Writing is neither noble nor great. You struggle to create something out of nothing, which most people will then judge superficially and with total disregard for the blood, sweat, and tears you lost in creating your work. Worse, they’ll judge you based on their perception of the subjective quality of the work you produced (as they did, or did not, understand it). To write is to ask for an emotional, intellectual, and sometimes spiritual ass-whooping.

But everyone should do it.

Wait, let’s back up…

I was rummaging across the Internet over the weekend and found myself briefly on Shawn Blanc’s Christian-oriented blog, The Fight Spot. It has a very nice looking graphic design, so I took a look around to see what I could steal, and I came across his post “Ink”, in which he reveals his thoughts on writing, and shares his desire to write a book.

He writes,

For years I entertained the idea of writing a book called “The 2911 Factor”. It would be based on Jeremiah 29:11, that God has thoughts and plans to prosper us. It would be a book about discovering and walking in our destiny. I was talking to Anna about this last night and she said I ought to wait until I can’t not write a book. That seems like a good idea.

No, it’s not.

Many of you know that I’m prone to wild fits of unjustifiable rage, but there are a few things that I feel legitimately compelled to actually fight against: scientific misinformation, cruelty to our fellow man, gingivitis, and people who want to write not writing.

The reality is you can always not write. The willingness to commit to writing is not strengthened by the mere passage of time. Writing is a brutal, unyielding, and perpetually difficult thing to do. I’ve written three novels and, believe me, it doesn’t get easier with time.

Shawn hits upon why writing is so hard,

Many great men and women have helped shape history through their written words. Theologians, poets, novelists, etcetera, have impacted thoughts and lives of countless individuals. There is something noble about writing.

You and I aren’t great men. Sometimes great men aren’t really even great men. Yet, great works do exist, and that is the standard by which every writer’s work is set… in their own mind.

That’s the wall that I believe keeps people from writing. It is the fear that the work that they produce isn’t going to impact the thoughts and lives of any, let alone countless, individuals. It’s the fear that what they write just isn’t good enough. The perceived nobility of the art presents a threshold people get scared to cross.

Shawn basically gets at that,

Do I really want to wait another 5 or 10 years until I have something to say enough to break it up by chapters instead of h3 tags? That seems like an awful long time. But on the other hand, who am I to try and crank something out simply because I feel an itch to write? That surely seems like a waste of perfectly good trees.

This concern — that their writing will amount merely to wasted paper — is what I see frequently holding back people who should be writing. It is a crippling fear that has to be overcome. How do writers do it? I believe successful writers — not to be confused with people who write successfully — overcome this impediment by two different methods: egomania, and gross egomania.

An egomaniac is a person who believes that their writing is important to the world because they wrote it. That their thoughts and feelings matter so much to the world that immortalizing them on paper for others to behold automatically, and unquestionably, makes the world a better place in which to live. These people are most certainly delusional.

In contrast, a gross egomaniac is a person who’s read the great works of others, knows that their work will be judged against those standards, and couldn’t care less. It doesn’t matter if everyone else hates their work, because the opinion of everyone else is irrelevant, if not stupid. These people will write because they feel the need to do so, the world be damned. Obviously, these people are also quite delusional.¹

But let’s hold on for a moment. Egomania is such a such a harsh word, and it carries around a lot of negative baggage. Instead of egomania let talk about confidence.

That’s what this is really about. The first type of writer I described is confident in the value of their thoughts and ideas, and the second is confident in their abilities. Confidence in those two regards (though not necessary to the extremes I described) allows us to overcome our fears and our doubts. It lets us create.

The question then becomes, “How does one become more confident in their writing?”

By writing.

Ah, so now you realize just how frightfully delusional we writers can be. But I am, unfortunately, quite serious. The only way to become confident in your ability to write is to sit down and start.

But where to start?

In high school I took an amazing creative writing class taught by the sweetest little-old Greek-lady in the world. The first day of class she promptly announced a contest for the week: we would all go home and write a short story three-to-five pages in length, we’d bring them to class and share amongst our classmates, and we’d take a vote to rank the stories in terms of their quality. The winner of this contest, she explained, would be the story that the class decided was the worst in the class.

Let me be clear, our assignment was to write the worst story we possibly could. Spelling mistakes and poor grammar weren’t allowed; the story had to be bad.²

This exercise accomplished two goals: it allowed us to think about what makes writing bad (and, therefore, what makes writing good), and, more importantly, it got us writing. All our fears went out the window. It really didn’t matter we wrote a bad story, because that was the whole point.

I believe this is the mental hurdle people have to get over in order to really start writing: you have to accept that your writing can be bad. You measure success by completion, not construction. This is the stated goal of NaNoWriMo (Nation Novel Writing Month), which is why I so highly recommend to people that are interested in writing that they participate in NaNoWriMo when they can. Not being hung up on whether your work is great or not allows you the creative freedom to create something great.

Several months ago Khoi Vinh wrote in the incredibly honest “On Blogging Well and Writing Poorly”:

One thing I worry about though, is if by becoming a better blogger over the years I haven’t also stunted my progress towards becoming a better writer. I often describe my persistence in this medium as predicated on my generally unflagging compulsion to write. I’ve certainly grown some as a writer while authoring Subtraction.com, but how much closer am I to writing the book that I want to write, to penning the articles that I want to publish, to developing a more insightful critical voice? Had I not preoccupied myself so many evenings and weekends hammering out hastily composed, poorly self-edited and only glancingly critiqued passages, would I have come any further along as a good writer than I have? To answer that honestly, I’d say I suspect that the answer is yes, I would have come much further. Which is to say that becoming a better blogger hasn’t made me a better writer.

I can’t speak to Khoi Vinh’s lack of development as a writer (though I think he’s a pretty good writer, in any case), but he’s probably right, and he’s definitely hitting the nail on the head. I think the only way to develop the skills to write a book is to actually sit down and write a book. You have to do it. I did, and in the process, I learned a lot about how to structure a story, set pacing, develop characters, and, ideally, how not to end the story at the half-way point. You simply cannot swap in one type of writing (blogging) for another (long-form fiction).

For these reasons, I implore you, Shawn, to just sit down and write. Don’t wait. Write your heart out. And try not to think about the great work of others, or the rising cost of paper. As Stephan King would put it, write with the door closed.

I guarantee you, and anyone who’s got the desire to write, if you do, you will be better for it, even if what you write is a pile of crap. I’ll stake a beer and some chicken wings on it. That’s a powerful statement right there, because I love my beer and chicken wings. But my love of beer and chicken wings — and cheapness — is not as strong as my belief that everyone should write… and so should you.

1. Yes, all writers are delusional. That’s why they come up with such imaginative stories. Duh!↩
2. Though I definitely tried, I didn’t win, as my story was deemed “so bad, it was good.” The story that did win was about a teenaged boy that had brutally over-dramatized problems with his parents. The only detail I recall was at one point he yells to his folks, “But I want to be a fireman!” in response to their question about the marijuana they found under his bed. It was awesome.↩