You are a bad cop.

This is the first hard truth that writers need to realize: we are actually very bad at policing ourselves. Let’s be honest: on the whole, we’re terrible at it. This is true in any area of life that requires willpower and discipline; for example, dieters fall on and off the wagon constantly, as do exercisers. Willpower is a finite resource, and we will save it for when it really counts — that is, for when we will have to be showing results to people other than ourselves.

The only way to get disciplined, therefore, is to admit what we can’t do! Sometimes that is working and writing without accountability. Your accountable person or persons can be a close friend, a relative, a significant other, or a writing group, as long as it is someone whose esteem you value, someone who will hold you to your pledge. You will always have an excuse for yourself; other people won’t accept excuses so easily.

After the jump: more reasons accountability is crucial.

Writers thrive on community.

Here’s another reason that being accountable to someone is a great idea. While some writing must take place alone, a great deal of the writing life could benefit from community. We use community to validate our career choice, to remind ourselves that others are struggling with the same issue, and to have people to turn stories in to. I think the element of community is particularly important for women writers; while all the books that get reviewed or get all the attention may seem to be by men, having a writing community that includes women can help us remember that women writers are out there. If you’re accountable to another writer, you’ll be motivated to turn in something that is up to a high standard. When you’ve had a long day, you’ll still push yourself to get the work done instead of leaving it for another day.

We write for an audience; we need readers.

We need to be accountable to people other than ourselves for the very reason that we write — because we write for readers! Therefore, it makes sense to say that we need people to actually read our work. We need someone to keep us grounded in reality, reminding us once in a while if we’re on the right or the wrong track. Without that sense of context once in a while, our work could become bloated, self-indulgent, grandiose or divorced from real human emotion.

It’s important to remember that we work best when we acknowledge the web of interdependence we’re all a part of. This is true of even supposedly solitary disciplines like writing. So reach out and find someone who will keep you honest.

As I was warned, Blood Meridian is bloody. It is full of atrocities such as casual scalpings, brutal massacres, and jail-cell or wartime torture. What is most disturbing about this violence, though, is how it’s treated; McCarthy’s style is the definition of hard-boiled, and every midnight-black event is presented baldly, free of emotion or judgment. Our main character, the Kid, seems unaffected by all that he sees, merely trying to survive, wandering from one bloody clash to the next. So what is McCarthy trying to say about violence? He might be arguing that it is fundamental to the human condition, which is a compelling point. But more than that, he might be arguing that there is something purifying, something redemptive, something deeply cleansing about being washed in blood.

The review on the cover of my copy says it all: according to critic Michael Herr, Blood Meridian is “A classic American novel of regeneration through violence.” I haven’t finished the book yet, but already I’m wondering — what does he mean by that? Could McCarthy be arguing the unthinkable — that we need violence to be fully human?

It’s a deeply troubling question, but one that I’m glad McCarthy is raising. Other novelists who indulge in violence are usually repugnant to me because they present it as a kind of pornography, eroticizing the violence, tying it firmly to a deep-seated hatred or fear of women. That may come later, but from what I’ve seen so far, McCarthy isn’t marrying violence with sexuality or arguing that women have no place in his world. His story is about men, but it is an historical tale, and the violence is not eroticized. It is, instead, simply what it is: brutal, often purposeless, often strangely fascinating.

How to handle violence yourself

Regardless of how it might seem, we live in a less violent world than humans have ever inhabited before. Violence is slowly getting stamped out of our DNA, first becoming shameful, then becoming dirty, finally, possibly, becoming evil once and for all. But in fiction, violent acts will always be powerful and evocative. They have a way of clarifying things by forcing characters to make hard choices. Violence has a way of finally making the sides well-defined and the heroes and villains more obvious. In that way, violence can “redeem” a story, finally blowing away the smoke.

