“I write when I have the time.”
“I have too much going on.”
“I write when the mood strikes me.”
“I’m stuck.”
“I’m not sure where I want the story to go.”
“I’m taking a break.”
If we were playing Jeopardy, this would be where the contestant says, “I’ll take What Authors Say that Bugs the Crap Out of Neal.”
When authors tell me things like this, I ask them what they do for a living. As in their real job that actually pays the bills while they’re waiting on the book they’re never going to finish to become a New York Times best-seller. One lady told me she was a lab technician at their local hospital.
“Great,” I said. “So, let me ask you a question. How many times have you called in and told them you weren’t coming to work today because you weren’t in the mood? You needed to mow the lawn? Or you just decided to take a break?”
She laughed as she admitted she would never do that.
My point, of course, is that if you want to be a writer, be a writer. Stop treating it as a hobby. Schedule time to write, and when that time comes around, you sit and write. Your mood is irrelevant. Not knowing where the story is going next is the perfect time to write. What usually happens is your story goes in a direction you might never have thought of if you waited for it to become clear to you.
I’m a weekend warrior. I will sit in front of the computer at 6:00am Saturday morning and write into the wee hours of the next morning, sleep, get up early Sunday morning and do it again. I feed my dogs, go to the bathroom, and eat when I’m hungry. Other than that, you’d think the computer chair was surgically attached to my gluteus maximus. There are many weekends I have cranked out over 30K words on a new novel. Mostly different words even.
Hence, treat writing like any job you’ve ever had. Sure, it might not currently pay the bills. To be completely honest, it might not ever fully pay the bills. But if I know you like I think I know you, that’s not why you write. That’s not what drives you to put your ideas to print. That’s not what keeps you wide awake staring at the ceiling in your bedroom half the night as your mind can’t stop thinking about the story stuck in your head.
Let me sum it up in one sentence. If you’re not going to take yourself seriously as a writer, how can you expect others to?
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Neal Wooten is a contributor to the Huff Post, columnist for the Mountain Valley News, author, artist, and standup comic. His new true-crime memoir, With the Devil’s Help (Pegasus Crime/Simon and Schuster), is being made into a miniseries. He is also the creator of the cartoon, Pancho el Pit Bull, which is being made into an animated series in South America.