Don't Stop

My long-time acquaintance and fellow writer, Diana Gabaldon, says there are three rules for writing:

1. Read
2. Write
3. Don't stop

Now the first two are self-explanatory (to me, at least): to understand how to write a novel, you have to read them. Lots of them. Reading fills the tank. Reading forges the neural pathways of plot development, teaching you on both conscious and sub-conscious levels how stories work.

Then you have to write. Not think about writing, not talk about writing, not write about writing, but Write. The. Story.

There will come moments of flagging energy, of sapped ambition, of profound discouragement. And this is where the third rule comes into play: don't stop. Because if you stop you will never finish (duh) and you will never get published.

But I discovered recently that there's more to the Don't Stop rule than I had initially realized. In addition to not quitting permanently, it also means not stopping along the way.

Not for anything. If you treat writing like bathing or eating--and you always find time for those, don't you?--you'll make writing an everyday habit, no matter what else is going on in your life.

And this has a twofold effect. First, it increases productivity. Second, it keeps momentum going and that in turn keeps the clay of the story moist and pliable. Walk away for any length of time and that clay just sits there and hardens, so that when you do return to the keyboard it takes an incredible amount of work and patience to find your way back into a story that has calcified in your absence.

This has been my biggest writing challenge. Real life interferes, things get busy, I get tired, stressed, distracted--whatever, just name any excuse, we all have them--and I would stop writing. Later, I tell myself. This afternoon. Tomorrow. The next day. Next week.

It wasn't until I began writing first thing every morning, without fail, that I realized how important that Don't Stop rule was. It is, in fact, key. Stopping is deadly. So don't.

The reason I started writing first thing every morning is because of another long-time acquaintance of mine, Vicki Pettersson. In her seminar at the Surrey International Writers Conference last year (2007) she mentioned a book she'd found helpful, called Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. The principle is simple--if you eat a frog first thing in the morning, it will be the worst thing that happens all day, and the rest of the day can only get better. So to put that in practical terms, do your most difficult task, the one you're most likely to procrastinate over, first.

Well, for me, that was writing. But for the longest time I thought "first" meant after breakfast, exercise, shower, checking the headlines, answering e-mail, reading blogs, running errands...and look at that, it's lunchtime! Somehow I never got around to writing first. Then one day I woke up and realized (another one of those "duh" moments) that first meant first, literally. So now I hop out of bed, grab the laptop, climb back into bed, and start writing.

It changed my life.

Another very true and useful bit of advice I got from Vicki was to make a list of all the reasons why it's difficult or impossible for you to write, and then to admit to yourself that none of those can actually stop you from writing.

The only thing that truly stops us from writing is a decision, made somewhere deep inside, that we are not going to write. We wrap it in excuses and procrastination to hide from ourselves the awful truth that it is not actually work, chores, the baby, the kids, the husband, school, travel, or writer's block that stop us from writing--we do that ourselves. We make the decision.

The good news is, we can unmake it.