Beantown Filter

I've created a filter for Boston-area people. If you think you should be on it, but you did not see the previous message about schlock movies, leave a comment here and I'll add you right up. (You can be on the filter if you're not in Boston, too, but it won't be very interesting to you.)

Lesson is more

Writing has damn few rules, but not zero. One I keep running up against is this: You can't write a book that's any better than the best book you can write.

There are many nights (too many) when I don't make any meaningful progress on word count, and almost always it's because I'm spending my time at the keyboard wishing I could write better. "If I could write better," I say, "then I'd be able to make this scene work; I'd be able to make this sentence less of an albatross; I'd be able to keep my readers from dozing off." I type words, scowling, and I delete them, and after a couple of hours I go to bed feeling mad at myself for failing to get anything down.

I have this idea that a Really Good Book called The Slow Palace exists in potentia, and it's my job to bring it into being. If I'm not up to the task, if the words I choose aren't worthy of this glittering book-to-be, I shouldn't sully it by filling it with my imperfect words; I should wait until I'm worthy.

But the rule is, I can't write a book that's better than the best book I can write. The Slow Palace is only as good as my writing. That sounds obvious, but I keep forgetting it, again and again. Sitting there waiting for the ability to write the sentences I want to write isn't going to result in a better book — it'll result in an unwritten book. Leaving aside the experimentally determined truism that I'm quite unable to judge the quality of my writing until some months after I've written it, the only way to improve my writing, both day-to-day (which is really a muffling of my internal critic) and long term (which is really getting better at writing), is by writing. All I can do is write the best book I can write, and have some kind of faith that what I'm doing is working. If I'm convinced that what I'm writing sucks — well, that's too bad, isn't it? It's the best I can do, and I'm the only one here. I can always delete it later, I can always fix it in the revision, I can always look back with a less critical eye and decide that it works — but only if I write it.

So I grumble, and put words down, and after half an hour I write something that makes me say, "Well, that's not too bad." And the book gets built, sentence by sentence.