Words On Paper: Never a Waste of Time.

It's all Jarrad's fault.

Well, okay, really it's all Gwen's fault, but Jarrad has contributed to that fault by asking me to use our Weekly Writing Night to blog instead of working on actual stories or novels. I probably shouldn't have told him that I'd committed to doing this. Drat.

Jarrad's blog, for those interested (shortly to be updated!): Jarrad, my writing buddy and a guy with a great turn of idea.

So I've got a bone to chew tonight, much like this entry's Mood Kyrie above. That bone to chew is with people who apparently believe that any writing you're doing as a beginning writer has any possibility of being a Waste of Your Time.

I haven't had anyone come out directly and say this, mind you. But when you mention to someone that you have almost finished your first real novel and they are enthused until you mention it's the first of a series--and they get That Look in their eye, and then they open their mouth--then you know what's coming. In this particular circumstance I brightly interposed, "But I'm learning so much!" That seemed to work. But wait. Why should I have had to say that at all?

I shouldn't, is the answer. Let's face it. A crapton of people think about writing. Some decent proportion of those actually talk about writing. Fewer actually attempt writing, be it fan fic, articles, endless blogging (ouch) or starting a short story or, gods forbid, a novel.

Then fewer still actually FINISH the short story...and a fraction smaller still finish the novel.

So what makes another writer or aspiring writer or person who thinks they know all about writing even though they never have taken the muse by the balls (well, aren't I permitted to have a male muse?!?) think they can walk up to me and insinuate that I'm wasting my time not working on something "marketable"??

So that has led me to this blog entry, wherein we will examine the Top Ten Reasons Why Writing Anything You Feel Like Isn't A Waste of Your Time.

10. Words on the page is words on the page.

9. If you're not cat-waxing, you're making progress.

8. The writer is probably the worst judge of whether what they're working on is worthwhile.

7. Did you learn something from typing this? There you go.

6. Even the worst piece of drivel coming out of my keyboard teaches me what NOT to do!

5. I'm establishing the habit of writing something, anything, every day.

4. Writing anything reduces the fear factor tied to coming to the blank page every day. Or the end of the paragraph where you're not sure what comes next.

3. How are you ever going to get published anyhow unless you try things and fail or succeed?

2. No matter what you are writing...you are WRITING. Do not question. Do not double-think yourself. Just DO it. And let the putting of words on the page make you happy. You are doing what you've dreamed of. Let go of the anxiety and let yourself believe that your words are worth something!

And the number one reason why writing what you feel like writing, "marketable" or not, is worthwhile:

1. Because George R.R. Martin told me so. So unless one of the other writers who I really admire--like maybe Neil Gaiman, Neil Stephenson, or William Gibson (and I would include Ray Bradbury and Anne McCaffrey except that, /sad, they would now have to do so from beyond the grave)--get on this blog and tell me George is full of it, I'm going to stick to that, thanks.

Actually I can thank George for Numbers Eight and Seven. He and his wife Parris where nice enough to treat me to breakfast when I was traveling through Santa Fe earlier this year, and he tolerated a writing question from me--because I WAS worried. I was working on East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and realizing that it was actually two books. "Is this a waste of my time?" I asked him. "It's probably not salable. I'm a nobody."

George told me that--though in his opinion short stories are still the way to break into the writing game--the important thing was to finish the project I was working on. No writing is wasted. You are developing your craft, seeing what works, what doesn't work. You are learning. And he told me that some of the things he wrote that he thought weren't all that or were too weird were some of the things that magazines or publishers turned out to be interested in.

So there you go. And really it all comes back to something I wrote in my journal as I was just starting East of the Sun : DON'T JUDGE THE WORK.

It isn't for you, the writer, to judge the worth of anything you're working on. It's your job to communicate, to regale the reader with the best prose you're capable of writing, to catch the passion you feel for the subject and tie that into the prose. Beyond that--don't worry about it.

Just keep writing.

Tomorrow: Why NaNoWriMo keeps drawing me back to it. Stay tuned!