BUTT IN THE CHAIR

Whenever anyone is fool enough to ask me for writing advice, I'm sure my responses are vague or cryptic at best. But having spent the last many (many) moons finally wrestling my next book into shape, I may have discovered a viable answer.

 

Get your Butt in the Chair.

 

Make time to get your butt in the chair every day. Even if you're only staring at a blank screen, even if your keyboard in encased in cobwebs, chances are, something is cooking in your subconscious — triggered by the mundane physical act of going into work mode. 

 

Ignore your email, social media, or whatever you forgot to take out of the freezer for dinner. This is your work time. Trust your inner writer to rise to the occasion.

 

Granted, it doesn't sound as sexy as the Narrative Curve Graph, or the 9-Box Plot Diagram, or some magic alchemical formula. Or voodoo. But it's an improvement over the Spaghetti Method (throw it on the wall and see if it sticks), which I realize is the way I tend to write my first few drafts.

 

Stephen King assures writers that nobody but you is ever going to read the first draft (nor should they), so you might as well throw in everything, including the kitchen sink, the whole enchilada, the kit and kaboodle, and any other stale cliche or ludicrous idea you can think of to get some semblance of an actual story up onscreen. Most of it will be (mercifully) deleted in the comb-out anyway.

 

You can pop a cork and do a happy dance as soon as you type The End on that first draft, but understand that the real work is just beginning.

 

 

This is no time to be like Mooch, the Cat, chilling out while waiting for inspiration to drop in. You can't stalk it, or bully it into submission, either. Inspiration is a fragile, often fleeting thing. You have to be ready at the keyboard with your doc open, your mouse in play (tinkering over this sentence or that parenthetical note to self, or some random snippet of dialogue), with the scope of the story simmering away in your subconscious, when that tiny idea glimmers briefly to life that's going to Make. It. Work.

 

But that the idea comes at all is absolutely the product of all those hours your butt has logged in the chair. Even when you're not writing actual prose, it's the busy work you do in the margins, Grasshopper, that empties out space in your brain for the next idea to be born.