The One True Secret to Successful Writing (Patreon)

Now that I’ve put you all through months of me rambling about Farscape and 90s television and my celebrity crushes, I thought I’d get back to what’s written on the frosted glass door of this place in noir detective font: HEY GANG LET’S WRITE STUFF GOODER.

And after five years with such admirable and excellent Hobbits, I thought I would finally give it up.

You know. It.

That thing everyone’s looking for when they go to workshops or buy books on craft or go to author talks or even *gasp* subscribe to some silly cheddarbrained typist’s

Patreon.

The secret.

The one true secret to successful writing. The deep magic. Oh, we say there isn’t one; we say follow your voice, we say avoid cliches, we say give your characters agency. But I’m here to break the silence and tell you the TRUTH.

All writers know there’s totally a secret. It’s just that it’s so hard to explain and so hard to consistently execute that it feels terrible to try to share the secret. People think you’re being glib or cheesy or dismissing them or, worst of all, you come off sounding like Pollyanna’s most saccharine kindergarten teacher.

That the thing with True Magic. It hides. It hides in phrases and actions that seem silly or trite. It hides in instructions that sound plain stupid. It hides amongst the ridiculous. Big magic, sometimes, hides in the cringe. Because no one thinks to look for anything serious or profound in that wholly-uncool clown-dumpster. It’s perfectly safe in there.

I don’t even want to type it out! It looks awful, even to me, even when I know how desperately and delicately true it is, even though in my eighteen years of publishing fiction, it’s the only thing I actually know about writing, that has proven itself every single time.

But I said I would. And you are excellent Hobbits.

So let’s get in there and dig it out of the red honky noses and greasepaint and giant shoes—

Wait!

Before we get our rainbow wigs on, a very important note about accessing this magic: it only works when you’ve…you know…mastered all the boring basic stuff like “grammar” and “structure” and “finishing stuff sometimes” and “enjoying writing fake things about fake people even a little bit.” It’s an advanced spell, one that works best when you’ve, at minimum, gotten through the “oops I made too many brooms and forgot an end-bracket in their programming so now they’re flooding the castle and pretty soon we’re all going to be living on Broom Planet my bad. I for one salute our new Broom overlords and I strongly suggest you do the same” stage and moved past baby-writer’s first entirely-avoidable full-biome narrative disaster.

Okay.

Here it is.

The secret.

Don’t say I never did nothing fer ya.

Ugh, I don’t want to.

COME ON, CAT, GET YOUR BIG WIZARD HAT ON AND IRRESPONSIBLY CLONE THOSE BROOMS.

The one true secret to successful writing is: have fun.

Oh god, I know. You think I don’t know? It’s fucking repulsive, is what it is. I can feel you recoiling. And you’re right to recoil! It’s gross and weird and literally what your least-favorite English teacher told you to do while giving you an assignment involving Steinbeck that could never, under any human circumstances, be fun.

And yet.

It’s still true.

And it’s true in a few different ways. The way it’s true on the surface and the way it’s true right next to the bone. The way it’s true before you get your first publishing contract, and the way it’s true afterward. The way it’s delightfully true and the way it’s terrifyingly true. They all have very little in common, except when they’re exactly the same.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU, THIS IS WHAT MAGIC IS LIKE. IT’S DUMB AND MAKES NO SENSE AND IS SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO MAKE YOU SOUND LIKE AN IDIOT WHEN YOU TRY TO TELL OTHER PEOPLE ABOUT IT. MAGIC IS A REAL PIECE OF SHIT.

Let’s start with on the surface: the easiest interpretation. Because look, if you’re not having fun, your readers never will. If you have managed, somehow, to bore yourself with your own brain, I promise you, it’s pretty boring for others as well. (Have I managed to bore myself with my own brain? Oh, my beautiful children, you have no idea. I’m fully capable of murdering my own capacity to enjoy life using no weapon but stories I made up on purpose by myself.)

If you’re writing to the market, rather than to your own weird interests and passions, it will lack life. If you’ve wandered into a part of the story that you’ve suddenly lost interest in but are just pushing yourself to get through to the part you are interested in, well, the “have-to” part is probably not going to light anyone else up, either. Skip it, cut it, do a time jump, do a perspective flip, find a way to tell a story that makes you grin all the way through. Even the commas.

Because that grin is the sign from heaven that you’re on the right track. Like when monsters start turning up in a video game. This way lies story, and experience.

