It’s hard to write.

It’s the holidays. It’s the drama. It’s the unexpected car repair, the meeting you don’t want to have tomorrow, the conversation you wish you hadn’t had today. It’s the fight with your sister, the lunch you forgot to pack, the accident that makes you reroute half an hour out of your way when all you want is to go home.

Life will give you plenty of reasons not to write. Life can drain you like a hole punched in an oil pan on a back road full of sharp rocks.

“Tomorrow,” you whisper to yourself, and you let the hours go, because today is just not the day. Tomorrow will be the day. Or the day after that.

But if you are lucky enough to have a spark in you that gives you the ability to write, fan the flame. Don’t let the things that happened to you today stop you from writing.

Write in spite of the bad news.

Write because you got bad news.

Write because there is an endless tide of darkness, and it is always coming, and you have been given a candle to light. Don’t wait for tomorrow to light it. Strike now, set that thing ablaze, and push back.

Push hard.

Story idea: “Whatcha doing?”

Me: “I’m enjoying having Finished One Thing, and now I’m Waiting for Feedback on the New Thing.”

Story idea: “So you uh… don’t have a Current Thing?”

Me: “No, I do. Just not with me right now. It’ll be back soon.”

Story idea: “But it’s not back yet.”

Me: “No, technically not. But it will be. Soon. And it will have notes stuffed in its pockets. It will need my focus. It will need my attention. It will need my love. And the One Thing I Finished will come back again too.”

Story idea: “But they aren’t here now.”

Me: “No, but they’re coming.”

Story idea: “I’m here now.”

Me: “I see that.”

Story idea: “You could just outline me. I’m not asking for a commitment.”

Me: “Yeah, sure. It always starts with an outline.”

Story idea: “You know as well as I do that’s not true.”

Me *blush*: “Well…”

Story idea: “You could put me down anytime and come back to me. I wouldn’t mind.”

Me: “But…”

Story idea: “It’s going to rain this week. And get cold. Don’t you want something to distract you from rain and cold?”

Me: “I have cats. And books.”

Story idea: “But what if you had cats, books, AND an outline?”

Me: “Dammit. You’ve got me.”

This manuscript has almost been done since June.

Still not done.

Why not?

The ending. It was as genuine as the grass in a cheap Easter basket.

I outlined. I reworked. I swore. I started a dump file that now contains almost 50,000 words that I loved so much I couldn’t bear to delete them, but I also knew I couldn’t put them in the story because they didn’t belong.

The only way out, I have long held, is through. I was going to write this thing if it killed me. I was going to push through until I wrote The End.

Then I remembered that my agent can tell when I’m shoving a square peg into a round hole in order to make a story. And she calls me on it.

And now she’s gotten me trained to the point where I can tell when I am doing just that, and I know enough to stop, and reconsider.

Breathe, Montrose. Use what you’ve learned. Trust the story.

So I went back to the beginning, and carefully picked up all the threads again, evaluating them, considering what they meant. I edited. I thought. I developed the weird concept map thing that somehow works to pull my scenes together into a story.

And it has taken forever. (For forever, read three months).

But it’s almost done.

Sometimes, the only way out is back, not through.

I outlined this novel. Honest, I did.

And it looked good. Spent two weeks on it.

It was a good guide for about fifty pages and then

It all went straight to hell. What looked good in the outline was a hot mess of  Characters Behaving Badly For No Apparent Reason in the story.

Who to believe? The outline, or the story?

The story, of course. Always trust the story. Maybe without the outline, I’d have written a horrendous first draft all the way through and wound up making the same changes anyways, but it would have taken a lot longer. Or maybe I’m no good at outlining.

What I’m wondering is whether it’s just me. Do you outline, and if so, how well does it work for you? Is it possible to outline a story and have it come out the way you planned, or does the outline just save you the pain of another draft on your way to a better story?

Recently, Chuck Wendig posted a challenge, a thousand words on why you write.

