This!

November 17, 2024 by Harvey

In Today’s Journal

* Quote of the Day
* This!
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Quote of the Day

“How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!” Mark Twain, in a December 1906 remark dictated for his autobiography, which was being published in installments in The North American Review.

This!

Please buckle up and keep your hands inside the conveyance. This is a long post.

The above is among my favorite Mark Twain quotes, though it has often been misquoted (yes, even by me) and presented as, “It is easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled.”

I believe a big part of the reason Twain’s statement rings so true is that people don’t want to admit they’ve believed a lie or been fooled. False pride, that.

I have contended with, and largely endured, the truth of Twain’s quote—along with waves upon waves of intentional, willful ignorance—for much of my life.

But I began contending with it far more intensely in late 2014 when I started teaching others the craft of fiction.

I could easily compile a book of excuses, but it would be a thin volume because none of them are original. I’ve heard every excuse multiple times.

When I respond to those excuses, I’m normally nice. I try hard to explain what’s going on and why.

But I admit, what I really want to say is, “Hey, this stuff works. If you don’t believe me, fine. If you want to believe me and reap the rewards, then pull up your big-boy(girl) pants and give it a real try for yourself.”

Most often, the engine driving the ignorance implied in those Twain quotes is not false pride, but unreasonable fear. By which I mean fear of engaging in activities or experiments that have absolutely no possibility of ill consequences.

Perhaps a comparison might help. Take a look at these possible scenarios:

1. Putting your faith in your own training and in your seemingly fearless leader and charging forward up a hill or across a rice paddy or desert surface in the face of bullets you can’t see fired by weapons you can plainly hear is, to put it lightly, a little difficult.

2. Putting your faith in your lack of training and charging across the floor of a bank to tackle a would-be bank robber as visions of headlines dance in your mind is also difficult.

In either of those scenarios, you might be killed. That is a possible consequence, and it’s real. The fear that possibility generates is reasonable.

In either of those cases, you might also be forced to live, albeit with reduced capacity or capacities. That too is a real and possible consequence. In my personal opinion, its also a far worse consequence.

But in both scenarions—call it what you will: bravery, overcoming fear, outright stupidity, or [insert your term here]—the possible consequences are real and therefore the fear of them is reasonable.

3. Putting your faith in yourself and your own store of knowlege and experience and charging ahead with abandon to record for posterity a story you’re only witnessing as it unfolds in your own mind hardly compares.

The difference? There are zero real, actual consequences in the third scenario.

In all three of the scenarios above, you will experience a twinge of fear.

In the first two scenarios, that fear is reasonable. It has a sound basis in reality.

In the third, not so much. In fact, not at all.

With every novel I write, at one point or another I entertain the usual unreasonable fears that I suspect plague you each time you sit down to write fiction:

• What if the story isn’t any good?

• What if nobody likes it?

• What if I’m unable to finish it?

• What if it isn’t as good as my previous story?

And on and on. Let’s take those unreasonable fears in turn:

Fearing whether the story will be ‘good’ is dangerous. It is an open invitation to the critical mind to come in and ‘fix’ it.

So I immediately turn that fear on its head: What if the story isn’t authentic? How will I feel then? For me, that is a much greater fear.

If the story isn’t authentic—if it isn’t what actually happened as you watched it unfold—it’s a lie.

And if you get into the habit of lying instead of conveying the authentic story, your writing will suffer and you will never realize your true potential as a fiction writer.

Fearing that nobody will like your story is inane, and you know it. Some readers will like it, and some will not. I’ve been over this ad nauseam, and my answer now is the same as it’s always been:

Shrug. So what? You should already be busy writing the next story for those who will like it. As for those who don’t, screw them. Since when do you let people who don’t like you dictate to you?

As for ‘What if I’m unable to finish it,’ that is simply a matter of willpower.

Take a deep breath to calm yourself, open the curtain on the story again, and simply write what happens and the characters’ reactions in word and deed to what happened.

If you do that, you will never go wrong. You’re only the reporter or recorder of the story, not a participant. You have no liability.

