Well, it’s 2019, and we’re all still here writing. Or at least I hope we are. No matter how many things I publish, how many manuscripts I complete and feel good about, there’s always an up-and-down quality to enthusiasm. Every writer experiences dark moments when they lose confidence in what they’re doing, or feel like their careers are stalled or perhaps ended forever. It’s inevitable.
When this happens in terms of what I’m working on, it’s pretty awful; whether you’re 3,000 or 30,000 words in, that sudden sense that your WIP is boring and not worth the effort can lead to day drinking and poor Netflix choices which can then slur into a spiral of lost time that undermines everything else you’re trying to do.
When this happens to a WIP I try a little psychological trick: I imagine my reader’s reaction to what I’m working on.
The Audience is Key
I’m a huge believer in getting your work out there. The act of creation is just half of it—the other half is getting your words in front of eyeballs to be appreciated, critiqued, and hopefully enjoyed.
When I was a little kid, I shared a bedroom with my older brother. When we were small, we’d lay in bed at night and entertain each other with stories. We just made shit up, and it was a blast, and I can remember the feeling of excitement when I had a good idea for a new story at night. I anticipated my brother’s reactions, and couldn’t wait to lay my genius on him. The fact that most of my stories at the time were satires of Star Wars which thought the height of humor was renaming Luke Skywalker Luke Mudd is beside the point, dammit. I was eight.
That anticipation sometimes solves my enthusiasm deficits. I imagine someone reading the story I’m working on, and getting to that big twist or that moment where I really sharpen and define the premise, and I imagine their reaction. I imagine that excitement—we’re writers, so we’re readers. We know that excitement that wells up inside when you realize the writer is about to do something really, really cool.
I imagine that. And then I want that moment. And often that clicks me back into being excited as a writer, and I get a second wind on the WIP.
Of course, if that fails, there’s always the aforementioned day drinking, which has gotten me through just about every other crisis in my life. To paraphrase The Simpsons, Booze: Teacher, mother … secret lover.