Quitting my job to write full time has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. In some ways, it helped me to access a depth of confidence and creativity that I’d long thought beyond my reach. That said, I’d never recommend it to anyone else.

Making a drastic life shift like this came after a lot of thought and planning, and if I’m being honest, more than a little desperation. For two years I planned my departure from the regular working world, and it wasn’t until the last few months that I decided to make writing the focus of my time off. Somewhere in the plans to travel and generally goof off, I’d realized a few things. It’s not likely that I’ll ever again be in a situation of having so little responsibility. No kids, no mortgage, no car payments, no debt, no job, and a fair amount of fiscal freedom. For a few months at least, I could live the dream and finally get down to work.

It’s never that easy though. Last week I received an email from a young writer who is sitting on the opposite end of that spectrum. He feels that his job at a call centre is crushing his ability to be creative, and that the stresses of life are frustrating his attempts at writing. I can easily relate to this, because I felt my job was doing the same thing. I was lucky enough to be in a great working environment, but the work itself was tiresome and frustrated me to no end. I felt I couldn’t possibly write anything worth reading unless I could break free of that external pressure.

I was wrong. To be fair, I’ve known this for a very long time, but a part of me didn’t really want to admit it. You see, I suffer from something I call Grass-Is-Greener Syndrome [GIGS]. You might be afflicted by GIGS if you’ve ever uttered the phrase “things will be so much better when…” or “I could write so much more if…” Unfortunately, all I have to tell you is that the circumstances don’t matter. You will either write, or you won’t, and there is a very strong likelihood that you will write better if you’re struggling against external pressures. For many writers, there is a power in suffering that translates into the work they create. It is a writer’s job to make the reader feel something, and many writers use energy from the extremes of their emotion to write the words that will make a reader feel most keenly. Everything that happens to you is fuel for your work, but this is nothing new, and you’ve read this all before. You don’t really want to know that it’s just as difficult to work when you have all day to focus on it exclusively.

What I offer you, if you’re stuck and feeling as though life is keeping you from achieving your goals, is the idea of a grand gesture. I’m talking about doing something big and scary in the name of your art. For me, it was quitting my job, but for you it may mean hiding your TV in the closet and putting a desk in its place. Maybe you’ll rent a workspace for two hours every week so that you have a proper place to work. You might sign up for a year long writer’s studio, or even a weekend introduction to fiction writing class. Maybe it will be as small as buying your first notebook in a very long time, and deciding that you will write one creative sentence every week. Only you know what little push you need, and the thing to remember is that you must do something that scares you a little bit, and that the act itself is meaningless without the followthrough.

There is power in grand gestures. You may not think you have the ideal circumstances to be creative or productive, but the only thing that separates you from the great masters of this world in this respect is that they didn’t let such a silly thing stop them from trying. Making a grand gesture in honour of your work may not put your ass in the chair every day, or keep you working hard, but it might just give you enough confidence to convert you from someone who wishes they could do something, to someone who does it.

All this week, I’ve been sort of winging it with my work in progress. There is an overarching outline with key plot points already decided, but it’s been a bit of a struggle to bridge the gaps between them. I sit at the computer and type a few lines, then decide to make coffee. Another 50 or 60 words and it becomes painfully clear that the arm chair on the other side of the room is at a slightly odd angle to the couch. After realigning the furniture, I might make it all the way through a paragraph before deciding that I’ll be better able to think through the next few pages in the shower.

A good day sees me writing 2,000 words in about an hour and a half. This week has already seen more than one day of barely cresting 1,000 after four or five hours of waffling between the computer and whatever distractions I can find. The worry in these moments is that I’m only writing filler to get me one more day closer to my final word count; that I’m ultimately going to have to edit everything out and rewrite it during revisions.

Yesterday I had lunch plans and knew I needed to get as much work done in the morning as possible. I skimmed the pages from the last few days, and had no troubles jumping directly into a steady flow. Somewhere in the mental meandering and uncertainty, I’d actually managed to eke out a few new ideas and set myself up with a solid way to bridge the gap through major scenes. The pages will still need heavy edits, but it won’t be the wholesale slash and burn I’d anticipated.

If you’re not the type to open your word processor every day with anticipation for what surprises your brain has in mind for the story you don’t know yet, it helps to think forward at least a chapter or two. No matter what your chosen outlining theory may be, there will always be days where the words don’t flow as easily as you’d like, but the trick is in remembering that this is sometimes where your best ideas will come from. The time spent spinning in your chair or doing the dishes is time spent mulling over your story and where best to take it next, and the words that come hardest may just be the ones most worth writing.

