Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning—sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.
Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Assume your readers are clever enough to work things out without being explicitly told. Assume they’re smart enough to know the names of unnamed characters, to imagine where the characters are when no location is specified, to write their own version of events down in the blank pages you leave when you’re stuck. If they’re smart enough to read, they’re smart enough to write the story themselves, and often it’s much easier to just let them.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Neil Gaiman
You move forward. Fixing things, editing and rewriting, are second draft things to do.
She’s a wonderful author to read aloud, by the way, as I discovered when reading her books to my kids. Not only does she read aloud beautifully, but denouments which seemed baffling read alone are obvious and elegantly set up and constructed when read aloud. Children are much more careful readers than adults, she’d say. You don’t have to repeat everything for children. You do with adults, because they aren’t paying full attention.
Start anywhere, or at least with something you know. You can write the beginning once it’s finished, and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.
The other thing that I would say about writer’s block is that it can be very, very subjective. By which I mean, you can have one of those days when you sit down and every word is crap. It is awful. You cannot understand how or why you are writing, what gave you the illusion or delusion that you would ever have anything to say that anybody would ever want to listen to. You’re not quite sure why you’re wasting your time. And if there is one thing you’re sure of, it’s that everything that is being written that day is rubbish. I would also note that on those days (especially if deadlines and things are involved) is that I keep writing. The following day, when I actually come to look at what has been written, I will usually look at what I did the day before, and think, That’s not quite as bad as I remember. All I need to do is delete that line and move that sentence around and it’s fairly usable. It’s not that bad.
Stephen King
The most important [thing I learned from Carrie] is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
Shit, kid, stop worrying about how other people do it and just write your story.