So how will you write about violence in your stories? Will you avoid it on principle, or will you take a test swim in McCarthy’s dark waters? Adding violence easily heightens the stakes of your story; but I urge you to avoid the easy pitfalls I mentioned earlier. Don’t eroticize violence; don’t assume that some people deserve to bear its brunt; don’t let characters become less than human. Violence has a nasty way of turning us into less than our true selves. I’m willing to read McCarthy, though, and see how oddly attractive violence can be, in its ability to make the line between choices and consequences so stark.

Another way this trope appears in movies is with the deceased. After a character dies, it’s impossible to find out more about what his or her life was like without detective work. A check in the date book will reveal the secret fight club she was attending, or the dog shows he’d been attending that no one knew about. Character – revealed!

All this is a reminder that the date book — or its modern equivalent — is a treasure trove of character. You may not keep a paper date book anymore — I know I’ve moved to iCal, and even my parents have moved on from the same black leather calendar they used to get every year and now use Google or Yahoo calendars. All the same, a paper or electronic date book is where our lives truly unfold. Date books tell stories about characters’ lives, just as they’re used for detective work in movies. They tell people who we care about meeting and when; who we’re dating; who we’re keeping secrets from; what hobbies we have; and what we don’t want others to know. Date books are as intimate as diaries in many ways.

After the jump: using date books in fiction.

Using Date Books as Plot Devices

Do you keep a date book? To learn how to use one in fiction, try studying your own for starters. Note what you actually write down and the idiosyncratic way we take notes when we know we’re the only ones likely to read them. Notice abbreviations and errors. What do you keep in your head without writing down? What goes in the date book?

Introduce tension through discovery

Of course, our own date books aren’t mysteries to ourselves; the source of suspense comes from a character’s attempt to understand another. This struggle is fundamental to many stories; the date book is just a convenient modern tool for drawing that tension out. In order to make it part of your plot, give us something we don’t know about in the date book. Let us try to puzzle out a note’s meaning as though it were a hieroglyphic. Let the appointment come up; let your sleuth character go to the appointment, but not figure out immediately what it might be. Above all, let the date book act as a window into another person’s identity. For a large part, we live secret lives, letting others see only minimal, carefully controlled slivers of what we really are doing and thinking. Let a tool like a date book do the miraculous, and look beyond that sliver.

One of the joys of a Netflix account these days is the ability to re-discover old, beloved television. I’m a bit of an old fogey when it comes to the media I enjoy; I grew up listening to motown with my mom, and watching Nick at Nite, so I know more about I Dream of Jeannie than whatever was on MTV when I was a teenager. One old television show I’m happy to be re-watching is The Wonder Years. It’s a classic show that often beautifully taps into the experience of growing up and facing a large and frightening world, particularly during a time of fracture and conflict (the show is set during the 1960′s).

As much as I love the Wonder Years, though, I also love to use it as an example for what NOT to do when write a short story or novel. What works in the framework of a half hour television show — a framework in which we often expect strong, clear emotional setups and sentimentality — often falls flat in writing. A teacher of mine called this problem “The Wonder Years” syndrome.

Here’s the setup: you’ve managed to pull your characters into a nice juicy conflict and given them a great payoff. The action has come together into a nice, poignant moment. And then, you ruin it. You step in with a large heavy-handed voice-over and connect the dots for the audience, telling them exactly what it is they’re seeing, what it means, and how it is significant in the larger picture. If you’re familiar with the show, you’ll know that this sounds familiar; at the end of some great bit of poignant action, the voice-over will come in and wrap everything up tidily, telling you what everything means.

After the jump: how to resist the syndrome.

Not connecting the dots

So how can we resist this problem? It’s often highly tempting to fall into the Wonder Years syndrome because we as authors have already done so much work figuring out in our heads what things are supposed to mean. “Here, let me show you what I’ve done,” we end up telling our readers. “I’ll just draw a little diagram so it’s clearer.” The problem is that readers don’t want the dots connected for them. They want the telling gesture and an accompanying silence, a chance to do the legwork themselves. That’s what makes reading a very different art form from most television: it requires active engagement and a little detective work.

