My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?
Read RAH writes in to say:
“I have plowed through 13 of your most recent books in the last week. You’re one of the few authors, who has an output speed that, when combined with several other authors, comes remotely close to keeping up with my reading needs. And that you do so while maintaining a stable content quality, is amazing.”
Thanks! Quality is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I’m glad that my books qualify as quality in your eye.
That does make me wonder – I’ve been doing this for a long time. Thirteen years now! That’s the longest consecutive time I’ve ever been at any one job. 151 books is a lot of books. I know of a lot of writers who have burned out and left for a variety of reasons, but I’m still plugging along.
I suppose there are a variety of reasons. I thought up four!
1. ) I have a good perspective on what hard work is. Writing is hard work, of course…but it’s not that hard. Like, I used to unload trucks, and I taught classes, and I did IT stuff, and all of that was harder work than writing. And there are harder jobs than unloading trucks – being a cop, or an emergency medical technician, an inner city school teacher, a corrections officer, a farmer, all that’s way harder. Writing is sitting in a chair and pressing buttons in the correct sequence, essentially, which I am very fortunate to be able to do. So I don’t get up in my own head about writing because I know, objectively, there are way harder things to do.
2.) I’ve been fortunate enough that people mostly like what I write. I get occasional emails telling me how much I suck, but not all that often.
3.) I don’t get too precious about my writing process.
What do I mean about that?
Someone was telling me about a book for new writers that she had read. It’s apparently highly rated and regarded, and all the advice was terrible. Like, you should never write more than 300 words a day. Or how you should have worksheets with detailed physical descriptions and inner motivations for each of your characters. Or you should make a flowchart describing the book’s plot. There was also a bunch of stuff that honestly seems like the sort of busywork elementary teachers sometimes invent to fill time.
There’s a lot of this kind of writing advice out there. Much of it seems to boil down to elaborate procrastination to avoid writing by doing writing-adjacent work. If it works for people, good, but a bunch of it seems really unnecessary.
It reminds me of a semi-apocryphal story story that actor Dustin Hoffman once stayed up 72 hours straight because his character had been awake that long for his scene. Laurence Olivier, upon hearing this, reportedly said “my dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?” Olivier meant it as a joke and had his own complicated process for getting into character, but apparently his preferred method was elaborate makeup, not long-term sleep deprivation.
So I see all the elaborate character journals and flowcharts and whatnot and I think…you know, why don’t you just try writing?
4.) I enjoy the process.
In the end, I really do enjoy the process of writing, and I suspect a lot of writers thought they would, but don’t in the end. Like, they enjoying having written, but not the actual writing so much. I enjoy both having written and the actual process of writing.
So, whatever the reason, I’m glad I’m still here. Thanks for reading, everyone!
-JM