On Chun-Li, Dinosaurs, and Ducks: Nineteen Years of Alleged Writing and I Still Have No Idea What I'm Doing (Patreon)

Next summer, I've have been publishing professionally for twenty years.

It's funny, I still don't really feel old enough to have been doing anything for twenty years, even though, you know, I was there the whole time, doing the thing for twenty years, but I suppose that's time and memory and the strange loop of existing in an organic body on a linear path through self and history on a ball in a void that used to have dinosaurs on it millions of years ago but doesn't anymore and probably doesn't feel old enough to have been doing anything for millions of years, either.

And I want to tell you something very silly and very serious, and they are both the same thing. It's extremely true, even though you'll think it's not and I'm just being modest or self-deprecating or trying to seem hashtag relatable on the internet. But it's just a fact, a fact that was true twenty years ago and is true today and at this point I'm starting to accept that it'll probably be true twenty years from now.

After all these years making stories, writing worlds, imagining people, places, and things, confining them in little black and white paragraphs of varying sizes and shapes, attempting to say something grand or small or both, attempting to express something not entirely tired or cliche or idiotic or all three, attempting to dream out loud and connect with other real alive human beings via the admittedly awkward and inefficient mechanism of unreal, unalive imaginary beings, after two decades of being a writer, forty-six books, the Old Ones only know how many short stories and poems and essay, after reams and reams of paper and a small nation's supply of ink expended, I still don't have any actual idea what I'm doing.

And that's okay.

And it's okay if you don't know what you're doing, either. 

It really is. I'm starting to suspect none of us do. Or at least very few and I should quite like to meet some one day.

I had absolutely no tiny, helpless, uncorked half-clue what I was doing when I started out--but back then I sure thought I did. I was a young writer of manifestos and imaginer of literary movements. I was full of store-brand piss and top-shelf vinegar. I just barreled through Streetfighter style, smashing every button and also the table and the console, hoping and praying the magic combo would unlock and my legs would light up with blue fire and spin around and make it happen. And sometimes it did! Smash enough and you're bound to hit some combo sooner or later. An idle miraculous hadouken will eventually fall out, though you can't predict where or when or how.

And I never really knew how it happened or how to make it happen again. I look back on some of the work I was so sure of and cringe; I look back on some of the work I thought was awful and it's beautiful and almost universally people-at-large like the latter better than the former. I have no idea what I'm doing. I didn't then; I still don't.

Oh, I know a lot about craft and style, about the market and the business, I've taught classes on voice, structure, postmodern techniques, the history of science fiction and fantasy, character and worldbuilding, literary theory. I know more about all that than most anything else in this world. I've been giving you all advice here for a lot of years, I do know some things, at least intellectually, theoretically, in the superego-hat. I know what I'm supposed to do, what ideally others could do.

But practically?

Every time it's me and the blank screen and the blinking cursor of doom, it's as terrifying as it ever was. Maybe even more so, because twenty years ago no one knew who I was or cared, if I failed it was really no big deal, no one was relying on me to feed them, no one really expected any great sales out of such a massive weirdo anyway. 

In the end, when I am actually writing and not teaching, when it is just me and that stupid blinking line, I just fly on instinct and hope that I've loaded enough Good Practices into the brain-bank that it comes out okay. I still make the same "mistakes" I always did: my sentences are too long, I abuse the em dash and the semi-colon and the word "and" beyond tolerance, I swear too much, I hate doing anything twice so my "brand" is basically a random ? crystal box from Mario Kart, I am just embarrassingly sincere and intimate all the time (cf this post) and all that shit is just out in the world for anyone to see, I still am not that great at plot, I use too many $20 words because I like them, I write about topics so obscure it takes a half-hour TED talk to prep anyone to read the first chapter, I keep insisting on writing for an American market about shit they do not care about, I'm Better about Random Capitalization now but I STILL WANT TO DO IT EVERY TIME, and god knows I'm not writing to any kind of market despite it probably being more advantageous to do so and me knowing that and still not doing it.