To keep yourself from falling into the Wonder Years syndrome, try a little experiment on your next draft. Write up your emotionally climactic scene the way you normally do, figuring out what everything means as you go. Then delete the last three sentences. Allow a little silence and a little space to let your last action hover in the air, unexplained. This also means you’ve got to trust your reader a little more, and have faith that the reader is as smart as you are and as capable of figuring things out.

When you’re writing a novel, there are many ways that you’ve simply got to cut out the clamor in your life and focus on what’s important. You’ve got to turn off the radio, close your email program, close the door to pets, kids, and spouses, and even turn down invitations to parties once in a while. All of these are important ways to reduce the cacophony in the world and focus on your novel.

But what about the clamor in your novel?

Being in the thick of writing a novel is a very exciting time. In many ways, it feels like all the worthy thoughts you’ve had thus far in life, all the astute observations you’ve made or odd characters you’ve encountered, can now finally find the perfect outlet in your large, ambitious work. In the draft and note-taking stages of novel, it’s easy to use your novel as a kind of “drop box” or catchall for everything writerly you’ve been saving up.

The result is chaos and clamor.

If you throw everything but the kitchen sink at your novel, you’ll end up with a snarl of wires, a bird’s nest, an orchestra with everyone playing different songs at once. It won’t be pretty. But the urge to add simply everything — a murder plot, a complicated family, many flashbacks, multiple converging storylines, a political scandal — remains tempting.

After the jump: why we can’t resist the clamor — and how to cut it out.

I find myself in this situation these days; as I’m riding the T to and from work, for example, I’ll think idly about a half-dozen ideas or observations. Maybe one (if I’m lucky) will actually be relevant enough to go into the novel, but the urge to toss it all in is there. It stems, I believe, from two different problems, so I want to make sure to tackle them both. The problems are insecurity and egotism.

Insecurity

It seems odd to say that the same problem stems from two opposite causes, doesn’t it? But swinging too wildly to the left or right on the spectrum of ego can result in a chaotic, unfocused novel. On the one hand, insecurity makes us think no one would want to read our writing, particularly because it’s boring. We don’t trust the worth of the story we’ve created, so we throw in other stories, other amusements, other entertainments. The result is a kind of fawning, desperate bid for attention: look, I’ve got incestuous twins! And circus elephants! Please read me! To fight this problem, remember to take a breath, relax, and have a little more faith in yourself. Your story is valid; to make it shine, focus more on the main story, and less on throwing in entertainment. Your audience knows how to read; they will not get bored and forget.

Egotism

Oddly enough, many novels today suffer from the problem of clamor for a very different reason: the author’s egotism. Many fat tomes that have come out recently assume that we as readers will naturally hang on every word that comes out of a writer’s pen. This allows writers to include long post-modern digressions, yawn-inducing family histories, furious rants, or otherwise self-indulgent material that doesn’t serve the story. As an old-fashioned novel reader, I want story first, and the author’s identity and philosophical hang-ups second. I don’t really care for those novels that are more like author rants disguised as some form of performance art. At the same time, I know not just the heavy hitters of the writing world succumb to this; I, humble fledgling writer, still often write a scene knowing it’s a little dull or beside the point, but that I still want it in there for the heck of it.

To cut this kind of clamor out of the novel, I try to tell myself to take a healthy dose of humility and remember, once again, that readers read for story. They don’t read to be impressed by how smart I am or to wonder how many books I’ve read, based on all the other books I’m cleverly alluding to. They don’t want to be lectured to about my subject matter. They want to read, for goodness’ sakes, and my job as a writer is to deliver that immersive, delightful, surprising reading experience to them.

I love writing workshops. I’m an unashamed supporter of them; they give us accountability, which is what really helps me turn out work, and they give us fellow writers to talk writing with. I could go on all day about writing workshops, and I’ve written about them a lot in the past.

