Non Fiction

Nonfiction

My Breakthrough

For a long time, I have known that I wanted to write. In high school I had ideas for stories that I talked about endlessly, but I never wrote a word. After graduation, I bought books on how to write books, but I never wrote a word. And in college, a few sentences occurred to me that I simply could not let escape, so I scribbled them down and put them away, but nothing ever came of them.

But last year, for some reason, I opened up a new document on my laptop computer, and I began to write. I wrote ten pages in a single sitting, and not just ten pages, but ten good pages. In a week I had written fifty pages, and I sent these out to my friends, and by the time they had read them, I had already written another fifty. I wrote almost two hundred pages of my first idea for a novel, The Altar of All, in less than two months, where in the previous five years I had written nothing. Reaching an impasse in that story, I got the idea for a second book, Sail, and in the last two months of the year, I wrote two hundred pages of that story as well, and the only planning I did was in my head or scrawled on a few slips of paper when I had nothing to do at work. And in between writing these two major stories, I wrote a hundred pages of short stories. In my entire life up to last year, the pages of actual good writing that I have kept I can count on one hand–but from April to December last year, I wrote about five hundred pages.

I have since been asking myself about this remarkable output. How did I break through the writer’s block that had kept me from writing before, and suddenly produce enough to fill a book?

The only answer that I have arrived at is that I released myself from expectations. I used to think, before I had written a word of it, that The Altar of All would one day be read in high school English classes the way that Lord of the Flies is read now. It would be a perfect and profound piece of literature. Last year, I realized that, not only would it never be read in a high school class, or even by a large audience, simply because of its content, but that it would never be perfect. No matter how much I thought about it and planned it out, or how much other literature I tried to absorb by osmosis to inspire my own writing, it would never be any better or any worse than the best I could do. How good that actually was would be decided by others, because anyone who has written anything knows that everything we write ourselves is either better than Shakespeare or worse than toilet paper in our own eyes.

There is an old adage, “Writing is never finished, it is only abandoned.” In my case, it had been, “Writing is never begun, it is only contemplated.” So I decided to abandon contemplation and planning and just start writing. It was not going to be perfect–and it shouldn’t be perfect, because people are flawed, and they don’t do the things we would like. I decided to forego elaborate metaphors and meticulous orchestration and just write, just allow one page to follow another, just allow the characters to do what they will do. And the result has been mind-opening, because I discovered that what the characters did when I allowed them to respond to each other naturally is what they would have done had I planned every last detail. They do what anybody would do in similar situations, and that really can’t be planned, because at some level, it is already known. And the metaphors developed of their own momentum, because metaphors are just patterns and comparisons that litter everything we write and speak. I discovered that I didn’t need to ponder this story forever. Once I turned my fingers loose on the keyboard, it just happened, whatever it is, and the result is more lovely than anything I could have planned.

The lesson that I would have others take from this is simple. Things only ever get done if somebody does them. Obviously, planning and editing are important in writing. But writing should be the paramount action, and editing and planning should move along in tandem and should not slow the forward progress of the writing. The perfect phrasing, the eloquent language, will come in time. They will develop as you write, or you will go back and fix things. But they cannot be expected to spring forth like gods out of your head. They must have a starting point on paper. So let go of all of your expectations of perfection and just write, for perfection is the act of writing, while the result will always fall short of our expectations of grandeur.