Interesting, partly because of this recent conversation:

Me: In fact, it wouldn’t even matter if I quit writing. *BLATANT ATTEMPT TO FISH FOR SUPPORT. CONTAINS NO ACTUAL PLAN TO QUIT*

Friend: Yeah, probably not.

Me: …

It made me think, though. Why do I have this ironclad will to keep going? Why don’t I quit?

Is this answer the reverse of the question Mr. Wendig poses?

Doesn’t matter. I give you: Why I Don’t Quit Writing

1) Because writing reminds me to have empathy. No matter what, there’s a story behind the situation that I don’t know. We know this, intuitively, in our own choices of words. “What’s the story with that?” we ask. “What’s his story?” We know. And yet sometimes we forget. Maybe the jerk who cut me off is a jerk with a sportscar and a complex, or maybe he’s a desperate dad who got bad news and is hurrying to a hospital. Sometimes five over the speed limit isn’t fast enough.

2) Because the phrase “I’m a… *fill in the blank*” fills me with horror when the filled in blank contains a job title. I’m not my job. I’m a person with a job. I happen to be very lucky because I love my job. It’s meaningful and awesome, and I am so lucky. But I’m not it. Writing is something that no one can take away from me. I could cast it aside, let it fall by the wayside, let it be killed by a thousand tiny bites of time, a million papercuts of need. But that would be on me.

3) Because so many stories not only don’t have happy endings, they don’t have any endings. They don’t make any sense. There’s no arc and no development, and sometimes “What’s the story with that?” has absolutely no answer. Chaos gibbers around us. I write so there’s at least one tiny space that I can control where there is an answer. There’s an arc. There’s a resolution.

Why do I write? Probably a totally different answer. But this is why I don’t quit.

What was kicking my ass is that I did everything right.

Right potting soil.

Seeds from a reputable vendor.

Combined in trusty seed starter with warming pad.

Watered to the precisely desired amount of dampness.

And… nothing. Nada. Zip. No seedlings.

Deep breath.

“There’s always the nursery,” husband says. “We can buy plants.”

*glare*

“Worst case scenario,” he amends.

He’s right. But I’ve done this before. Why am I a failure now?

I am not a failure.

Rip it all out. The soil was a year old. Maybe that was it. Does soil get old? Who knows?

Buy fresh soil.

Redo.

Patience. Calm. Do not count the days since planting.

Do. Not. Count. The. Days.

Nothing.

For ten days. Two weeks. Nothing.

I am a failure.

I am stubborn. The soil can sit there and be watered and warmed, carrying its unresponsive load of seed. It can just sit there. If there are no plants by… April… then maybe I will clean up the seed starter. And go to the nursery. But for now, it can just sit there. Is it stubbornness? Is it faith? Is it a refusal to admit failure? Am I kidding myself?

I don’t know. I carry on.

This morning?

Seedlings.

I’ve been taking the same class for twenty years.

Well, not exactly.

But I still remember walking into the room where my first CPR class was to be held. Bleach stung the air. The plastic mannequins rested on blue mats, placed just beyond the industrial grey tables and molded plastic chairs of the kind that you know will be uncomfortable after a few minutes.

I wasn’t there to be comfortable. I was there to learn CPR. I had bought the book ahead of time and studied the slightly cartoonish pictures and had absolutely no idea how any of this might apply to me someday putting the heel of my hand on a person’s chest and pressing down in a rhythm that on that long ago day had not yet seeped into my bones, become part of a muscle-memory that’s now much too deeply engraved to ever be erased.

Malcolm Gladwell’s statistic on the amount of time it takes to master something is 10,000 hours.

What’s that mean, though?

10,000 hours, assuming you work full time at 40 hours a week, breaks down into about 5 years of nine to five work.

What’s that mean?

That means doing whatever-it-is so many times that you remember the first time you did it, the eleventh, the twenty third, the four hundred and twelfth. It means remembering different times in a shifting deck of instances, of the time this happened and the time that happened and several hundred times in between, until all of those times inform the current one without you being consciously aware.

