The Guinea Pig Report: Uses For Scribblins, #1 of a series
Becoming A Writer, Chapter Seven
So, if you’ve been playing along at home, and if you’ve been fairly faithful about it (more so than me, anyway, and that’s shamefully easy to do), you’ve probably got this huge stack of stuff you’ve scribbled over the past few months or weeks. And you’re probably wondering what to do with it all. You’re probably thinking, “Well, I certainly can’t publish it.” And you’d probably be right, because if you’ve been doing the exercises as prescribed, you’ve generated a lot of rough draft. Rough draft and babble.
That’s good. Yes, even the babble.
Here, according to Brande, is one of the many things you can do with this babble:
- Simply know that you can produce writing in quantity.
Perhaps for the first time you see that if you want to write you can write, and that no life is actually so busy as to offer no opportunities if you are alert to find them. Then, too, you should begin to think it less than miraculous that writers can bring out book after book, having found in yourself the same inexhaustible resources that issue in the work of others.
—pp. 81-82.
This isn’t even the main point of Chapter 7, but it bears emphasizing (and quite possibly repeating). So I’m gonna sit on it for this post. Proving to yourself that you can write whenever you want to, and that if you want to you can, isn’t just for newbies. It isn’t just newbies who need it proved.
Yesterday, the point I wanted to sit on was that everyone–new writers, old writers, experienced writers, green writers–everyone gets blocked at times. Or at least goes through periods where the writing isn’t fun. Where they’d rather do anything but. And sometimes, some of them (Niki raises her hand) start saying self-deprecating stuff like, “Oh, I’ve been lazy lately. Hardly got any writing done at all. Slept late. Such a bum.” But what’s going on underneath the laziness is, Why bother getting up to write? Why bother writing? I’m crap. I’m an imposter. I was crazy to think I could ever write.
The only way out is through: Write anyway. Prove to yourself that you can.
Which is the long way of saying that this part of Brande’s Becoming a Writer agenda really works for me. I recommend it.