“I want to write a book” may be one of the most unrequited ambitions in America.
Year after year of blandly worded uninformative rejections can drive any balanced person into therapy, but the real killer is, how do you find the time for a carefully crafted, innovative work? The time to write the million words you need to have under your belt before you can reasonably expect to haul your sorry ass to the top of the slushpile.
In our busy, time-crunched, sleep-deprived lives, something has to give somewhere – or be given up – to provide that time. I’ve been told at writer’s conferences that the thing to give up is sleep. (Usually this advice is proffered by a sixty-something Boomer explaining how he wrote his first novel at twenty-five and still went to college and kept his minimum-wage job.
It’s not good advice anymore. Forty years ago, people who subtracted an hour of sleep every night still got more sleep than the average person does today without subtracting anything. The stories we’re competing against now are better-written, and it’s harder to surprise readers; thus, more sleep deprivation will only guarantee that your stories won’t be as good as they could be if you could actually think without gulping down a double energy drink first. A tired writer is one whose brain reaches automatically for a simple, uncomplicated plot. A plot with as much tension as limp celery.
Which is pretty much death to an ambition to be read by millions.
And for me, the realities of working the graveyard shift pretty much guarantee that I won’t get enough sleep. No, I won’t give up anymore.
So what’s left? Some writers recommend you give up having a family. If that works for you, then go for it, but I can’t do it.
IMHO, the best thing for a writer to give up is being a consumer of television. Unless you’re writing for TV, there’s no reason for a writer to zap 34 hours a week (average American consumption) into the black hole of the idiot box.
Think of how much you could do with an extra 34 hours a week. How many more words you could write and books in your genre you could read. How much more research you could do. Heck, you could even afford to take a day off and recharge doing absolutely nothing.
Treat yourself as if you were a natural resource that needs the right kind of fertilizer. A creator appears to make something from nothing, but the reality is that such magic has a price. You can’t pay it if your idea bank is playing reruns of Duck Dynasty. There’s nothing wrong with watching Netflix movies, just be judicious about it.
I gave up TV ten years ago, and I don’t regret it for a second. I think of myself as a creator, not as a consumer — shudder — whose purpose is to imitate a vegetable. And I would love to see more people escape that so-called “relaxation.”
‘
starsandchocolate 