Sloane Kady
One of the most useful pieces of advice I can lend is this: hurry the hell up and write before you realize how bloody hard it’s meant to be.
I wrote an entire article on this very topic for my blog. I equated writing to learning how to drive a stick. The very first time I got behind the wheel of a manual transmission, I drove it beautifully. But apparently that rubbed my instructor the wrong way. She sat in the passenger’s seat, mouth agape, completely perplexed by my ability to drive a stick without having popped the clutch. This bothered her so badly that she made me pop the clutch…on purpose! She wanted me to be prepared for what the vehicle would do. So I did as instructed and popped the hell out of that clutch. And I popped it again, and again, and again. Lo and behold, by evening’s end I couldn’t stop popping the clutch. I had completely lost my ability to smoothly transition between gears, and to this day, 18 years later, I still can’t drive a stick. Had my instructor allowed me to grow more comfortable with maneuvering between gears before teaching me to fail, I might have fallen back into the groove of things.
Moral of the story is: Writing a book is damn difficult, but you don’t have to go into it knowing that. There are thousands of articles, blogs, books, posts, and forums dedicated to this very subject. You can meet struggling writer after struggling writer, all more than willing to tell you how incredibly difficult writing a book is. But when first setting out on your writing journey, why fill your heart and head with enough discouraging words to swallow up all your passion?
Every writer learns how hard writing is. If you stick with it long enough, finding out that truth is inevitable. But it’s best to jump in head first, before you know how hard it’s meant to be. Let your naivety and drive blind you, just long enough to get the book written. Then, and only then, should you fill your head with all the realities of editing and re-writing, because once you’ve written the damn thing, you’ll transition back into the groove of things, even after you pop your clutch.
I wrote an entire article on this very topic for my blog. I equated writing to learning how to drive a stick. The very first time I got behind the wheel of a manual transmission, I drove it beautifully. But apparently that rubbed my instructor the wrong way. She sat in the passenger’s seat, mouth agape, completely perplexed by my ability to drive a stick without having popped the clutch. This bothered her so badly that she made me pop the clutch…on purpose! She wanted me to be prepared for what the vehicle would do. So I did as instructed and popped the hell out of that clutch. And I popped it again, and again, and again. Lo and behold, by evening’s end I couldn’t stop popping the clutch. I had completely lost my ability to smoothly transition between gears, and to this day, 18 years later, I still can’t drive a stick. Had my instructor allowed me to grow more comfortable with maneuvering between gears before teaching me to fail, I might have fallen back into the groove of things.
Moral of the story is: Writing a book is damn difficult, but you don’t have to go into it knowing that. There are thousands of articles, blogs, books, posts, and forums dedicated to this very subject. You can meet struggling writer after struggling writer, all more than willing to tell you how incredibly difficult writing a book is. But when first setting out on your writing journey, why fill your heart and head with enough discouraging words to swallow up all your passion?
Every writer learns how hard writing is. If you stick with it long enough, finding out that truth is inevitable. But it’s best to jump in head first, before you know how hard it’s meant to be. Let your naivety and drive blind you, just long enough to get the book written. Then, and only then, should you fill your head with all the realities of editing and re-writing, because once you’ve written the damn thing, you’ll transition back into the groove of things, even after you pop your clutch.
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