Loyalty to the Unknown Reader
I was giving writing advice to a friend of mine. Here is a snippet of the conversation I’d like to share in case it inspires another would-be author out there:
“But you will not do better unless you take up your pen and write. Set yourself a quota of a page count or a number of hours devoted to the novel. Eliminate all distractions during that time and hold it sacrosanct.
“You need your wife’s permission and cooperation to do this.
“If you feel writer’s block coming on, go out, away from all distractions, and do lawn work or chop wood or do pushups or other hard manual labor until the ideas start flowing again.”
I did not tell my friend, but this is the advice of Gene Wolfe, not my own. When I have writer’s block, I merely talk to my wife, my pet muse, and command her to solve it for me, imperiously snapping my masculine fingers. She then works out how to solve my writing problems, and I chain her up in the kitchen again, barefoot, until needed. (I think Neil Gaiman wrote an episode of SANDMAN about me. I come to a messy end.)
((NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: that was a joke. The guy in the Gaiman story kept his mused chained up in his attic, not his kitchen. Completely different person.))
“So called writer’s block is inevitably a sign that your muse is telling you something you don’t want to hear (usually, you don’t want to hear that whatever you just wrote is going down the wrong track). When that happens, throw out the chapter and start again from ten or twenty pages ago.
“Write! Your future fans are weeping and waiting! Have pity on them!”
And my friend wrote in reply:
Damn you and your encouraging faith in me. Makes me feel guilty and want to try it all at the same time. I even have flashes of hope. Do you have any idea where that can lead?
My answer:
“Nine times out of ten, it leads nowhere. Writers are merely those ordinary men who continue to try to write ten times out of ten, and put up with wading through the disappointments of the nine. The only qualification to be a writer is persistence. Talent can be learned, or faked, or done without.
“You see, my favorite author in my youth was AE van Vogt. I never wrote him a fan letter, never met him at a SF convention. He could not have known I exist, and yet his books were everything to me.
“When I sit down to write, I keep in mind that somewhere out there is a youth who will be as moved and brightened by my words as I was moved by the words of AE van Vogt. Heaven will ensure that the right audience, even if it is an audience of one, will find my book in his hands at the right time.
“I cannot disappoint him. I imagine how much more dreary would have been my life if the books of my favorite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien or Gene Wolfe or E.R. Eddison or David Lindsay or A.E. van Vogt or H.P. Lovecraft or John Milton, each one of which had very good reason to believe his work would never sell, had given in to sloth or despair or the voice of reason, and I am appalled.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
