Author Archives: Berthold Gambrel

Writer of fiction, poetry and essays.

Why Writing Is So Hard: A Hypothesis

[I posted this on my blog back in 2017. I’m re-positing it here to hear what the WSW community thinks of this idea. I’d be delighted to hear your comments! –Berthold]

Most days, it’s a real struggle for me to get started on writing even a paragraph in one of my stories. Once in a great while, I’ll be struck by some inspiration and then it’s just a matter of getting the words down as fast as I can, but that’s rare. The more normal case is something like this:

 I need to write something where X happens.

 [Write a word or two]

Huh, I wonder what’s going on in the news.

[Half hour later, force myself to write another sentence or two]

Are there any good videos on YouTube?

I have to consciously force myself to stay on task and write something down. If I manage to do that, most of the time I hate what I’m writing up until I finish, at which point it starts to seem possibly decent. But the whole time I’m doing it, I feel like I’m doing lousy work, and moreover, it takes all my willpower to even do that.

Why is this? Writing is supposed to be what I like doing. No one is forcing me to do it—it’s what I want to do.  But then why am I strongly tempted to avoid doing it, like it’s a job or something?

At first, I thought maybe I was just a lazy bum. But I follow lots of hard-working writers on Twitter, and they frequently report this same problem. I even did a poll of my followers, and while the sample was small, 100% reported they procrastinated.

So, it’s not just me being lazy. Other writers face this problem too.

The simple and obvious explanation is that writing is active. You have to consciously do something to make it happen. Whereas reading the news or watching cat videos is passive—you just find your way to the site and put your mind on cruise control.

But this doesn’t totally explain it. One of the ways I procrastinate is by playing video games. And that’s not passive; I still have to press buttons and make decisions to get the outcome I want in the game.  Yet it’s far easier for me to play a game of FTL or computer chess than it is to write. I don’t have to will myself to play a game.

My next-door neighbor has had all kinds of hobbies over the years I’ve known him, from shooting guns to building model airplanes to mixing drinks to, yes, playing video games. And he doesn’t seem to need a huge amount of willpower to make himself work at any of his hobbies. Why is my hobby different?

Part of the problem is that I’ll write something down and then think, “Well, that’s not any good”. This feels unsatisfying. And at some level, I think procrastination is a defense mechanism. Skimming the sports headlines may not yield much satisfaction, but at least it won’t be as disappointing as writing something imperfect.

But why should that be disappointing? After all, no one else is going to judge me by the first draft. No one else will even know it existed unless I show it to them. So why am I bothered if it’s not right the first time? I don’t get discouraged if I don’t win a video game right away. On the contrary, losing a game just makes me want to try again.

Writing, unlike other activities, is more closely associated with having an audience. After all, if you’re just writing for yourself, why bother writing? You know the story already—the only reason to write it down is to communicate it to others.

That’s the heart of the difference: When I play a video game or exercise or any of the other things I do for fun, my only audience is myself. If I’m satisfied with my performance, that’s all I need.

We are trained very early on that writing is different. Writing is what you do when you want to tell other people something. As a result, when you write, you are subconsciously trying to please other people.

Ta-da! This explains the mystery of why writers procrastinate. Procrastination is something you do when you are assigned a task by other people, and writing feels like that because that’s how we’re trained to regard it. It’s the same reason we all procrastinated when our teachers assigned us to write a paper on such-and-such-thing-no-one-cares-about.

Some of the most common advice I’ve seen from successful authors is stuff like “Write for yourself,” “Ignore your inner critic on the first draft” and perhaps the most common, “Lose your fear of writing”.*

This advice always puzzled me. Of course I was writing for myself! Who the hell else would I be writing these weird stories for? And my inner critic? Who’s that? As far as I knew, I didn’t have one. The fear thing seemed the most sensible, although for me, the fear wasn’t so much of writing as it was of publishing.

But now I see what all those famous writers were saying: you think you’re writing for yourself, but you aren’t really. In your unconscious mind, you are still trying to figure out what the readers are going to think of what you wrote. It’s a deeply-rooted habit, probably one that evolution instilled in us—the societies where people could clearly communicate their ideas to one another were the ones that flourished.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t write so that other people can understand you. But the point is, that has to come later. First, you have to treat writing as a personal challenge between you and the part of your mind that wants to stop you from doing it. It’s like working out: you know it’s good for you, and you know you will feel great afterward, but you have to overcome the natural instinct that tells you it’s easier not to do it.

The precise way to do this can vary from person to person. You’ll discover the method that works best for you as you go along.

One exercise that I think can help teach how not to write for an audience is to just try writing stream-of-consciousness. For this post, I deliberately tried an experiment where I turned off my sense-making filter and just spewed forth whatever came to mind. This is what resulted:

Grey window skies empty noises and duahgter nothing al dhpauiw hope thjat move listen coffee  righ fjor wdesk need time hope sk

Sitting on a cold day that is grey and deporessing why am I doing this write exercise imagine plains vision skies weird black nebulous

This seems like incoherent babble, but it’s really not all that random. For context: I was sitting at my desk by a window on a cold grey day, drinking coffee. I could hear people outside talking and someone said something about a daughter.

For the second paragraph, the other people shut up, and I started to let my imagination roam, which led to visions of Lovecraftian weird cosmic horror, because that’s my favorite genre, or at least the one I’m most familiar with.

As sloppy and gibberish-filled as that is, you can see my thought process even through all the errors and downright nonsense. Which brings me to my point: as in many other fields, “true randomness” is actually pretty hard to achieve in writing. Your brain will work very hard to force you to make sense. Which is helpful in many other ways, but the problem is that our brains have become so good that they will try to prevent us writing anything less than the perfect sentence on the first try. That part of the brain would much rather procrastinate than risk writing something nonsensical.

