or a twitter feed and get hushed and reverent responses. It is a far easier goal to “write a novel that has wide appeal/large possible audience,” since that goal makes no presumption of popularity–only of its potential to be popular.

Setting goals that you can live with, and that reflect your desires is the key here. Sometimes finding a goal you can get your mind around is as simple as figuring out the proper way to get at your goal.

I write because I want to wrangle the chaotic thoughts in my head and make something meaningful to others from that. I write poetry because, frankly, I have issues with brevity. I like cultivating this habit in myself.

 

So. Why did you start writing?

It’s a common experience for writers to get started early in life, but there are hundreds of path into the craft. Perhaps you started writing because you always wanted to live the glamorous Hollywood life of an out-of-work screenwriter. You needed to find a sense of closure from traumatic events. You were dying to rail against the exponential witlessness of pop-culture commentary. A person’s history layers new motivations onto the original writing impulse, making each person’s reason for writing a story itself (and is possibly the reason why so many first novels out of workshops have protagonists figuring out how/why they want to write as a part of the main plot).

I was good at writing when I was a kid, and it snowballed from there. When I discovered that I lacked the attention span to make novels, I settled on poems–then grew to love their gem-like qualities. My attitude toward writing changed dramatically during college; some of this story can be found in past articles on writing workshops at the university level, some of it opens this article.

I keep a running tab of places where I’ve talked about my writing history, because the story changes each time. Details are dropped or remembered. Different writing influences are foregrounded. Mentors’ advice seems more or less meaningful based on current experience. How you tell this story to yourself affects how you think of yourself as a writer. If you think your story is, “I’m a failed writer who couldn’t make it in workshop,” that is the kind of writer you will be. If you change that story to, “I am a writer who was failed by workshops, and now I need to remedy that,” suddenly the possibilities open. It may seem pedantic to you to talk about writing this way–but I guarantee that if you are not aware of the stories that zip through your mind at laser speed, you will be unaware of how pervasively they affect your entire enterprise of creating.

I cannot overstate how important it is to know thyself, writer.

Sit down with a journal / word processor / blog and make a narrative about your journey with writing, and don’t pull any damn punches. I dedicate a couple page in the back of my journal to evaluating my progress each year, usually after a major turning point in my writing. Major turning points are when I decide to start a new project, finish an old one, shelve a project indefinitely, start a new blog, explore a new genre, find a new writing group.

Keeping abreast of all of your writing activities helps with your honesty. If, like me, you bemoan the lack of writing in your life, then discover that you spend all of your time blogging, commenting, Twittering, guest posting, updating LiveJournal… clearly you are writing. Your issue may  simply be a matter of the type of writing that you are doing.

 

So. Why do you write the particular project that you are currently working on?

If there is one take-away from this post, it should be that specificity and honesty are your most important tools. While it is important to understand your impulse toward writing, it is equally important to understand why you are embarking on your specific project.

In my estimation, the reasons for working on a project boil down to four big categories: “because I can,” “because I want to,” “because I need to,” and “because I have to”.

Because I can. This category roughly covers the reasons that roughly begin with a, “why not?” or “why not me?” XX wrote the great teenage vampire-werewolf romance novel and made cash hand-over-fist, why can’t I do the same? I have a bunch of XX lying around, why don’t I collate it into a publishable book? I wrote an excellent post on XX the other day that got a lot of response from my readers, why don’t I write a book/blog/series of vignettes on that?

The “because I can” category is the weakest of all categories for sustaining a project, because the motivation dries up once the novelty wears off. Once you decide to write that novel in Reno just to watch it die, it’s important to keep the drive alive by making provisions for it in one of the other categories. That is to say, once you’ve decided on a a project (a novel, a collection, a screed) just because it’s something you can do–you need to own the project. You need to become invested in it by igniting a genuine desire to see the project through. This can often be achieved during the falling-in-love brainstorming stage, where adding more detail or researching new facets of the project bring you new sense of pleasure at your choice of project.

