I’m going to start off by making a statement which might be a bit controversial: namely that it is far easier and far less important to write well than it is to write consistently.
Ultimately writing is a craft which isn’t all that difficult to learn. Reaching a level of competence where you can get across what you want to say to an audience doesn’t take all that much in the way of learning and practise. That’s why so much of what I’ve talked about so far in this column has less to do with the granular practise of writing itself, and more to do with the more general and more esoteric discipline of storytelling: stuff like plotting, characterisation, worldbuilding, things which are important parts of writing long-form genre fiction, but aren’t necessary for the sake of actually writing – and there’s a reason for that.
When people who don’t write and don’t see themselves as writers stereotype a “bad writer”, they often portray someone who is so utterly incapable of crafting readable prose that it leads those who try to parse it completely unengaged, if not writhing on the floor in convulsions. Ask anyone who’s tried their hand at writing on a serious basis (which is to say, actual writers), and most of the self-deprecating humour you see will take an entirely different tack: that of someone who keeps getting ideas for stories, who has a large pile of works in progress, and who cannot help but be excited about some of them at any given time – yet cannot for the life of them actually finish one of those projects.
Both of these stereotypes highlight a challenge which any writer must face when they start out. However, one of these difficulties is easier to surmount than the other. There is no such thing as a naturally bad writer, any more than there’s any such thing as a naturally talented writer. Writing well is simply a matter of persistence, commitment, and being open to the feedback of readers and more experienced writers. After all, writing is a craft, and just like carpentry or welding or plumbing, a writer who continually gains experience and knowledge will eventually become good at it, so long as they stick with it.
Which leads us to the second problem, and by far the more difficult one, a problem which plagues even those who have accrued some of that experience, and become “passable” or even “talented” writers in the eyes of others.
When you start writing a story with a fresh idea in your head, everything you write comes out easily. The words fly out of your head like a constant stream. Sometimes, your typing fingers can barely keep up. Everything feels simple, every sentence feels brilliant, it’s the kind of high you normally need controlled substances to achieve, and that’s the feeling that often makes writing so attractive in the first place. Yet as time goes on, that feeling fades. The excitement goes away. It becomes more and more difficult to keep going, and everything that you write begins to feel like it’s not even worth the effort to put down, let alone worth someone else’s effort to read. This is when most writers stop. They have what they consider to be a bad day where they can’t write anything down and they skip that day. The day after that, they still feel like they can’t write anything, so they skip that day, and so on and so on, until days become weeks. Eventually, they’ll recapture that mood of excitement again, but the old idea will still seem too distant and too difficult to reapproach, so they pick a new one, and the cycle starts again.
Speaking bluntly, unless you relegate yourself solely to short poems and stories which you can write out in a day, this method will mean that you will never complete anything. Unless you are exceptionally lucky, this method of writing will never be able to support any semblance of professional career. You will fall into the same trap that so many hobbyist writers have fallen into in the past – and still fall into today. Eventually, you may become self-aware that you’re doing this, but instead of compelling you to strive for consistency, it will likely convince you that you simply do not have it in you to finish a long-form work. This is a path that leads to what might be considered the final phase of the hobbyist writer: someone who no longer even writes, but only worldbuilds, does character studies, and fantasise about what it might be like to finish a work – someone who is so afraid of once again adding to their pile of abandoned works in progress that they do not even try anymore.
This state of mind is not terminal. It is possible to pull yourself out of it, even if you’ve been there for years. However, the most effective method is perhaps also the one most difficult to achieve: that of actually finishing a long-form work. This ties into advice I’ve always given, whether it be to aspiring writers, aspiring game developers, or a combination of the two: the most important thing about the first project you seriously embark on is getting it to the finish line. It doesn’t matter how mediocre or simplistic or outright terrible you think it is. If you can finish it, even if it never gets published and never makes a cent of revenue, it is concrete proof that you are capable of completing the kind of project you want to work on.
Of course, this also brings us back to square one: how do you finish a project in the first place?
The key here is to set a quota, a number of words which you will expect yourself to write on a given project every day, without fail. This is harder than it sounds. A lot of writers impose a daily word quota on themselves, and still fail. This is because they set their expectations too high. When you’re just starting out, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that the amount of writing you can manage on a “good” writing day will be representative of what you’ll be capable of consistently. This is a huge mistake. Eventually, you’ll have a bad enough or busy enough or unlucky enough day that your quota simply won’t be met. When that happens, it becomes easier and easier to slip into the habit of skipping writing days altogether, until the current project joins the pile of unfinished WIPs with all the others.
What I would advise then is to banish all thoughts of finishing a long project quickly or writing a prodigious amount in a week or a month out of your mind. NaNoWriMo might demand a pace of about 1700 words a day, but that is not really sustainable for anyone aside from an experienced full-time or near-full-time writer. You might be able to manage a pace like that for a few days or a few weeks, but eventually, malaise and disinterest – what some people call “writer’s block” – will set in. Your levels of confidence will drop, and that project will end up abandoned. There’s a reason why only something like 10-15% of NaNoWriMo participants actually finish.
As a result, it’s important to set your expectations low. Imagine your worst writing day, a day where you have to do everything at once, and everything goes wrong, and you can only squeeze out the shortest possible period for writing. A day where you don’t feel like writing, when the words just aren’t showing up, and when every sentence you write reads as if it were the worst prose ever composed. Imagine how many words you’d be able on that day. Then halve that.
That’s your daily word quota.
Of course, on a lot of days, you’ll be able to do far better than that. On good days, you might be able to write four, five, maybe even ten times what’s required of you. On the bad days, however, you’ll probably struggle just to hit that quota, but what you won’t do is see such a number as insurmountable, or worse, struggle to hit that quota day after day after day until it starts affecting your longterm mental wellbeing. That’s how creative burnout happens, and when burnout sets in, you’ll not only find the rest of your life suffering, but you’ll notice that you’re making more mistakes, that your writing’s getting worse, and that the intricate plots and setups and characterisations you were able to navigate easily when you were more stable are now almost impossible to keep straight. I’ve been there, it’s awful, and if it weren’t for the fact that I was already confident in my ability to finish projects and financially reliant on doing so, it might have put me off writing forever.
Establishing a quota like this serves to change the way you think about your writing process in one very important way. Namely, it’s intended to split up the task of writing a novel or a game into small, manageable chunks, while focusing your attention on what you have to get written today, as opposed to what you eventually have to write in the long-term. By doing so, the conception of a seemingly massive and insurmountable task (finishing the project entirely) is broken down into a task which seems eminently doable in the immediate future, which means you can have the satisfaction of finishing that task, and knowing that doing so every day will push you steadily closer to your ultimate goal. It will mean that you will be able to make forward constant and steady forward progress, at a rate which shouldn’t sacrifice your mental or physical well-being.
As usual, a disclaimer: these methods work for me, but they might not work for you. I don’t know what your life’s like, and I can’t make any judgements on how much time or effort you can put in writing. What’s important is that you have that time and effort, and continue to use it every day, until it becomes a habit which you can rely on. For me, that’s enough to get me to the end of my projects, even ones which I would have once considered insurmountable when I was younger. For you?
Well, you’ll have to decide for yourself.
Paul Wang 