Sometimes when I arrive at my novel writing, I don’t know where to begin or what to write. But I know it’s still valuable to show up for it and spend consistent time with it each week, even if all I do is stare at it and produce nothing – or nothing but trash! I’ve learned that productivity is far less important than dedication.
So, this one is about encouraging you to just show up for your writing, whether or not your writing seems like hot garbage, or whether or not you write something at all. Just stay in the habit of it.
The Habit of Showing Up → Creative Experimentation
Habits are important, so they say. They definitely have helped me to ease into the real, deep work much more smoothly. All too often when I feel blocked, it’s just due to a lack of movement in general. Sometimes, you just have to move at all, anywhere, just to get unstuck enough to eventually start drifting toward where you actually want to go. Like a barnacle scraped off its rock to catch some current throughout the seven seas.
Here’s a big lesson that I picked up from The Creative Act by Rick Rubin: experimentation is important to the creative process. It’s the phase where you don’t judge anything. You don’t shut any idea down. Nor do you go seeking ideas necessarily. You just let whatever comes come, and you’re just okay with it. Put everything in your back pocket. It may be useful someday. Even the garbage. Creative experimentation allows you to foment and formulate what you’re actually going to say later. And staying in the habit of showing up provides you a consistent space for experimentation, even when you feel you have nothing to say. (Once you let go into the experiment, you’ll likely end up finding that you have plenty to say after all.)
Right now, you might be thinking something along the lines of, “If you’re going to create something, and go to all the trouble of producing something concrete out of thin air, then it ought to be something worthwhile. It “should” be worthy of the resources it takes up: materials, time, energy, focus, etc.” To this, I will gently push back: sometimes, it’s freeing to create fluff! Maybe that fluff turns into something of actual substance later. What comes out of you is not for you to judge, after all. You are just the secretary for your muse.
An “Anecdon’t” on Perfectionism
My process with writing novels has been interesting. I ended up back-burnering my first novel (a dystopian sci-fi) because I realized I didn’t yet have the skill that this particular project required. I thought at the time that I lacked writing skill, but ultimately, it was really about not understanding my creative process and what it needs. Ultimately, it was really about perfectionism.
For instance, I was too attached to structure, and it was hindering my motivation and creativity. I also struggled quite a lot to actually take the time to sit and write the damn thing, all because I put so much pressure on myself to do it all exactly right – exactly how the outline says: oh and don’t forget all these 19 important details that need to be included in this scene. It was all so scripted and controlled that the muse didn’t have space to breathe.
Having come from this, when I began work on my current novel (a DnD-inspired fantasy tale), I went into it with an entirely different energy: it’s not all that serious.
I dove headfirst into this novel intending for it to be a throwaway project. I thought, “Let me just get my crappy first novel out of the way so that I can become good enough to work on the sci-fi one.” Ironically, this fantasy novel has now shown me a beauty that is entirely its own, and I’ve come around to appreciating it far more than as a throwaway. Still, having the permission to not take it so seriously freed me from most of those perfectionistic tendencies from before.
And now, I know a few things about novel writing that may not be “the way it’s supposed to be done.” Did you know that…
- You don’t have to write things in chronological order.
- You don’t have to have a complete plot outline. You also don’t have to follow your outline completely. You are allowed to be completely unstructured and unorganized, or as much as you want.
- You can spend your writing session not writing, as long as you are bringing your calm attention to the project. Or, you can just free-write until something interesting emerges.
- You can create hooks or not care about creating hooks at all.
- You can write for a specific audience or not care about writing for marketing goals at all.
- You don’t have to write at the same time every day. You can if that works for you, but you don’t have to. You can write whenever, however, and whatever feels best and easiest and most fun in the moment.
This laissez-faire mindset might free you up enough from perfectionism to introduce your process to genuine creativity, rooted in curiosity and experimentation, as it did for me. And, as a result, you might just learn to have deeper trust in uncertainty and in the muse.
On the Value of Shit
So I will leave you with this question: what might open up if you were to be at peace with making something terrible and not worth the resources it uses? Your work is never actually going to be terrible and unworthy, of course. But cultivating an attitude where you can accept making a big steaming pile of shit frees you from the perfectionism that has been putting so much pressure on you to make a magnum opus.
As I like to say in my fiction editing work with clients, “Don’t try to write perfectly or even well. The goal of writing is to generate a big steaming pile of shit. Only in editing do we take that raw material and begin to sculpt something beautiful.”
So no, this may not be the greatest piece you’ll ever write. This one can just be an experiment. A “just for funsies.” That’s okay. If anything, that attitude is precisely what could usher it into actually becoming your magnum opus.
Wouldn’t that be ironic?