I’m there in my day job, of which CPR is still a part. I’m over my five years in. And I’ve got that shifting deck of slices of time.

I’m waiting anxiously for it to happen with writing – and slowly, slowly, it seems like it is.

There’s a particular book I love.

Only a few have ever seen it, or know it exists, but I love it.

It is the first story I ever wrote all the way through – haltingly over a few years. It’s not at all polished, but the bones of the story are lovely to me, and although I recognized its faults and put it in the noveltrunk along with the fragments I’d been putting on paper since my teens, I never forgot it.

So much so that during my most recent phone call with my agent, I grabbed my courage with both hands and pitched it alongside a newer idea for a story that I also love. Old idea, new idea. Let the agent and fate decide.

The old idea is the one that got an excitement noise from her, so I confessed I had written it a long time ago. As in years. As in I had no idea what I was doing at the time I set it down. But still, the premise. So much in love with it. Still.

“Write it all over,” she suggested. “I know it sounds like a lot of work.” (She knows how to temper wisdom with empathy)

Work? Ha. I laugh in the face of work. I will eat the elephant, one bite at a time.

“You should try outlining it first,” she added.

Oh. Oh god. Another first. I’ve never outlined a novel before writing it in my life – but until two years ago, I never wrote a successful query letter, spoke with an agent on the phone, or started a Twitter account, either…

So. An outline. Based on what I already had. Not too bad. I did this with the story that attracted the agent’s attention. I could do this. It was a rewrite. It wasn’t that foreign. This could happen.

Except.

The more I outlined, the more it changed. If I ever wondered how much I had learned since 2008, this was a fine way of figuring it out.

At last, I had an outline. It felt good. It felt right. I would not be disappointed by my lack of pantsing on this project. I would press on and rewrite the story according to the new outline. Keep the parts that made me love it and lose the parts that made me cringe, and it would all be good.

And then I discovered that even with an outline… there are gaps. Gaps that delight the pantser in me. Gaps that still need a leap to bridge. Satisfying. And yet without the slight anxiety that was always there with a completely pantsed story that felt like the ghost of Christmas yet to come leering at me from my peripheral vision.

And perhaps it won’t need the massive edits that the pantsed ones did. Maybe. Just maybe.

It was because I was hypoxic that I missed it for a while. That’s my story.

Part of my daily commute includes a long road bordered by stretches of grey and dun farmland interrupted by a single farmhouse with a wide roof at a shallow angle.

And on that roof tonight there were lights. Puzzling lights. A circle of gold lights, covering the whole expanse of roof. In the circle, a vertical line of white lights with a shorter line of white lights sticking out to the right at the end of the vertical line. Over the white lights, another line of lights, these red, angling upward from left to right.

What? What kind of decoration is this? My head hurts and I haven’t slept the night through in about two weeks for various reasons, and I just can’t manage to solve it. But I puzzle at it. Are the white lights meant to be a hockey stick? They look like a hockey stick. Not a fan of hockey? Enough to climb on a roof and arrange lights? Possible, but likely not. Maybe the part of the white lights that forms that little right angle to the vertical is a mistake? Or an artifact produced by available wiring, meant to be overlooked? Maybe the red and white lines symbolize candy canes. Or something.

That doesn’t feel right either. Puzzle, puzzle. Look forward to getting home and having dinner, and then maybe hot tea and cough syrup, and yet… the lights.

“They look like an L,” my brain supplies helpfully. “What don’t people like that starts with L?”

Liver? We’re a few blocks from the library, could it be a protest against the library? Not very seasonal.

“No… no… no “L” something,” I mutter. I’m almost home and the mystery of the lights will soon be swept away in the confusion of greetings from husband (who is also sicker than a dog) and the cats, who seem to sense that humans are sick and must be cuddled. “No L. No L.”

Right.

No L. Noel.

Got it.

And this, I remind myself as I turn the key in the ignition and leave the truck parked in the drive until the predawn hours when we must meet again, is why one reads one’s work aloud to oneself. The mind won’t find what the ears don’t hear.