The whole reason I don't give myself more than a couple of months to turn around a first manuscript draft is that I can't believe in myself the way it takes to do this for any longer than that. I can't stop all that wow I am trash at this and by now I should be all like the last scene in Wonder Boys where Michael Douglas is all calm and zen with a laptop and a house with giant windows just quietly happily easily finishing his book why is that never me? Because of the trash! So I try to outrace my own feral chaos goblin brain, every time, every book, never really knowing what I'm doing or how or whether this will be one of the ones people rave about or one of the ones people ignore.

And you know what? It's fine.

It's more than fine. Out of all that fucking up I've built a career. One with a lot of failures and disappointments, sure, but I'm still here, I'm still working, and there's been more than a few Chun-Li power-moves along the line, too. I think maybe the day a new book doesn't scare me and feel impossible is not a day I want to meet. 

It's okay if you fuck up a lot too. It's okay if it takes a long time to find the right buttons to do the leg thingy. It's okay if you feel like you're way too young to have been doing anything as long as you've been doing your life. It's okay to still not really know how to do the things you want to do even while you're doing them. Even if it's not writing at all. Even if it's parenting or marriaging or spreadsheeting or stockmarketing or coding or baking or just being a person on a planet that did so many dinosaurs and then never did one again.

And some of the most exciting stuff happens when you have no idea what the fuck you're up to. Breaking rules and hoping for the best. Doing things people who know better would never try. I so often think of the chapter in The French Lieutenant's Woman where John Fowles just stops the whole story and talks about how hard it is to write a novel for like 15 pages. No one would ever say that's the right choice for a manuscript, or acceptable at all, or anything but self-indulgent, or remotely workable in a story about a period romance. You're literally not allowed to do that shit. Yet it's one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I've ever read. It made the whole book feel different, more intimate, it made me root for Fowles to pull it off. And if you're an English major or ever were, someone's probably going to assign that book in a class, because it's a master work.

Sometimes everything feeling so hard and confusing and not knowing how to get from page one to page the end can be thrilling for the reader. It's a weird, terrifying magic, but it happens, somewhere between the printer and your bedstand.

It's completely fine, and maybe even great, if you feel like you're just faking it and flailing around and terrified of that page and looking at others and thinking there's some secret to doing this they have and you don't, it seems so easy for them, the course seems so smooth. If John Fowles thought it was just so hard, then it's ok for it to be hard for us.  

And it really probably isn't smooth for anyone else, either. I don't think I've ever met a writer, and I've met a ton of us, who didn't think there must be an easier way to do this than the one they landed on. Nor am I the first one to say this; that "you never learn how to write a book, you just learn how to write this book" line that gets credited to both King and Gaiman has been stock footage in writing workshops for longer than I've been working.

It's such a truly unnatural, uncanny thing to write novels anyway. Create a universe from nothing that doesn't and can never exist, and it goes out into the world and all that unreal imagining changes things for real living people. Sometimes, if you're lucky, if you hit the combos just right, for people who aren't even born yet when you're doing the writing. Books have changed my life, over and over. Changed the way I saw, lived, dreamed, wrote, loved, hated, ate, hoped, feared. And on the other end of nearly all of those books that became part of the very cells of my body was a chaotic writer tearing their eyebrows out over how to fix that line, or that scene, or that ending, convinced they'd lost whatever they ever had one day, convinced they could do anything the next, just hoping any of it matters to anyone.

It's some real fucking duck magic. Looks so calm and serene on the surface, and underneath it's a mess of flappy feet and claws and feathers and churning dark water.

It's really just okay. The richest man in the world turned out to be an absolute fool. We are all of us doing just a little better than that, at least for today.

It's just never serene. Not life, not art, not work, not connection. Humans aren't; books aren't. The mess and the chaos and the anxiety and the despair that it'll never happen, or if it has happened, then it'll never happen again, and if it's happened more than once, then this one will never be done, or if it's ever done, it'll never be good, or if it's good, it'll never be loved, or if it's loved, it'll never pay the bills, the furiously paddling insufficient orange dinosaur feet under the waves is what makes books that live and breathe and shine. It's fucking stressful as shit, but energy is energy. It can be stored and transferred. It can be felt. 

It can expand forever.