That said, workshops aren’t perfect. One problem with them is that they tend to encourage a certain kind of writing. The readers and students in a workshop have a lot on their plates; they tend to support the stories that are the most sensational or entertaining. They would rather smooth out all the interesting rough edges of an experimental or heavy work, and laugh or be pulled in by the sure entertainment of a page-turner.

Nothing’s wrong with writing entertainingly; I’m all for it! But it does mean that other kinds of work have a harder time surviving. Some writing is designed to give the reader a rollicking good time; some is designed to ask tough questions, to challenge us as readers and as people, and to take us on spiritual or emotional journeys. These books are not always the easiest to read, or the best-suited for breaking into digestible, workshop-sized pieces. But that doesn’t make the writing any less necessary.

After the jump: choosing what your story will do.

What Do You Want Your Story to Do?

If an author’s goal is blurry, the story will suffer. We as readers will feel confused if the story is half-joking, half-serious, or seems to accuse us at one point and be in cahoots with us at another. You the writer must ask yourself some tough questions: do you want to push the envelope of style? Raise difficult political issues? Challenge established religious ideas? If so, you may have a very heavy, intense piece of writing ahead of you. Prepare accordingly!

What Kind of Writer Are You?

This is the difficult judgment writers must make — they must decide what they want to write. That doesn’t mean crafting an elevator pitch for yourself or deciding what blurbs will be on your book jackets; it means deciding whether you want to push the reader, deconstruct things, soothe the reader and provide a balm, enliven a feeling of nostalgia and shared experience, make the reader laugh — or all of the above. Your writing will be special in one way if you focus on sharpening and honing it, but it won’t be special at all if you try to do everything at once, or pander to what you think your audience wants. Too much now, there is a divide between reading as entertainment (often looked down upon) and reading as intellectual exercise (often too divorced from the pleasures of reading). If you’re going to be tough on your reader, don’t be apologetic about it! Don’t compromise the principles of your story by throwing in cheap entertainment just because you think you need it.

The blogosphere is full of writing websites these days. There are blogs that will tell you about writing grammatically; there are blogs that will tell you how to write English if you’re an English language learner; there are blogs that discuss the literary world and its politics. Overwhelmingly, though, there are blogs that tell you how to make money from your writing.

They talk about the money-making opportunities in copywriting, in proofreading, in commercial blogging, and in ebooks. These blogs are well and good, and I’m not judging them for having a different goal than this blog and for aiming for that goal (often very well and informatively). The effect of this overwhelming number of writing blogs about money-making, however, is that it’s creating a culture of writing as profession compared to writing as passion. If writing is your passion, then I do believe you can make money from it; but somewhere along the line, you’re going to have to choose what your primary goal is, and which takes priority.

What Does a Passion for Writing Mean?

The blogs out there will probably hasten to tell you that you don’t have to choose. You can have fun and make a profit, they’ll tell you. Just follow these steps. First, spend most of your time developing contacts and advertising yourself. Get on these social networks. Oh, and remember to write something once in a while.

The problem with this focus is that if passion doesn’t come first, it’s pretty much nowhere. Writing primarily as a money-making venture or a career-builder is missing something. It’s missing the times of quiet and solitude that writing creatively requires. It’s missing the agony, anguish, and fear of rejection. It’s missing the anxious scratching out, the crumpled papers, the miserable rejected files lurking in your computer’s trash. It’s missing the calm joy that can come from writing something that is just right, or the feeling that you have something to say that no one else can say as well.

After the jump: the difference, and making your choice.

The Difference Between Profession and Passion

That may be one main difference between choosing to think of your writing as a profession first, or as a passion first. If you think of writing as a profession, your goal is to join a successful group of professionals already out there. In order to succeed, you’ve got to follow some rules (and follow them well and thoughtfully) in order to join the club. If you think of writing first as your passion, you’re trying to differentiate yourself from established clubs. The only way to make your writing special is to make it unique, new, different from what has gone before. Your goal is to voice an original thought, to sing an unheard note, to pull something out of yourself that only you have. That’s part of why choosing writing as your passion is probably going to doom you to a lot more heartbreak than if you choose it as a profession.