This is what all those famous writers mean when they say “Write for yourself” or “Don’t worry about the audience” or “Ignore the inner-critic.” It’s all true, but it’s not specific enough, because when you are tempted to put off writing and procrastinate instead, you don’t realize you’re writing for someone else, or that it’s your inner-critic, or your fear of the audience. It feels like you’re just trying to write something that makes sense, and for some horrible reason, you can’t.

That’s because it doesn’t make perfect sense, and your brain hates that. But it’s okay. You can fix it later. Editors and beta readers will make sure of that.

So my advice is: don’t worry about making sense. In fact, I’ll go even further: actively try to avoid making sense on the first draft. Just put down the most basic, sub-literate version of what you want to convey. You’d be surprised how hard it is to not make sense—your unconscious mind will keep you at least within saluting distance of it most of the time. After that, you can just iterate until your visceral idea has been refined into something your readers can understand.

FOOTNOTE

* As Phillip McCollum has observed, fear can also be extremely useful for writers. But that’s fear of other things, not writing itself.

World-building

–Berthold

I think what most people want in a story is to immerse themselves in another world. The most obvious way to do this is a sprawling novel with lots of lore, although it’s not the only way. I recently read a very short story, but I was immediately captured by the setting.

How do you write a story that immerses the reader? I think the most critical thing is to have a clear mental picture of the world in which it takes place. I’ve been reading The Fellowship of the Ring recently, and it’s obvious just from the writing that Tolkien had this extremely detailed vision of what everything looks like in his mind.

This sounds simple, but it’s harder than you’d think. I’ll often get what I think is a great idea for a story, but then before long I get stuck writing it. And I think the reason is that I haven’t really got a clear picture of what the whole world looks like; just a few characters and plot points.

This might be less important if you’re writing in a contemporary setting, although I still think it might be tougher than many people realize. It’s true I can describe the contemporary world, but only from my perspective. To write a really immersive story in a contemporary setting, perhaps the key is to be able to see it from multiple perspectives.

Most people, including me, would say that what matters in writing is telling a good story. And I still think that’s true. But suppose that the literary profs are right, and that there are only a few archetypal story patterns. If that’s the case, then maybe the trick is to build the world first, and let the stories grow organically in it.

This might be why some authors return to the same setting again and again. Lovecraft had Arkham, Wodehouse had his vision of aristocratic English clubs and country houses, etc. Once you have a really good world built up in your mind, you can keep going back to it with new stories regularly.

But I can’t claim to be any kind of expert on world-building, so I’m curious to hear what others think of this.

Reviewing (And Being Reviewed By) Other Authors

–Berthold Gambrel

In our latest chat, we discuss authors reviewing other authors, etiquette for rating books, whether writing is like baking, and more.

One thing I didn’t get a chance to say during the chat was that I always appreciate reviews from other authors, because they know what’s involved with writing and publishing a book, and are in a position to give more meaningful feedback. I know this because of how much better of a reviewer I became after I had gone through the process of writing a few books myself.

Also, there are good negative reviews and bad negative reviews. A thoughtful, constructive, well-written negative review can really help an author improve. (A bad negative review is one that criticizes the author rather than the book, complains about the physical condition of the book, the delivery time, etc.  🙂 )

“Harsh Writing Advice”

The other day, this phrase was going around on Twitter. The original tweet was as follows:

HARSH WRITING ADVICE:

Your writer friends are also your competition.

Sorry.

(Inserting a screen grab didn’t work, and I didn’t want to embed the actual tweet–no need to call out the author by name.)

Does this sentiment speak to an uncomfortable truth about our beloved craft? Is writing ultimately a brutal, cutthroat business? When you finally finish your book, will all your friends betray you in a ruthless and nihilistic struggle for power, like the end of Far Cry 2?

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating for the purpose of mocking this tweet. It’s not fair really; the offender already got dragged mercilessly for this. And, in some very broad sense, his advice isn’t entirely wrong.

There’s nothing wrong with friendly competition. When I sit down to write, I am competing with every other writer–I’m trying to write better stories, create more compelling characters, capture ideas that no one else has captured, after all.

But the competition ends when I step away from the manuscript. Competing against your fellow writers when you’re actually writing is just and proper; but competing against them in public forums, or even on such crass metrics as sales or reviews, is simply not allowable. It strikes at the integrity of the craft itself.

When I’m not actively writing, I’m trying to promote the craft–because if no one is reading anything, then there’s not much point in writing, is there?

It’s similar to sports. Every quarterback in the NFL is competing with the others. But each one also has respect for his rivals, and for the game itself. When playing against one another, each will try to play better than the other. But when, say, talking about to the press, each will immediately state his respect for his counterparts.

At the risk of being repetitive, not only are we competing for the attention of people who read books, but we are also competing against every other form of entertainment. 

You think the tweet above was harsh? My advice is remorselessly brutal. We are peeling back the thin veneer of civilization and revealing the true Conrad-esque dog-eat-doggery that is the business of telling people stories.

Or maybe I’m being over-dramatic again. Anyway, though; the point is that most people don’t read because they have other, easier entertainment options available. And there’s no way you can make reading a book easier than watching a movie.

Now we are starting to understand the true nature of writing. We may be intensely competitive among ourselves, when practicing our craft, but must present a united front to the outside world, in the face of the challenge from other, rival art forms.

I think of writers as a sort of order of monks. Like the Jedi or something. Being a writer, in an age of a million temptations, requires discipline and focus. We writers can rightfully take pride in choosing to devote ourselves to an art that requires saying “no” to doing something easier.

Your writer friends are your competition, yes. But they are also your comrades and your teachers and your readers.