If the project fails to captivate you on a basic level, you should move on. A project that fails to interest you at its outset, and continues to fail to interest you as you get deeper into planning it, won’t bring you closer to any of your writing goals (unless being bored with your art/craft is one of your goals!). Readers can sniff out a writer doing it without passion (although faked passion will do in a pinch, if you have a knack for that). For writers who have gone through higher education, writing without passion is one of those habits that we have picked up, like tics in an open grassy field, and you seriously need to divest yourself of notion that a project will magically become interesting to you on page 200 if it isn’t already interesting to you by page 20.

If you insist on pursuing a project where the motivation never materializes, you need to impose deadlines on yourself as though the project were any other must-do task. I suggest treating the project like one of a client-designer relationship: set hard dates for various parts of the project, try various permutations of your subject/theme/project out until you settle on something you can live with, and make sure there is a critical eye on the other end that can evaluate your total work.

Because I want to. This category is probably the most familiar to us as writers. I write because, hell, I like the feeling of sitting down to a blank page and defacing it with words. I actively pursue that feeling by creating projects that will allow me to write, scribble, doodle to my heart’s content.

But “because I want to” is much broader category than simply wanting to write. It also includes wanting to say something, do something, or demonstrate something. And it is the category that writers, flush with the giddiness of having put something on the page, often have no clue about. Especially because, much of the time, a writer has no clue what she/he has written until someone gives feedback on the project.

Two examples will illustrate my abstract ramblings. Swensen and I have both suffered from this set-back. A couple of years ago, I was editing a fantasy piece for Dan that was eventually going to become a large world-building novel about a group of soldiers who were deep in a guerrilla war with another race. When I asked him why he had stalled, he mumbled something about having an issue with what his story was trying to say. He wanted to work on a project that expressed something beyond, “this was a cool story about soldiers. Badass.”

I was stumped by Dan’s trouble. It was pretty clear to me that he was writing a fantasy novel that was borrowing literary tropes from war novels to make a more realistic, less high-fantasy-feeling setting that ultimately decried the war and violence that other fantasy novels glamorize (or at least make highly desirable).  When I told him this–he was equally stumped. He didn’t think he was writing that at all. These newly uncovered themes rose up dauntingly on the page. Did he want to write a novel with such weighty concerns, especially since the indelicate handling of topics about soldiering and warfare could bring criticism from a pool of readers he never even considered (the war novel aficionados)? Could he possibly do justice to these tropes, which were admittedly far outside of his areas of interest?

While I felt Dan’s anxieties were unfounded, they arose because he genuinely did not know what he wanted out of his writing. The project was eventually sideburnered in favor of his current project, now in its second draft. Dan figured out what he wanted to do/say with this new project, and felt the scope of the project was manageable to him. Ultimately this novel succeeded where a more ambitious (and less desired) project did not.

My problem was a bit different from Dan’s. I didn’t have the motivation to even attempt a book, even though I was sitting on a cache of poems that were begging to be edited. I had been discouraged by writing workshops, where I had been repeatedly shown the door and told to try a different genre. My writing didn’t fit anywhere. I became convinced it, therefore, fit nowhere. I stopped pursuing poetry because I convinced myself to stop wanting that.

In the end, the anger of deferring to authority sat up and demanded to know why I convinced myself not to want this. I wanted to be a published poet. I could taste the desire (it was a bit tangy). Once ignited, that want-to impulse sustained me through a self-imposed deadline of three months from inception to completion; writing, editing, and manuscript design on the back of grad school, teaching, and deteriorating health. The want-to was born from the desire to show the amalgamation of every polite workshop rebuff that I wasn’t the nothing voice. The work amounted to about 2 hours of writing, editing, and design on the project per day. The magic simply was that I would sit down at my keyboard and get something done even on days where I was tired to the bone.

I know that many writers have buttons that activate see-this-through-anything mode. If you are honest about who you are and what you want (and take the time to reflect on these questions to find these things out), it is possible to find the fire/drive to see projects through. The tricky part comes when you need to yoke that fire to a project that might otherwise seem marginal to you.

While Dan has said that being alone while you write is one of the most fundamental truths of writing; to me, the most fundamental truth is that you must learn the alchemical transformation to generate motivation even when you are staring down into the source-water of your anxieties, goals, and desires.

That does it for part one. In part two, I’ll tackle the remaining “Because you need to” and “Because you have to” reasons, and tie everything up with some peppy words about motivation and deadlines.