And regarding the last fear, again, so what? How ‘good’ any story is depends on the individual reader. Either way, you will suffer no consequences. The characters, not you, are living the story and enduring any consequences.

Of course, you certainly don’t have to do any of the above.

I am literally the last writer on Earth who would ever say you have to trust yourself and write into the dark.

But my own personality and experiences goads me to tell you this:

You should at least give yourself the opportunity to experience WITD. You can always go back to the try/fail sequence in which you’ve been engaged thus far. You know exactly what I mean.

You should at least try WITD, and I don’t mean taking a lackluster poke at it with the stubby end of a dulled toothpick. If that’s all you’re going to do, you might as well save yourself the effort.

I mean REALLY try it. Only by diving in head first and committing yourself to the effort can you ever prove or disprove absolutely and completely to yourself whether it works or doesn’t.

That’s exactly what I did back in April 2014.

Frankly, I wanted to prove once and for all that Dean Wesley Smith was full of sh*t. Or that “Sure, WITD works for him because he’s so well established as a fiction writer, but no way will it work for me.”

Sound familiar?

So I sat down, took a deep breath, and focused on writing what was actually unfolding in the story in my creative subconscious.

Note that I didn’t write what I wanted to happen in the story or what I ‘made up,’ but what was actually happening: the unmitigated, unedited events of the story, and how the characters reacted to those events in word and deed.

Several times during that process I had to push down my critical voice, then refocus on the authentic story and continue transcribing it to the page. And finally I’d written “Consuela.” If you want to read it, email me and I’ll send it to you.

WITD actually worked!

Well, once. I was certain that was only a fluke. No way would it work again.

So to test the process again, I wrote another short story. And another. And another. With each story, the critical mind’s attempts to intrude occurred less often and were less severe.

Before that flurry was over, I wrote 72 short stories, at least one per week, before I finally (and for some stupid reason, intentionally) ended my own streak.

Two-thirds of the way through October 2014, around 30 short stories into that journey, I started writing my first novel.

I applied the same techniques to focus on writing the authentic story, and 28 or 29 days later, Leaving Amarillo was finished.

I haven’t looked back since, and I haven’t considered even once going back to the outline-revise-seek critiques-rewrite-polish circus I’d been trapped in for 60 years of my life.

So I dare you.

And if you’re from a part of the country where a ‘double-dog’ dare carries more weight, I double-dog dare you.

I won’t ask you to carry a carbine into combat and put your trust and your life in the hands of someone you met only three days ago.

And I won’t ask you to risk your life doing anything heroic (or stupid, depending on your personal perspective).

I dare you to take a deep breath and commit to trusting yourself and your characters and the events that unfold in your mind when a story or a scene of a story or a character with a problem in a setting occurs to you.

I dare you to battle your own conscious, critical mind and put the true, authentic story on the page exactly as it unfolds.

When it works, you will almost certainly believe it’s a one-off, a fluke. If that happens, I dare you to try it again. And again. I dare you to continue testing it as many time as necessary.

I dare you to experience the joy, the freedom, and the unbridled exhilaration of Writing Into the Dark. If you want to see the payoff, check The Numbers below.

Please share this post widely. I dare you to do that too.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

Communicating – 6 Unconventional New Rules for 2024

Grab These Free Templates: Perfect for Authors Ready to Show Off Online

Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week: “Self-Directed Stupidity”

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 1600

Writing of Blackwell Ops 31: Jack Temple

Day 1…… 1620 words. To date……. 1620
Day 2…… 5016 words. To date……. 6636
Day 3…… 3466 words. To date……. 10102

Fiction for November………………… 43800
Fiction for 2024……………………….. 880932
Nonfiction for November…………….. 16060
Nonfiction for 2024…………………… 350480
2024 consumable words…………….. 1,055,451

Average Fiction WPD (November)…… 2738

2024 Novels to Date…………………….. 16
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 1
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 18
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..… 98
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 255
Short story collections……………………. 29

Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.

Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.

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