Writing Tips for the Self Saboteur

“There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.” Christian Rudder, author of Dataclysm: Who We Are

I was doing research for a print magazine story when I stumbled upon the Rudder quote above. My writerly confidence immediately vanished into the ethers like a tweet without a hashtag.

Did the world really need more words? Specifically, did the world need my particular words? Of course not. Bookstores and libraries are filled with more words than can be read in several lifetimes, and the internet is evidently an almost infinite source of words profound and obscene and everything in between. So why bother? What is the point?

Sound familiar?

So many of us are our own evil editors. We don’t ask ourselves constructive questions to clarify our writing but dump doubt on the very act of writing. An existential crisis may be a teenage right of passage but for a writer it is a dead end down a dark alley.

Don’t get stuck with the rats and rubbish.

Below are tips to guide you back on the writing track.

Tip 1: Prepare to be a reject

Precious few breeze through the writing process, land agents, sign publishing deals, and hit the best best-seller lists with their debut literary work of exceptional merit. If that happens to you, then bless you. (On second thought, the gods have blessed you plenty already but, you know, congratulations?)

As a famous stage mother once said, “Winners are willing to risk being losers.”

Kellyanne Conway said that to her daughter Claudia right before she auditioned for a reality talent show. I know this because my “research” involves getting Google lost.

The only way to avoid rejection is to not submit. But then, of course, you will also avoid acceptance.

Tip 2: Jealousy will destroy you and make you unappealing at cocktail parties

Many writers start off confident their talent will rise and shine but are soon humbled. I was not a jerk but if you were at a certain writers conference when an ambitious participant pronounced plans to wrap up her book and get published in less than a year because she wasn’t a loser, well, you are entitled to a little schadenfreude.

Tip 3: Thinking about writing is not writing

Ultimately, writing involves putting fingers to keyboard. Or, if you are stubbornly quaint, pen to paper. It requires sitting your tush down at a desk or, if you are trying to impress your Fitbit, marching in front of a standing desk.

Tip 4: Procrastination is for amateurs

There’s nothing pro about it. Call it amateur-crastination. Real writers write.

The mid-book crisis is real. Maybe you’re reworking your first draft. Things are going swimmingly. Somewhere around page one-hundred-fifty, you go back to reread an earlier chapter you felt confident was decent, possibly even good, and a few paragraphs in realize you have produced the worst piece of trash ever written and you are, therefore, also trash. Or this may just be my own particular way of beating myself up, writing-wise.

Keep writing.

Tip 5: Learn to identify your own personal word Waterloo.

Portland, Oregon where I live and write, was deemed by National Geographics one of the top ten most literary cities in the world. The city has nearly as many bookstores as coffee shops, the public library system is the second busiest per capita in the country after New York. The metro area is home to several regional publishers, including one that specializes in resuscitating out-of-print books deserving more attention. Some days, such literary stats are inspiring. Other times, they leave me feeling as insignificant as a grain of sand in a desert, a desert where all the other grains of sand happen to be writing important books based on masterful outlines with good story arcs.

How can a person come up with anything new to add to the Sahara of words already written?

Tip 6: You can’t.

The wise poet Audre Lorde once said: There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

Tip 7: She wasn’t the first to say something like that.

Keep writing. The right words can shift perspective. And isn’t that why you do this?