Remember when you were a kid, and you made up a million stories with your action figures or dolls or stuffed animals or, totally random not at all personal example, a clothes-hanger with a loose hook whose body was covered with neon crocheted yarn because the 80s were like fuck it, why not? Remember how time just seemed to disappear, and all that existed was the absolutely fucking epic 19-part HBO saga of President Barbie’s war against the Emperor Palpatine (who had used the Force to enslave Equestria’s Gremlin-mounted calvary) while trying to balance her forbidden love for both Catra AND Optimus Prime?

Or, you know, whatever.

But deeper down, closer to the bone--

Remember how exciting it was when you got a new action figure or doll or toy and got to think up how to integrate them into the Care Bear Game of Thrones storyline already in progress?

It didn’t feel like work. It wasn’t hard to motivate yourself to sit down and do a funny voice for the Imperial Guard with the red cloak who was absolutely keeping Rainbow Brite prisoner in the murky depths of the Dreamhouse. It was the thing you wanted to be doing. It made beige carpeting into the whole of space-time and some dining room chairs and a blanket into the Fortress of Solitude. You just wanted to do that shit all day.

It was just you, playing with everything you knew about the world so far, following your own personal logic through what you suspected about the world but couldn’t be sure yet, to arrive at something that excited you and made your day thrilling and daring even if you had to get through school to continue binging your own imagination. Sometimes you even scared yourself, venturing into stories that touched on adult themes and big concepts. But the scare was a frisson of getting away with something and wrangling with those huge ideas in safety. And while some adults might be bored when you rattle on about everything happening during Living Room Sweeps Week, most other kids would be into it, and doing it themselves with their own toys at their own houses.

We are storytelling machines. It’s all we ever do. Tell a story about the world as we see it and act it out, over and over and over.

The point is, it was play. It was fun. And it’s the literal same activity that writing is now, you just don’t have to spent 12.99 a pop on action figures and/or doilied clothes-hangers to kick it off.

And this is what I have found to be truly real and fundamentally reliable, after 45 books and the devil only knows how many short stories. I am at my best when I am playing. When I am thinking, not of publishers or markets or reviews or awards or craft or breaking the mold or following my voice or avoiding cliches or giving my characters agency or even readers, just the game, just the toys, just the story, and having fun the way I did back then, with a hanger and a hook and Strawberry Shortcake about to get her ass burnt on a space-rotisserie in the Ewok village.

And that sounds easy. Ha ha have fun lol publishing is fun how do you do fellow artists? And it is not easy. It is brutally hard. It is terrifying.

When you’re just starting out, however you start out, there’s no pressure except the kind you put on yourself (you know, that very feather-light pressure aspiring anythings wear comfortably because we are very good at going easy on ourselves) and it can be like that, it can be like the sprawling cinematic universe in the head of a creative 8-year-old. But ever so slowly, as you start making your way through zines and agents and contracts and edits, or just the gnawing desire to get started on making your way through those things, it inevitably becomes work. A source of anxiety. Of self-doubt. Of humiliation and fear of humiliation. President Barbie can’t reject your storyline, but Random House sure the fuck can.

And fun ceases to be the first word you think of when you consider sitting down to handle the friends-to-enemies conflict between Ram-Man and Papa Smurf, whoever Ram-Man and Papa Smurf are for you. The more you publish, the harder it can be to find the pure fun of it, because now it’s your fucking job, and editors are waiting and also they don’t always like how you made Papa Smurf a brutal dictator and then killed him off in the second act even when you really though that was super clever, and people are relying on you so they can eat, and some of those people are cats, and some of those cats are really just not very understanding of the difficulties of commercial publishing.

Pressure kills fun.

When I was writing the first Fairyland book, despite it being my eighth novel, I really and truly was just playing. I was convinced no one would ever publish it—my god, who would want a children’s story so intimately tied to a Big Book of Fucking that had come out the same year? I had no idea if anyone would really even care, as I intended to publish it on my own damn website. I was certainly under Life Pressure, as the economic crash was doing its gross thing all around me and I had less than zero dollars to my name. But I felt no Literature Pressure. It was just fun. It was just a game. Take these pretty toys and throw them around the family room floor on a Saturday morning while everyone else is sleeping, no big. Throw in some deep-cut private jokes or Easter eggs literally just for one friend, who cares? Make a bunch of absurdly obscure alchemical references? Polyamorous witches? Post-modern intertextual critiques of other, better children’s books?

Fuck it, why not?

Fuck it, why not.

