Thanks to Chuck Wendig for this dialog
You: **panicked gulps of breath**
Me: You seem a little wibbly.
You: Oh, I’m wibbly. Super-wibbly. Wibbly to the max.
Me: *looks at calendar* Oh.
You: It’s National Novel Writing month.
You: *vomits in a shoe*
Me: Definitely writing a novel. Also, that was my shoe.
You: Sorry.
Me: I didn’t like that shoe, anyway. A very hateful shoe. So, what’s the prob?
You: I just — I can’t — baaaaaah. *flails and points at the blank screen*
Me: The empty page.
You: *gasping*
Me:. The blank page is some terrifying business.
You: It’s scaring the Halloween candy right out of me.
Me: Understandably. The white page is all cliff, no bottom. It’s an endless pit. A snowy expanse without a single track to follow — and you’re thinking, if I go stomping my boots into this stuff I’m going to ruin it. It’s pristine, now. Untouched. Infinite possibility. The novel you’ve not written will always be more interesting and more vibrant than the one you do. That novel, the imaginary one, the eternal multiplicative one, is like a flawless diamond.
Me: *kicks your shin*
You: Jeeeessssss, owy.
Me: I guess it wasn’t the shoes that were hateful. It’s my feet. My violent, angry feet.
You: You said the unwritten novel was perfect.
Me: It is! In your mind. And you can always go and tell people, Oh, I’m writing a novel, and they’ll mmm and ohhh and they might even look impressed and if that’s all you want — the illusion of writing, the acknowledged potential of writing — hey go on and keep pretending to write that novel. But for my mileage, I’d rather have an imperfect story penned in blood and coaldust than the gleaming perfect unicorn fart that lives inside my head.
You: Unicorn farts live inside your head?
Me: Yup.
Next column: More fears to Overcome.
My point ol’ wonderful student and WRITER- Just write.
That’s right. Just write.
Sit down and write the first 3 paragraphs or scenes tonight and then repeat tomorrow.
Classes start in Jan 2014
You got a lot of work to do!!