Ask A.K. #5
Is it too late for me to develop the writing habits that seem to come naturally to pros?
I’ve always enjoyed writing and have recently become a lot more serious about it. I’d love to publish a novel someday but like I’ve never been a huge reader, like of course I enjoy reading but I was never one of those people who reads tons of books every year. I know I have to read more in order to get better and even set reading goals but I can’t help feeling like it's too late? Is it possible to just develop these habits most writing professionals have early on?
Well, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Of course it’s not too late. It never will be. I saw something the other day about how Mary Higgins Clark didn’t get started until her late forties, and she’s far from the only one. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, I’m only 28, and still trying to establish myself, so I can’t tell you that with the weight of experience. You and I will both have to take a bunch of famous obituaries and my older friends’ stories as assumed truth and roll with it.
I’m more interested in digging into the second part of what you said. It sounds as if you’re worried that you’ll set yourself up for failure if you don’t “prep yourself to be a writer” in a very specific way. Is it really not enough for you to enjoy reading? Do you really need to chew through a hundred books a year? Sure, it might help, but do you have to? Do you see what I’m getting at? You risk putting yourself under the shadow of what you’re obligated to do. And the only thing obligation breeds is shame and resentment and frustration and getting nowhere. Something about the human brain just resists being ordered around. You know that joke that floats around social media about resisting a task because you were nagged about it? Don’t do that to yourself.
I’m going to let you in on a dark secret. I probably don’t read as much fiction as conventional wisdom says I should. Articles? Every day. Nonfiction? All the time, especially for research. But long-form fiction? I admit, I had to fall back in love with it. Don’t get me wrong, I started out as the stereotypical “gifted” bookworm who devoured them by the pile. When you’re told that you read at a college level in fifth grade, it becomes a thing you hang a great deal of your identity on. Then I went through one of those phases in middle school where I only wanted to read manga and hated all my assigned reading books. I warmed back up to it in high school a little. My friends can testify that I was obsessed with Moby-Dick, which proves that whatever you’ve done, you’ve never been as cringe as me. The point is, despite my feeble effort to get back on the ball, I’d broken the habit of regular reading. The damage had been done. I make a lot of excuses about how busy I am with multiple writing projects at once, but I’m not fooling anyone.
(As a sidenote, I still feel that, on some level, it’s more about the quality of your reading experience than the quantity. And by that, I don’t mean that you always have to love the book. Did you read something so good, it inspired a story idea? Did you read something that you mostly liked, but wished you could tweak one thing? Or did you read something that you hated so much, you took it as an example of what not to do? All of these things can be equally instructive!)
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I didn’t dislike reading. Far from it! I just had a fraught relationship with it. Why? A few reasons. A good deal of blame lay on the fact that, as a writer trying to develop my own style, I couldn’t consume others’ work without zeroing in on how I would have done it my way. It’s devilishly hard to lose yourself in a book when you’re rewording every sentence as you go. Reading my friends’ work helped curb this. They’re a hard-working, talented bunch, and many of their writing styles are very different from mine. But I adore them, so I like pretty much everything they put out, and the clenched, humorless hair-splitting goes in timeout where it belongs. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t say that, as a developing young woman, certain passages in some assigned books made my blood run cold. I don’t regret reading the works, but I should be honest that I reacted to them, and there would’ve been academic consequences if I didn’t push past my feelings and finish them.
And that’s the crux of what I’m getting at here. I had developed a sense of obligation around reading. It had become regimented and occasionally uncomfortable. A letter grade depended on it, which I associated with fears about my future. So I applied that sense of obligation to my writing habits, too, with predictably miserable results. I’ve never been more frustrated with writing than in 2010, when I tried to guilt myself into writing four hundred words a day. I kept a diary of daily word counts. When I didn’t break four hundred - which was most of the time - I withheld treats or leisure activities from myself the next day. What did I accomplish? Sure, I got maybe 14,000 words into some story or other, but I mainly just hated myself. That’s not a constructive relationship with one’s art. It doesn’t respond to emotional privation, no matter how badly you want it to.
That brings me to my second point. Let’s not kid ourselves - these habits absolutely do not come naturally. As proven in my earlier story, I did not “just have” professional-level writing habits. I didn’t even develop them early on. I mean, there are always geniuses out there, but I’d wager a lot of other pros didn’t, either. In my case, it took a very gradual buildup of emotional stability, excitement, self-trust, and discipline over the course of several years. First, I learned to pick at a non-commercial writing project once in a while. Then I wrote a story I enjoyed enough to work on more often. As that story grew, I felt motivated enough to write larger amounts when I worked on it. Then I did a fandom big bang - a challenge where you submit a written work by a specified date - and learned how to finish something short on a deadline. Then “writing more often” became “writing every day.” I finished something novel-length that I was passionate about without a deadline. Then I got my first game writing job, and I learned how to write things that I wasn’t always passionate about on a deadline. Eventually, I learned to write one thousand words a day. Then I became more efficient. I wrote one thousand words a day before lunch. My yearly word counts once numbered in the hundreds of thousands! Eighteen-year-old me would faint if she knew. But it didn’t happen until long after I stopped burdening myself with unrealistic expectations and punishing myself for not meeting them.
There’s another important reason that I want you to be firm in your ambition, but gentle with your self-judgment. Establishing these writing habits requires a luxurious amount of free time that most people in the modern world don’t have. If you have school or a day job, that will make it more difficult. If you have children, that will make it orders of magnitude more difficult. (I’ve seen more than one person bring up that November is a terrible choice for NaNoWriMo, due to the demands of the burgeoning holiday season.) If you’re like me, you probably think that when you struggle, it’s your fault, and you probably scourge yourself to fix it. More sacrifice! More discipline! But I don’t want you to lose your love for writing, and I think you’ve done yourself - for now - a huge favor by not giving your book a deadline. “Someday” is good. “Someday” keeps you hungry for it. If you become a professional writer, there will be plenty of instances later on where you’ll have to treat writing like work. For now, it’s not too late to start.
- A.K.