On Loving What You Write

New writers are often told to ignore the market and focus on writing what they love. It’s solid enough advice, for what it’s worth, but I think there’s a flipside to that. At some point, no matter what the project, you need to figure out how to love what you’re writing.

There are probably writers out there who can write a whole novel without coming to loathe or fear the manuscript, but I do not come across them all that often. What’s far more common are the conversations where doubt has seeped in, or an idea that was once exciting and shiny has grown worn down with use and the realities of sitting there and putting words on the page. Ideas move away from their Platonic ideal as you write them, because execution is harder than imagining. The set up of the first act is significantly more exciting than the delivering on that promise in the second and resolving it in the third.

My first attempt to write a novel suffered horribly because of this. I wrote four seperate first acts, pulling in fresh ideas without thinking through their resolution. The things I write today still struggle with the impulse. As I hit the second quarter of a book I start creating things that need to be excised from a story, tucked away for something else because they’re pulling focus.

I had to step back and focus on the thing that started it for me: why did I want to write this? Why did it seem fun?

I need to figure out how to love the project all over again, instead of asking it to be something it wasn’t meant to be.