Making Your Choice

As I mentioned earlier, this post is not about denigrating the world of professional writing; it’s a world I certainly hope to enter one day, and many of the good writing blogs out there offer invaluable advice about living in today’s PR-centric world. What I wanted to do was offer an alternative voice, a reminder that not everything in our lives needs to be commercialized, or packaged up and sold to someone else. If writing helps you express something deep about yourself, then honor that impulse and discipline; don’t think that it should be advertised and sold in order to meet someone’s definition of success.

But how much does talent matter? Are we writers born and not made? We hear stories about people like Keats composing some of the greatest works in the English language in his early twenties, and we begin to wonder if we can learn to be great, or if it can only be encoded in our genes. We can certainly improve our writing through hard work and thought, but is there a glass ceiling, an innate limit to how high we can go?

After the jump: my take on talent.

Talent is overrated. But dedication isn’t.

In my opinion, we do over-emphasize talent because we like the idea of great writers being destined for the pen. When it comes to our own futures, however, we prefer to imagine ourselves not bound to a certain path, but free to choose where we’ll go and what we’ll make of ourselves. We have to be fair to others when we imagine talent — they struggled as much as we did to improve, even if it seemed easy.

I do believe that we might have early interests and tendencies, things that we’re inclined to do well at and that we’d be best suited developing. That potential will make the difference between a kid who reads insatiably and a kid who can’t leave his or her telescope alone. But there’s a whole world of possibility about what we’ll do with those interests. We might exploit them to their fullest potential, or we might not. Talent, ultimately, is a nice leg up — but it simply won’t end up mattering that much after the first ride on the horse. There’s simply too much to learn, too much discipline that is needed, whether you’re talented or not.

So where does that leave the people who never felt innately good at writing who want to be writers now? There are plenty of acclaimed writers out there who stumbled into the profession late in life, and no one can really tell the difference between the early bloomers and the late bloomers. What really matters is dedication; talented or not, you’re just not going to get anywhere without it. So we worry and fret about whether we’re meant to be writers — but we really should be worrying about how we can take the stories and words we have and make them the best they can be.

What’s it about?

This will be the first, the most common, and the most difficult to answer question. I always find this question a little depressing to answer; the minute my one-sentence explanation leaves my mouth, I realize what a small, pathetic, and silly topic it really is, and I’m left wondering why I would want to write a novel about that in the first place.

How to deal
It’s up to you whether you want to answer this fully or not. Novel-writing is an intensely private process and I frankly believe that being asked about the topic can seem a little pushy, as though you are being asked about your religious beliefs and practices. Few non-writers realize how invasive the question can seem, however, so be tolerant. Answer politely that you’re not sure yourself, or that it’s vaguely about the place in which it’s based. Don’t feel pressured to justify the novel’s existence and explain why it’s a revelatory topic.

After the jump: more questions you’re sure to be faced with.

How did you get the idea?

Again, here’s a question that’s unintentionally invasive, and that is expecting a boiled-down small-talk answer that may be reductive. I always struggle to answer the question because I’m not sure myself, and I’m not sure how in-depth an answer the person really wants. Do they want to hear about all the books I read and life experiences I had that led up to this moment of the novel?

How to deal
Try to gauge whether the asker is asking out of politeness or genuine interest, and edit your answer accordingly. Also, keep it light — you don’t need to plumb the depths of your soul in order to tell them that you’d always been interested in deep-sea diving or that your cousin recently sent you a fascinating book about women soldiers in the [correction: American] Civil War (true story, by the way — there are many documented cases of women dressing up as men in order to fight).

Is it about your life? Am I in it?

