“If you want to write, just write.”
—Brent L. Kendrick, b. 1947. Old enough to know better.
Over the last five years, I’ve written nearly 260 creative nonfiction essays—personal essays, you might prefer to call them. And instead of 260 essays, I might prefer to say that I’ve written about 750,000 words. More dramatically, three-quarters of a million words. Any of those counts would be true. And let me add that those essays have appeared right here Monday after Monday after Monday without fail, since December 2021.
If you’re thinking it was magic, all that I have to say is:
“Phooey!”
Magic had nothing to do with it. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I pulled it off by doing what I spent decades telling my Creative Writing students to do:
“If you want to write, just write.”
Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?
Yep. In a way. Whatever it is you want to do, you have to do it and keep doing it over and over and over again if you want to get it done. Again and again and again.
It’s that simple.
“If you want to write, just write.”
But that’s not the whole story.
The part that doesn’t get included is that while you’re doing whatever it is you want to do, you’ll encounter many strange bedfellows. I never taught that part because I hadn’t gotten in bed with enough bedfellows of my own.
Since 2021, however, I’ve slept with many.
Doubt. Am I good enough? Who’s reading what I write? Who cares whether I write—or don’t? Does anyone? Do you? Shakespeare nabbed it: “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
Loneliness. Mathematically speaking, writers = solitude. Other people, as a rule, aren’t really interested in what you’re writing or thinking about writing. And if they lend you an ear or three, you run the risk of talking too much and walking away feeling empty from the lip service. Robert Frost toyed with the danger: “Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.”
Ideas. This one is strange. Initially you worry about not having enough of ’em. Then you discover that you have too many. You find yourself reciting J. Alfred Prufrock: “Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?”
Motivation. Melville’s Bartleby accompanies you regularly. Probably every time you’re thinking about whether to write, you hear his muffled moan: “I would prefer not to.” It’s no easy task kicking that one out of the bed. There’s almost always something else that we’d rather do. Or not. I can relate.
Time. Don’t even go there. We’re all allotted the same amount. The challenge is to stop believing that you have all the time in the world. Chalk one up to Andrew Marvell: “Had we but world enough and time.” We don’t.
Work. This one is a no-brainer. Earlier I established once and for all, with a mere utterance of Phooey, that writing is not magic. Now let me say what it is. Work. Lots of work. Lots of drudgery. Lots of pain.
Deadlines. The strangest bedfellow of all. But come on. Tell the truth. What do you do when you don’t have one? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. With a deadline—whether imposed from within or without—we always do something to meet it. Even with a deadline, you’ll often find yourself facing it head-on before you’re able to scrape something together. But guess what? Something outranks nothing.
Doubt says: Is this good enough? Does anybody care?
Deadline: Doesn’t matter. Write.
Loneliness says: Nobody gives a damn what you’re doing.
Deadline: Write.
Ideas say: There are too many of us. Where the hell do you start?
Deadline: Pick one. Write.
Motivation says: I would prefer not to.
Deadline: Cute. Write.
Time says: Tomorrow will do.
Deadline: No. It won’t.
Work says: It takes hard work.
Deadline: Work harder to make it happen. On time.
Because after all those disagreeable creatures have climbed into bed with you, Deadline finally creeps in—and—frankly, my dear, Deadline doesn’t give a damn who’s already under the covers.
Listen up and get this.
Nobody at The Wired Researcher ever said that I’d get fired if an essay didn’t appear on Monday morning. No editor standing over me. No paycheck withheld. No professor docking my grade.
I invented my own Monday deadline. Then I submitted myself to it. I still do.
Not always gracefully.
Just a few weeks ago, Friday arrived. I had lots and lots of ideas and false starts but not one single paragraph. Somehow, I just couldn’t discover my writing rhythm. Saturday morning? Faster pulse. Shallow breathing. The grandfather clock ticked louder than it had any right to. Doubt was wide awake. I struggled alone. I didn’t want to admit my fear, not even to Gary.
I’d love to tell you that inspiration struck. It didn’t. The clock did. I left the bed where I always write and put down one bad sentence in broad daylight. Then a better one. Then another. By day’s end, I had a draft. A really rough draft. But, at least, I had something that I could revise. And revise. Five. Six. Maybe seven times. I had an essay. Not the one I’d planned. But come Monday morning, I had finished “There It Stood.”
It went up on time. Nobody knew the difference. Until now.
I created an artificial constraint and then treated it as real. Over five years that imaginary line on my calendar made me write three-quarters of a million actual words.
So, if you want to write, just write.
But do yourself a favor. Let that obnoxious bastard of a Deadline hog the covers.