It made me happy. I wrote that shit in eight weeks with no hesitation or worry about being good enough, just making things I loved and made me smile. When someone at a con reminded me I couldn’t go back and change anything once I posted it, I was stunned because that had not occurred to me on any level. Because I was just playing. You don’t edit play.

It’s still my most successful book. Made my name. International bestseller.

But, of course, every book after was so much harder, because there certainly was Literature Pressure then.

And I doubt it’s a coincidence that my second-most successful book, Space Opera, also was never meant to be written, and when it was written, was mostly done as a joke, with no expectation on my or the publisher’s part that really, anyone would care about a Eurovision pastiche written by someone who doesn’t even qualify to vote in Eurovision.

And yet.

Space Opera is a hard one though, because it very much was not fun to write…as a whole. I was under deadline and it was supposed to be a novella and it just kept growing and growing and growing and my cat was dying and she still didn’t care about the difficulties of commercial publishing. It was so far outside my comfort zone that when I turned in the final draft, I genuinely though it was absolutely dreadful and I’d fucked a decent concept into oblivion.

But each individual chapter was more fun than I’d had in years. So shiny, so quick, so delightful to try something that new for me, that modern, and that crammed full of references to the world outside my heart and the world within it.

Again, though, the sequel was and is so much harder. Because the pressure found me again, and I couldn’t see my way back to the Dreamhouse. And I can look at all my novellas and short stories and remember the ones I had fun with and the ones that just felt so hard and sloggy and baffling, and pretty much down the line, the fun ones are the ones with a wake of award nominations churning behind them.

Fun is a moving target. It’s fickle and it’s fleeting and it’s allergic to anything you’re contractually obligated to do or people will be mad and you and also you’ll starve.

Now, do I think that because I have ADHD? I DON’T KNOW, MAYBE.

But also it’s part of human and/or magpie nature. There’s a reason it’s an axiom that when you’re on a tight deadline, that’s precisely when an absolutely marvelous idea for something else, anything else, will pop into any given writer’s head. Excitement carries most of us through long hours no matter what we’re actually doing with that time. We are what we are—dopamine-hunters and serotonin-gatherers tracking mammoths through the tundra.

So when I tell you you have to have fun to write a successful book, it sounds either easy or insulting, depending on your experience.

But it’s honestly so very serious, and so very hard. Oh, not only do you have to write something good, and new, and on-trend but not too on-trend, master character, setting, plot, dialogue, style, then invent some science shit that no one else ever has or maybe some way to do dragons that isn’t tired as hell, and do it over and over for a whole career, then also edit and market yourself and keep up with social media and not completely abandon your family (AND CATS) and do it all more-or-less on time, but no matter how stressed you feel, you need to have FUN with that? And if you’re not having fun, it might not put food on the table?

Cool, thanks, sorted, amazing.

It’s almost like falling asleep, or lucid dreaming. If you want to sleep so bad and get anxious about what time you have to get up and start thinking about everything that’s ever gone wrong in your life and oh, also how that guy in 8th grade asked you out as a joke even though you’re literally fucking forty, you’ll never fall asleep. If you’re hyper-focused on the checklist some app gave you on how to have a kickass lucid dream about flying on a dragon-elephant named Doug, you’re going to be lucky if you manage the one about not having studied for a college exam you passed two decades ago.

It’s the hardest thing to do and keep doing. But those stories, the stories where you were a kid again not even thinking, just letting your brain smash plastic together and giggling the whole time, those are the stories that shine.

Does that mean if you had fun you have a guaranteed hit on your hands? Ha ha ha no. Publishers are impassive gods and their favor moves with the tides. You often can’t control too much how many copies a book moves, not on your own. But there will always be people who love it, who see the energy in it, to whom it meant something, who will remember it when you’re gone. It will be more. It will be bright.

(No, this isn’t about Osmo. DAMMIT. To be fair, I honestly had no fun at all writing Osmo so I suppose it’s evidence for rather than against.)

Joy is contagious. It just is. We can feel it when you feel it.

And that’s it. That’s the weird little unpleasant, beautiful, lumpy, difficult, expression of sheer grace that comprises the secret of writing. Just achieve nirvana, that’s all. And do it more days than not. I’m telling you a deep truth, even if it doesn’t seem like it. Maybe the only deep truth I know after twenty years at this.

That’s the garbage thing about real magic.

It’s just a hell of a lot of work.

And by the way? I don’t want to freak you out, but the thing I’m doing right now is the most fun I’ve had in my entire life. Including the crocheted hanger. So hold on to your fucking hats.