Something I’ve noticed around the aspiring author blog scene is the posting of writing from a work in progress, usually accompanied by a disclaimer along the lines of “this is totally first draft, but I’m posting it anyways.” While I can understand that blogging is a form of catharsis for many people, and that posting work will often bring positive feedback from your friends, family, and other people too polite to post negative comments, I have to wonder why anyone would post what is in all likelihood the worst example of their talent as a writer.

For illustration’s sake, here’s something from my own work in progress:

Luke knew that he was getting stuck in the image that Hollywood put out there, and that he was attempting to live in the grey area between super hero, and every day hero. He couldn’t fly, couldn’t see through walls, didn’t have superhuman strength, and didn’t have adamantium claws embedded into his hands. He also didn’t possess the Jason Bourne-like qualities of intuitive language and fighting skills that would take fifty years of training to master. He was just a man. Thinking about the fact that he was skipping school at the moment, he revised that in his head to just a boy. He was sixteen years old, and he couldn’t hold himself up to the standards of anything in his comics or movies, nor should he compare himself to the real world spies who work with millions of dollars worth of training and technology behind them. He needed to start somewhere, and no one was perfect when they first started. The real asset, as he saw it, was that he didn’t want to just be some one off hero who found themselves in an extraordinary situation and took the right course of action. No, Luke wanted to consistently seek those wrongs in society that he knew he could act on, and one day his training and experience would allow him to tackle larger and larger issues. One day, he really would be a force to be reckoned with.

This is not a fair representation of who I am as a writer. It suffers from gramatical errors, is somewhat incoherent, slightly confusing out of context, and the writing is just plain messy. After several revisions, this paragraph will hopefully take on the tight and engaging style that will make a reader want to stay on the couch until they finish the book, but right now it’s just part of the foundation on which I’ll build a readable novel. If you were to read the rest of that chapter, you might seriously doubt my ability to ever produce anything worth reading.

Consider the following before sharing your first draft writing:

1. Your first draft writing is not very good. I’m not trying to be mean here, but it’s true. First drafts are for your eyes only. Show them to a close friend if you really nead structural help, but try to resist. You should always clean up your work before sending it to anyone so that your Beta Readers are receiving the best product that you can produce on your own. They shouldn’t be doing your dirty work for you, but rather helping you take your work to a higher level of excellence.

2. Readers will judge you. Little turns me off more than writing excerpts riddled with errors and clichéd or awkward phrases. Posting your lowest quality of writing on a blog or forum might lead people to pass unfair judgment on your ability to produce a quality finished product. Do you really want to put this facet of your writing out there for everyone to see?

3. Even if your draft writing is good, it might not be interesting out of context. It takes looking at the big picture to see if the little pieces all fit together. Extraneous plot elements need to be weeded out, character traits may be inconsistent, and your rough chapter excerpts are probably lacking the momentum they need to carry the reader through. It’s challenging enough to pull an excerpt from a polished work that will stand on its own, and even more difficult to do so from a rough draft.

4. If I’m reading entire chapters on your blog, what makes me want to read them again when they’re published? We all want to get published, right? If I visit your blog and am getting blasted with an excerpt once a week, might it not feel like I’ll be reading the book twice if it actually gets published?

So when is it okay to share my writing?

This depends on what you’re hoping to get out of it. If it’s something you want feedback on, do your critique group a favour and clean it up as much as possible. Before you ask someone to work hard to help you with your writing, remember that this is a relationship based on mutual respect and that you should try hard to fix it to the best of your abilities before sending it out.

You might also find yourself in the position of wanting to promote your forthcoming novel. That’s great, congratulations! Now you can post experpts from your published work. Hook people with that same fabulous writing that you used to land an agent and publisher, and by all means put a few chapters up on your blog.

What do you think? Is there anything to gain from posting first draft writing on your blog or favourite forum?

It takes nine months to create a human being. That’s somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 trillion cells, 300-350 bones (some of which will fuse together as the child grows), 3,000 taste buds, 230 joints, 100 000 hair follicles, 23 pairs of chromosomes, and one tiny beating heart that powers the whole machine. That little human will grow, and learn, and change, and will sooner or later sit down to write a story. Maybe even a best selling novel.

A thrice-published bestselling author once told me that I should expect to spend the next two to three years with my novel if I was going to see it through to publication. From the drafting, to the revising, to the pitching, to the pre-launch promoting, the novel will consume an average writer’s life for a solid two years.

