My dog, full grown. More from the my book on writing coming out in the first week of December.

       

Extra: One bit of starting advice: Don’t let that voice of doubt stop you from writing. It will try. You aren’t smart enough. Who do you think you are, trying to write a novel? You don’t have a story to tell and you don’t have any art in telling a story. You aren’t special. You will never be a writer. Almost every writer hears this crap from themselves. I know I have. You have to quiet this voice and in the quiet that follows you begin.

 

            

 

2.

 

                                    Write In The Moment: Be The Dog

Let me elaborate on writing in the moment a little more. One thing that was important for me to learn is that writing fiction is juggling many things at once and not thinking about any of them while you’re in the act of writing. There are just so many areas of concern: voice, character, plot, setting, language, and on and on. If we think about them while we’re writing, there’s a good chance we’ll freeze up or go into a kind of stiff, forced writing, or maybe make the wrong choices. And the wrong choices can be deadly in a novel. The wrong choices can lead you to other wrong choices and then you’re halfway through the novel and you’re thinking, HOW THE F**K DID I GET HERE? WHAT AM I DOING HERE? THIS ISN’T MY BEAUTIFUL NOVEL. THESE AREN’T MY BEAUTIFUL CHARACTERS (and before you know it you’re in a Talking Heads song—sorry, off topic). 

So--you can't think—not consciously--about writing while you're writing. You can think all around it, of course. When you're driving your car (this does raise safety concerns but we all must make sacrifices for our art), taking a shower, walking the dog (one of my favorites). I'm constantly turning over aspects of what I'm working on when I'm not actually working. However, when writing be in the moment.