Guest Bloggin’: Piper Center – “What to Write”

Someday, you’re going to be dead.

I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to you. If it does, you are either extremely young or extremely naive. Neither situation bodes well for great writing. Try to overcome them. Become old, like me. Acknowledge that someday you will be dead.

Given that certainty, consider this: What do you want to leave behind?

Sure, we all want to leave a lifetime of great memories, a pretty corpse, and — ideally — a string of satisfied sexual partners, but really think about it: What do you want to leave behind?

If your answer is anything but “Truly great writing,” please close this browser window. I hear there are adorable cats on YouTube.

(Oh, and no fair saying, “My kids.” Your kids are not a path to your personal immortality. Your kids are individual human beings with their own lives to lead, not your legacy.)

An author friend of mine once came to me with a conundrum. He had two projects in mind, he said to me. One of them was very much in line with current trends in fiction. It had what Hollywood types (and, increasingly, publishing types) call “high concept.” Sounded like a grand slam, honestly.

The other project was something he’d been champing at the bit to write since before his first book was published.

He didn’t know what to do. He was at a point in his career where he’d published a couple of books that met with so-so sales responses. He knew he could sell his publisher on another book, but he didn’t know which one to go with: The moneymaker or the passion project. He really, really wanted to make some money!

Who doesn’t? We all want to make money. Money is good. Money buys food and shelter and clothing, to say nothing of really important stuff that matters, like comic books.

Now, you already know what I told him to do, right? This isn’t an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a twist ending, after all. I told him to pursue the passion project. What matters, though, is why.

Two reasons:

1. Fads and trends are, by their very nature, mercurial. They shape shift. They move about like sand under the tides. The absolute killer idea you have right now — today — that will capitalize on the lucrative ocelot trend will flop like an out-of-breath fat guy when it’s finally published a year from now. By the time you identify the trend and write something to take advantage of it, the odds are you’re too late. You might catch the tail-end of it and ride to publication, but the odds of raking in the dough are negligible.
2. Repeat after me: Someday, you’re going to be dead. And all that will be left of you will be — ideally — a shelf of books you wrote. Do you want those books to be products of your heart, soul, mind, and loins, stories that speak to something welling up deep inside you? Or do you want them to be crap you hacked out to try to make a buck?

As a writer, you make choices every single day. To adverb or not to adverb? Sci-fi or romance? First person or third person? But the biggest choice is what you want to leave behind.

You only have so many hours in a day. So many days in a week. So many weeks in a year. So many years in a life. Every book you do write means one you can’t.

I like to tell people that I only write a book when I get to the nuns and puppies stage. By this, I mean I write a book when I feel so passionately about it that I would cheerfully run over a crowd of nuns and puppies, if that’s what it took. This is hard-fought, hard-won knowledge. In a couple of cases, I wrote the book I thought I should write, not the one I desperately wanted to write. I’ve always regretted those decisions.

Write the book you must write, not the book you think will lead to fame and riches.

And if there’s no book that compels you, no book that obsesses you, no book that bleeds into your dreams…

Oh, come on — who are we kidding? If you’re reading this, you’ve got to have at least a half-dozen such books competing for your time and attention.

Don’t you?