To put that in perspective, a friend of mine recently created two human beings in that amount of time. The computer you use to type the first words of your project will be on the verge of obsolescence by the time you see publication. Everyone will be driving hovercars and living on Mars. [That may be going a bit too far, but you get the point.]

It’s important to love your story. You don’t always have to be ecstatic about sitting down and typing, and there is every chance you may hate your characters and the whole idea by the time you’re giving your first reading with a hard bound first edition in hand, but there needs to be something driving you to chisel away at the work day after day. Non-writers will of course have the opinion that it’s an idyllic life of typing a few thousand words each morning before strolling to the café to converse with other artist types. It’s easy, right? Just string a few pretty sentences together, and after a few months you have a book.

Those of us who’ve looked ahead know that there is significantly more involved in the process. After the drafting comes the revisions. How many revisions? Maybe only three (we hope), more likely eight or nine on that first novel. We’re done after the revisions though, right? After we write out a dozen different versions of our query letter, send it to a few agents, deal with the rejection, revise our query letters and sample pages, send to a few more agents, land an agent (we hope), suffer through the publisher rejection process, get an acceptance (we hope), negotiate a contract, handle our own publicity by doing blog tours and interviews in the online and independent media because the publishing industry only has media budgets for it’s biggest new stars, and eventually get drunk and pass out at our book launch party. Then instead of writing we have to convince all our local bookstores to let us do a little reading and signing, where we’ll sit and try to snare the attention of the one or two book browsers who are trying their best not to wander to close to our aura of discomfort and embarrassment at standing alone in front of several empty chairs and a pile of books waiting to be signed.

Is it starting to sound fun yet? This is all part of our labour though, and to survive the frustrations, anxieties, and sense of tedium that are all likely to crop up, we need to be working on projects that we are passionate about. We need to write the stories that only we can tell, and we need to find the motivation in our work that keeps us coming back to it time and time again. When you write those first few lines of novel length project, you’re at the beginning of a new relationship. If you’re not feeling the excitement churning in your stomach in the first few days of dating, how can you expect to get through through the long term?

Do yourself a favour, and find a project that gets you going. Be ambitious, be bold, and be brave in your creativity. If you’re not a little bit afraid that you won’t pull it off, maybe it’s not worth writing about?

I’ll write more about what tactics I use to harness that excitement in a future post.

I just spent the last 25 minutes making coffee. I have a wonderful insulated stainless steel french press that I haven’t used in more than half a year because it’s been sitting in a box while I enjoyed a variety of temporary living experiences. Now that I’m in my own place again, I finally got around to buying a pound of my go-to house coffee [Ethical Bean Sumatran], and cleaning out the press pot.

I hadn’t used this particular press too often before packing it away, and never quite nailed down the bean to water ratio. If you like coffee, then you already know that the ideal is 2 tablespoons of ground beans to 6 ounces of water, but I don’t actually know the size of my press pot. I did a bit of quick measuring and learned that the pot holds 32 oz. of water. Now how much room will I have to deduct for the space 10.3 tbsp. beans will take up? If I lower the water quantity by 4 oz., how many tbsp. of coffee to I need now? How does a tablespoon of whole beans compare to a tablespoon of ground beans?

Twenty one minutes later, I’d done all the measuring and calculating to be able to eyeball the requisite amount of beans in the grinder, and the level at which to fill up the press with water, but this isn’t really about coffee. While waiting the precise four minutes of steep time before plunging, I caught myself thinking about how I tend to approach things. I’ve never been one to wing it and hope for the best. It’s in my nature to break things down, and to be as precise as possible. This may sound ridiculous to some of you, but I get an almost perverse sense of pleasure out of mastering small tasks like these. I pay attention to every small variable, and try to come up with a consistent means of producing a product that meets the standards of quality that I know myself possible of achieving.

This explains a lot about how I approach writing, and why I’ve so often felt frustrated at advice from wildly successful writers who suggest starting with a single idea and simply exploring it as you type. I generally like to have an idea of where my books is going. I like to have scheduled writing time. I don’t go in for fuzzy feelings of a piece of work yearning to be written longhand with a quill pen in a Komodo dragon skin notebook with virgin papyrus pages. I tend to be left-brained in my approach to writing because I am left-brained in my approach to life.

I’ve come to see writing as a blend of two worlds. There is art, and there is craft. For many years, I worried that writing was all art, and that I wouldn’t be able to produce anything worthwhile. Spending time with a few different published authors has shown me that we can live in either hemisphere and still tap into the other when we need to. I can approach the task from the neurotic and detail oriented craft side, the same way other authors can light incense and meditate their way to a brilliant bit of wordsmithing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pour a second cup of coffee and get back to work.