Inevitably, this question is going to come up in varying forms — and I find it the most irritating. I don’t really want to go into how the novel relates to my most personal inner life, and I especially don’t want to flatter you by telling you you’re in it, uncle Fred, or offend you, Aunt Alice, by telling you that that cold, cruel character is you!

How to deal
Most non-writers simply don’t know that novels don’t have a one-to-one relationship with reality. It’s difficult to characterize the complex, blurry way fictional worlds tend to overlap with our real lives. Again, the invasiveness of the question is unintentional, but I’ve found questions to be surprisingly pushy. For example, because I’m writing about Buddhism, I get asked point-blank whether I’m a Buddhist, and then I have to succinctly explain my feelings about religion. In cases like these, I think it’s fine to note (politely) that the question is a little more than you’d like to answer. Or else settle for “it’s complicated.” Sometimes it just none of the questioner’s business, and you’ve got to use your writerly verbal skills to find a tactful way of saying so.

When will you be finished?

Aah, the most dreaded question of all! For people who haven’t tried a novel themselves, the task must seem like a walk in the park — a month or two of typing it up, and then you’re good to go, right? So, so wrong.

How to deal
First, breathe. The question is probably innocent and is not a passive-aggressive jab that you’re taking too long and wasting your time, money, and youth. Gently remind your questioner that James Joyce took ten years to write Ulysses — and that’s about par for the course. Allow a self-deprecating comment about how slow you are. But don’t feel that you have to blame outside forces or nervously explain. These things take time!

Most likely your questioner is curious and would like to learn about what’s typical in the writing life — so avoid defensiveness. Just remember that the world of writing is a fascinating one, and try to grin and bear those tough questions.

For writers, reading can be our favorite way of procrastinating. It feels so delicious because it doesn’t feel like wasting time, and so often it isn’t. “I’m improving my writing skills,” we’ll tell ourselves when we’re curling up with a book instead of thinking about our own writing. “I’m learning about plot movements and character development.” Doesn’t it feel good to get something done, even if it isn’t the thing that really needs to get done?

Now, though, with the start of a bright new year, it’s time to put reading back in its place and push writing to the top of the heap. Here are a few ways to keep reading where it belongs.

1. Read what helps your writing only.

There are plenty of big old classic novels I’ve been meaning to read, as well as some lighter fare. But neither of these types of writing are what I’m particularly interested in writing. To keep your reading productive, choose wisely; read things that you think will be related to the work you want to do. If you’re writing short stories, read some short stories! If you’re writing about a historical event, only read about that historical event. If you’re writing about a particular religion or culture, read about that religion or culture. Now isn’t the time for that beach read or that dusty tome you’ve been meaning to plow through for months.

After the jump: more ways to keep reading in its place.

2. Don’t read what you might imitate.

My writing teachers, while worshipful of Nabokov and his talents, were surprisingly wary about assigning him or recommending his books. Sometimes it just wasn’t the right time to read Nabokov, they said, because his style was so distinctive and infectious that it might rub off a little too strongly on our own writing. We didn’t want to end up sounding like a style imitation, so if a particular workshop submission started sounding too much like one or another author, we’d be warned away from reading him or her for a while. In your own writing, be aware of your influences and make sure you are injecting new strains into your language. Don’t read the book you’re trying to revive while writing; instead, read new and fresh things that will help you depart from your heroes’ styles.

3. Write as much as you read — or almost as much.

Some of my teachers believe you should read about ten times as much as you actually write, and I’m a follower of that idea as well. Sometimes, though, when you’re in the thick of the project, you need to apply a little discipline and make sure your output is nearly equalling your input. If you read an hour a day, then make sure you are writing for at least half an hour a day — or make it so that you don’t get your “treat” of reading until you’ve put in a good solid writing session. Reading is wonderfully helpful, but sometimes you should treat it as a dessert that must be earned by sweating out some calories.

When you’re in the thick of a project, how do you balance your writing and reading? Weigh in at the end of this post!