Writing a novel is the most honest work there is.
OK, I’ll dial that back a little. Writing a novel is very honest work.
Modern (corporate) work life is about out-sourcing the dirty work. We must be efficient – doing only what we have to do while securing the most value. Work is about getting money (for us or the company) and then finding ways for that money to make more and do more. Much of this is ethical. It is the way we’ve designed it.
Writing obeys a different set of rules.
Writing is honest work. It is honest like laying brick is honest. Writing is a manual labor. The result of the work is immediately evident. The outcome brings spontaneous judgment. If the work isn’t done well, and the laws of structure aren’t obeyed, the end result will fail. And fail fast.
Watch. Here is a sentence directly from my most recent draft manuscript:
Once I put my head under the water and came back up I felt the breeze as if it had only just now started.
Now I don’t care how much you read, it should be evident to you, right now, that that sentence is terrible on several levels*. (And that the one I just wrote isn’t much better.)
You can’t fake writing a sentence and you certainly can’t fake a story. The right words must be on the page and in precise order or your work is not done. The work won’t get done unless you sit down and do it. You can’t delegate it or hire some whiz kid fresh out of grad school to run it down for you. And you’re terribly unlikely to pad your 401k by writing books.
Writing is honest work.
There is little opportunity in life to see the instant or lasting results of our work. But like the brick bungalow my great-grandfather designed and built at 2723 W. Hayes Street in Peoria Illinois, with diligence and attention to craft, I too can build walls that won’t fall down.

*The fact that this sentence is a disaster was pointed out to me by a colleague in a workshop. This happens all the time. We are, by far, not the best judges of our work. (You are not reading the first draft. My wife read and edited this blog post before I put it up.)

The most frustrating thing* about being a writer (or a musician, graffiti artist, cake decorator, tennis player, etc.) is that you can’t write whenever and for however long you wish. Let’s call this our inability to write unhindered. Life demands more of us than to be writers. The expectations are greater than to simply practice our creative passion and eat.
What makes this frustrating is that I can often see, as I’m working on a piece, a vision for it. I can see what it will become, and I recognize that the only thing standing between me and that vision is more work. Yet, I must stop working at the end of my allotted time and pay bills, go to the office, rake the leaves, scoop the catbox. Sure, I could skip these things and keep writing, but I also value providing for my family and being a decent citizen. (Don’t let me confuse you. My concern here is not about time to write. That is a different discussion and is about knowing our priorities and clarifying them for ourselves (see Time to Write, January 2014).)
There is no such thing as eliminating the hindrances so you can write. In fact, the best writers have found a way to incorporate them into their writing lives. So, what to do? Keep going. Don’t define yourself – your self-worth that is – by how much writing you can get done. You are more than the sum of your manuscripts. Recognize that writing enriches your life and write as much as you can.

*When I say this is the most frustrating thing what I mean is that the other frustrating things (getting voice right, struggling with subject matter, getting your work the attention it deserves) would be greatly mitigated if you could write unhindered.

Writers are often asked about their characters. Which is your favorite? Did you miss Jimmy when you finished the first book? Do you talk to any of them or hear them? Do you feel close to them? Were you sad when he died at the beginning of book two? This line of questioning, as I’ve attempted to demonstrate, can very quickly get more than a little creepy. It can also become quite meaningless to the reader.

It is true that as writers we do come to affiliate with our characters. They become important to us as we work to uncover their story. They are indeed our “boots on the ground” and often our porthole (to thoroughly mix metaphors) to what is or will happen on the page. There is no story without them. In all this, we are very much first readers.

I recently thought about these things as I was considering a character from one of my short stories and getting ready to invent another character for another story. For my part I concluded that I don’t think I miss characters when I’m done writing them. But there are characters that come on and off my pages only briefly that I wish I’d had the opportunity to know better.

An elderly fellow came into the office one recent afternoon to visit. He’d been told he had about two months to live. His wife brought him in.

He sat in his wheelchair at the head of a receiving line. No cake or coffee. Just him, the carpet, the walls. He had worked security and driven the shuttle bus. I barely knew him – just the casual hello in the hall when I saw him patrolling the building, or when I took the shuttle to the corner for lunch at the Mexican restaurant.

I noticed as I stood in line, that I had left my office without my Blackberry. This seemed somehow fitting for that moment. Empty-handed seemed like the best posture as I waited for my turn to shake his hand. To shake the hand of a man who could only look back.

I learned the other day that he died, right on cue. I also learned that his wife died within a few weeks of him.

I found that it was a lot easier to sit down and write this evening.

Why do I type my long form fiction in an 11 font? The 11 font has become part of the Feng Shui of my work, a well-worn path I take to my process. I was born on the 11^th and so was my dad. Could that influence why I like the look of the 11 font on the page? It doesn’t seem like it.

I am not a superstitious guy. When the pitcher is throwing a no-hitter, I would likely talk to him. But now anything other than an 11 font feels uncomfortable to me, like a pebble in my shoe or like jamming my fingers into a cardboard keyboard.

I feel a physical relief when I hit Control A, selecting the whole document, and then right-click and select Arial from the drop down, and 11 from the drop down right next to it.

I exhale, hit Save, and the words on the page are mine.

Last week, while traveling in Southwest Florida, I did my daily writing in my travel journal. I started keeping a travel journal in 2006, not long after reading about “special purpose journaling”, specifically Ronald Reagan’s journal, kept from the first day to the last day of his presidency. My travel journal has been with me as I hiked through Mammoth Cave, drove the southern coast of Ireland, and traversed such places as Niagara Falls, The Smokies, Carolina Beach NC (hats off to Britt’s Donuts), Northern California (including City Lights Bookstore and the Pacific Coast Highway), Geneva Switzerland (sadly, on business), and all over my home-sweet-home, the Mid-West.

It has taken me some time to figure out how to travel journal. The tendency is to retrospectively, at the end of each day, record my itinerary. While this is useful – I know what we did on the third day of our cabin rental in Rockbridge, Ohio in April 2012 – my reflections while driving past cotton fields in Georgia are really what I’m after. Those times when the journal is open and I’m writing in real time are when the best I have to offer is captured. I don’t have it mastered. The content in my journal is about 50/50. Hindrances to the better journaling are flying (one’s sense of having traveled is muddled, somehow false) and being behind the wheel (kills the real time thing). It is also a challenge when returning to a place I’ve already been once or twice before. But it is practice in looking deeper.

If you don’t do so already, you should keep a travel journal. Your thoughts when you are away are different and potentially innovative. The inputs you receive while you are out of the house will bring you insights you would not otherwise have had and you’ll find that capturing these will add another dimension to your (writing) life.

Is it wrong to be delighted by your own writing? I found myself giggling the other night as I was editing one of my short stories. I heard myself and I felt a bit self-conscious, a bit self-congratulatory. So I paused and thought about it. What had me so tickled? Was it really about the words on the page? Here is the conclusion I came to.

It was not that I thought I was funny. There are people that I think are loads and loads funnier than I am. Rather, it was that I was delighted. I was delighted by the way that simply by obeying the discipline of doing the work, a story had shown up. I was delighted and entertained, as a reader, by that outcome. But I was not laughing at the content; instead I was feeling the emotion of having created something that before I began did not exist.

I was experiencing one of the great payoffs of doing the work.