I (also) write when tired

A couple of years ago, when my third child was a couple of months old, a writer friend told me about Dean Wesley Smith’s Great Challenge. The concept was simple: write one short story a week every week for 52 weeks in a row. It was a terrible time to embark on take on such a huge commitment, but one day after a middle-of-the-night diaper change I got out my phone and signed up.

I learned an incredible amount over the following year as I successfully completed this challenge. I’d written about 7 or 8 complete short stories in my entire life before it. I had another 52 when it was done. I learned a ton about myself as a writer, and I dramatically improved my skills. I also learned a lot about some of the settings and characters I’d been noodling with for years.

I’ll write about those other lessons some other time, but for my first blog post on this new site I’m going to start with one of the most surprising things I learned, and the one that seems most applicable to 2022 (or, 2020-two, as it’s shaping up to be).

Towards the end of the Great Challenge I gave up all pretext of conducting myself in a rational, well-ordered manner. Instead of incrementally writing throughout the week, I didn’t touch a keyboard (for writing) until Friday night.

As I drove to pick up dinner for our traditional family night movie, I’d listen to inspiring music and think about Dean’s prompt and come up with the most exciting premise I could. Then—after the dinner was eaten, the movie was watched, and the kids were in bed—I’d retreat into the semi-finished room over the garage with a laptop, headphones, a copious amount of Coke Zero, and a rough idea for a story. And I wouldn’t come back out (except potty breaks!) until it was done.

This was actually a lot of fun. I love writing in long, intense stretches. I love the solitude of writing when everyone else is asleep. (Even my social media contacts had better things to do.) But it was also completely unsustainable, especially for my wife, who had to compensate for my late-night writing binge by solo parenting Saturday morning when she really, really needed help. (Remember: our youngest at the time was not yet 14 months when I finished my last story.)

So now it’s 2022. I’m as busy as ever and we have a fourth kiddo, another beautiful baby girl. I would love to sign up for another intensive year and do the Great Challenge once more. I know I could level up my skills again. And now is absolutely not the right time for that.

Instead, I’m going to try and apply that lesson I referred to. And here it is: when I’m really, really tired and stressed the act of writing is much, much harder but the quality of the output is about the same.

This isn’t a new lesson. It’s the capstone in a series of lessons I’ve been learning pretty much my whole life.

You see, I’ve wanted to “be a writer” since middle school. I was inspired by the books that rescued me from the mystifying transition from elementary to middle school when I lost all my friends and entered a period of genuinely traumatic bullying. (Famous ones like The Dark is Rising and The Lord of the Rings and Foundation and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, as well others that I vividly recall but don’t hear about so much: The Adventure of Tom Swift, Jr., Quest for a Maid, The Tripods, and Nobody’s Son.)

I grew up poor, and so I wanted to be realistic about my chance of building a career that would let me support a family. This led me to attempt to be realistic about it. I researched the history of science fiction as a genre, the careers of authors I admired, and the economics of the industry. The fact that fantasy sells roughly twice as much as sci-fi was a hard pill to swallow, once I switched away from fantasy towards sci-fi, but I choked it down.

Eventually I realized that my odds of making it as a professional writer were in the same ballpark as making it as a professional athlete. Since I wanted to ensure a secure home for the wife and kids I hoped to have one day, I decided I’d get a day job first then turn to serious writing when my career was stable.

I thought I was approaching writing with cold, hard-nosed realism.

Boy was I wrong.

As the oldest of six kids, there were exactly two times in my life growing up when I had the house to myself. I did the exact same thing both times: Pick out my favorite CDs from my dad’s collection (a Moody Blues best-of compilation and a Tangerine Dream album, if you’re curious), get some snacks, my dad’s laptop, a comfortable place to sit, and write.

The fact that I would use such a rare opportunity to write shows how much I wanted to write, doesn’t it? I thought so at the time. But all it really shows is how much I had an unrealistic, romantic ideal of writing. How much I wanted to be a writer. Not how much I wanted to write.

It took me a long, long time to understand how different those two things are.

The reality is that everyone who is swept away by life-changing books can desire to be a writer, but only someone who has actually spent a lot of time writing has any idea if they like writing or not.

My mum took me to see Phantom of the Opera once when I was a kid. It was a huge deal. If not once-in-a-lifetime, certainly once-in-a-childhood. And that’s pretty much how I thought of writing: this kind of rare, transformative, transcendent experience. That’s why I only wrote when I thought I could get all the circumstances just right. I wasn’t trying to write words. I was trying to live a dream.

I had a lot of excuses to not write more than I did. I thought I was busy when I was in high school. And I was, relative to other kids. I got my first job at 14 and I always worked significant hours. Being a janitor was one of the toughest, since I’d often be out to 2 or 3am on school nights. Come home, take a shower, sleep a few hours, take a shower to wake up and get going. I’d routinely forget which shower I was taking, and not know until I got back to my room if I was about to go to sleep or about to go to school.

Same thing in college. I worked my way up to the highest available IT job for students, then started professional consulting before I graduated. I worked harder than almost anyone else I knew, so it was easy—combined with my unrealistic expectations of what writing was like—to think that I never had time.

Now, as a 40-year-old with tougher jobs and four kids, I want to smack my younger self in the head and tell him to get to work. You think it’s hard to write when you’re in high school with a part-time job? Boohoo. Give me a break. There were hours I spent messing around every week that I could have invested in writing. Instead of torturing one story with endless rewrites, I could have written dozens. I could have started and finished entire novels, no matter how bad. That’s what I could have done if I really wanted to write, instead of just wanting to be a writer.

It turns out the best time to practice your writing is like the best time to plant a tree: decades ago.

And the second-best time? Right now.

When I thought writing was a kind of sacred space that I could only encounter when all the stars were aligned, I hardly ever wrote. But now that I know it’s an activity that you can force yourself to do under a wide variety of circumstances if you’re willing to grit your teeth and push yourself, I’m all out of excuses.

So that’s my aspiration for 2022. Take care of all of my responsibilities first—my family and my job—but when they’re done and I’ve only got 15 minutes left in the day before I need to go to sleep: use those 15 minutes instead of rationalizing why it’s not worth it.

One day I won’t be this busy. Writing will be easier then. I know, because it was a lot easier in the years between our first two kids and our most recent two kids. I could wait. But I’m all done waiting. I don’t want to be a writer anymore. I want to write.

Two codas.

First, this isn’t meant as general advice. These are my experiences and my lessons. If they help you, great. If they don’t apply, that’s fine, too. I’ve got no authority. I’m a nobody. Feel free to cherry pick.

Second, this is actually about something deeper than writing. I’ve probably written about 400,000 words of fiction so far in my life (I used to keep track). I know I’m OK. I don’t know if I have the potential to be great. In a sense: I don’t care. Maybe I give all I’ve got to give and at the sunset of my life I realize everything I’ve written will be forgotten as quickly as I am. Maybe I never publish at all. That’s not what keeps my up at night. I don’t really care about success or failure. That’s the outcome. It’s not up to me.

What concerns me is the input, because that is up to me. What I care immensely about is whether or not I honestly, sincerely try.