I Have No Voice And I Must Write

I’m a writer.

My passion is to write top-notch fiction and nonfiction and inspire others through that.  I have no doubt that I’ll make my mark as a writer… yes, I’ve made some good progress in that regard, but I still have a long way to go.  I’ve worked out a very detailed five-year plan, with interim goals all along the way.  Many of those goals involve publication… given that I am self-published, it’s all up to me.  I’m not dependent on the vagaries and whims of Random House or Simon and Schuster.  Simply, I write the book, edit, format, create the cover and upload to Amazon.  Simple as that.  Yes, I do have plans to do both print and audio books in the not too distant future, but that is neither here or now.

I really dig the idea of controlling my own destiny, but there are pitfalls… one of them is the ongoing challenge of marketing.  Fortunately, my full-time job is in the wonderful world of digital marketing, so I have something of an advantage there.

The other hazard is that my future as a writer is, obviously, dependent on the quantity and quality of my output.  I have confidence in the quality of my work, but I struggle with quantity at times, especially recently.

Yes, it’s true.  I lost my voice.  I had the dreaded writer’s block, the enemy of authorial aspirations, the killer of literary dreams throughout history. Not being one to curl up into a ball and give up, I decided enough was enough.  Time to fight this thing.

One of my favorite writers is the acerbic genius Harlan Ellison.  He is probably best known as the writer of most people’s favorite classic Star Trek episode, “City On the Edge of Forever”.  You know, the one where McCoy goes back in time and… well, if you haven’t seen it, I don’t want to spoil it for you.  But it’s awesome (I also highly recommend his story “Jeffty is Five”)..

Anyway, Ellison is an incredibly prolific author.  His output over the years rivals that of many small publishing houses.  He published a story in 1967 entitled “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”.  The title resonated with me somewhat in my writer’s block addled state.  Somewhat.  I fiddled with the wording a bit and came up with the title of this little missive… “I Have No Voice and I Must Write”.  Perfect.  
I really felt as if I had lost my writing voice.  Where words once tumbled out of me faster than I could commit them to paper, I had gotten to the point where I could hardly scratch out a decent paragraph.

Ugh.

I suppose there were a variety of reasons this happened, all of them conspiring to bring my literary output to a crashing halt.  Ultimately, none of them mattered.  In the end, I chose to let them crush my momentum.  Now it was up to me to get back up to speed.

I’ll be honest, I spun my wheels for a little while.  There was a start and stop project or two (I promise to get back to you, love story with a twist ending), the odd blog post here and there, but still, I struggled.
So I had an epiphany one night.  Actually, a few epiphanies (if you’re guessing I didn’t sleep well that night, you would be correct).  I came up with a plan and did a little attitude adjustment for good measure.

THE PLAN

PROJECT: Just Write Something, You Pansy!!

I vowed to not let a day pass that I didn’t write something.  Anything.  It’s actually pretty easy when you think about it.  Here’s how it goes:

You write (or in my case, type) just one word.  Like this:

The

See how easy that is?  Now go for two words:

quick brown

Got it?  Now for the main event… finish that sentence:

fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Look at you… you just wrote an entire sentence, you stud (or studette, as the case may be).  Nobody said it had to be original or even good.  It just had to be words.  More to the point, you just chose to write, rather than be in the thrall of the word-sucking demon known as writer’s block.  Go you!  Take a moment and pat yourself on the back.  You’ve earned it.

Keep doing that, every single day, and you’ll soon be well on your way to actually writing all the time.

Now that you’ve pretty much made writer’s block your bitch, it’s time for the good stuff.  Let’s alter your attitude a bit.

THE ATTITUDE, PART I

PROJECT: Dammit, Jim, I’m a Writer, Not  An Editor.

My problem was that I kept judging each and every sentence, word, punctuation mark and letter I wrote, as I wrote them.  Yes, one wants to put out quality work, but one has to actually have output to judge, right?  There is a time for that… it’s called the revision stage.  I put the editor part of my brain on hold and just spilled out as many words as I could.  Upon going back to edit later, I was met with a pleasant surprise: I did a pretty good job.  Granted, I had to do some tweaking here and there, but I was overall pretty pleased with myself.
So guess what?  Being human, I’m not perfect, nor is my writing.  And that’s okay.  Part of my full-time job is to be an editor, so I have that covered pretty well.

THE ATTITUDE, PART II

PROJECT: Why?

I write for a lot of reasons,  I won’t bore you people with the full list as it is lengthy, but I had to remind myself of my litany of whys.  I write to have a brighter future.  I write to inspire others.  I write for therapy (yes, writing can be most therapeutic).  Etc. Etc.

This past weekend, someone I’ve known all my life shared that he felt “worthless”.  That cut me right to the core.  Part of the reason I write is, as above, to inspire others.  If I can keep one person from feeling that way, I have succeeded.  

I know I don’t have all the answers when it comes to beating writer’s block.  This is just what has worked for me.  The point is that I proved I can beat it and I can beat it again if necessary.

And guess what?  So can you.