Hugh Howey and A Little Writing Advice Part 2
I love the way Hugh starts off his writing advice post, “I started writing my first novel when I was twelve years old. I was thirty-three when I completed my first rough draft. That’s twenty years of wanting to do something and not knowing how. Twenty years of failure and frustrations and giving up.” –Hugh
Wow, does that hit home for so many dreaming writers. We believe things like, “we aren’t good enough.” Or “It’s too late.”
But that is some of what we are going to dive into right now.
If you’re thinking it’s too late to start, start now.
Hugh was 33 when he finished the first draft of his very first book. It spent 12-33 years on the back burner of his mind. How long have you had a book idea stewing in your creative mind?
How long have you been telling yourself, I’ll never finish that? If this successful author had thought that, he wouldn’t be where he is today, sailing around the world and writing.
It’s better just to start chipping away at it and finish it eventually than to never finish it at all.
I think some of the reasoning is we worry that we’ll regret having spent so much time on something that doesn’t pay off in the end. While that is a real concern, my opinion is that it’s a bad concern. (Yes, if you quit everything and only worked on that it might be a bad decision for you.)
But if you spent some amount of minutes or hours on it each day instead of social media, I have a hard time thinking you’ll regret that.
I can tell you with 100% accuracy what will make you fail as a writer.
There is absolutely no telling whether or not you will be a success as a writer. Any writer could be a success. But I can tell you with 100% accuracy what will make you a failure as an author.
You never finish any story. You never start that blog you’ve been thinking about. You never try to freelance write.
The one thing that will absolutely make you a failure in writing is not writing what you know you want to write.
It’s a funny thing. We are SO afraid of failure sometimes that we FAIL by never starting. Which in turn makes us ACTUALLY FAIL at what we were afraid of failing at!
It’s a crazy failure loop!
Don’t fall into that loop. Don’t make failure so easy in your life that you fail by never starting what you think you might be passionate about.
Think about it. Will it be so painful to start out on a writing creative journey where you learn along the way and then you don’t become a world-renown writer at the end of all of it?
And who says we should even be dodging pain and hardship as much as we do? Maybe the hardship we experience through trying something hard like finishing a book will make us a better human in the end?
Who can tell?
What we can say is, “You miss 100% of the opportunities you don’t take.”
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Don’t be ridiculous.
The pressure we put on ourselves as writers is ridiculous.
“Imagine if NBA all-star Steph Curry attempted to learn to play basketball with a million people watching. Or if the first pickup game he ever played was his only chance to land an agent and get signed to an NBA team. This is the pressure writers put on themselves, and it makes no sense. Basketball players will put all the hustle and energy into a thousand practice games before they ever get a shot at turning pro. Most will spend a dozen years playing almost every day of their lives before they make it onto a high school or college team. Writers should have the same expectations. Perhaps you write a dozen novels before you write one that blows you away or becomes a bestseller. The point is to finish them all. Play all four quarters. Steph Curry played a thousand games to the end before he turned pro. Every game he finished was a success. He didn’t stop himself, and neither should you.” – Hugh
We see and read these amazing authors that we look up to and think, “wow I’ll never be able to accomplish what they have!”
The question is, have we written a dozen books? Did they just write one book and it blew up? For most of them, this is so untrue. Many successful authors faced SO MUCH rejection and hardship along the way.
Even when we look at Amazon reviews and see certain books with thousands of reviews, do we realize that they didn’t wake up one morning to those numbers without writing and editing a couple hundred thousand words at least? Or maybe even a couple million words.
When we think about becoming a successful writer we should be thinking about writing every day for years to come and then just get started. We shouldn’t be thinking, “I have to take my time and make this first draft perfect or else, I’m not gonna sell any copies.
You can fact check me on this, but recently heard or read this good advice.
We look at a famous painter like Picasso and think about how an artist becomes famous. We just see the fame and glory. He must have been some kind of savant that had divine intuition to know how to make art that people were going to love every time. The truth is Picasso probably made around 50,000 different paintings. Only about 50 of those become worthwhile and famous.
Those numbers are probably a little off but the principle stands. Most people that “get lucky” in the success of creation usually spent many many MANY hours doing their craft until one day something happened that made it all catch up. If they hadn’t have put in all the time beforehand that moment might have never happened.
Readers often express, “looking for something good to read.”
There is no shortage of desire to read well-written stories. For most people, the problem isn’t that their book or writing is good enough. It’s that they haven’t written anything or haven’t finished what they started.
If you complete your story, there is no shortage of people that are willing to give your writing a try. People are looking for unheard of gems. People love to read good books. Your next book could be that good read they are looking for and then they will pass it on to others.
In turn, we as humans like sharing good things with each other. When I find a good show I think my friends will like, I enjoy the process of telling them about it or introducing it to them. You probably have had a similar experience with friends or family.
Don’t assume that no one will want what you have. Finish and get it out there. If it gets a big pushback, just edit and try again till something sticks.
Hugh Howey and A Little Writing Advice Part 2
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Hope this helps!
Happy writing!
Resources:
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Hugh Howey and A Little Writing Advice Part 2
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