How I Write

I was checking out my author page on Goodreads.com the other day (which you can find here – shameless self-promotion plug) and I had previously enabled the “Ask me questions”. The good folks at Goodreads were kind enough to send me a number of questions.  One of them was “How do you get inspired to write?”

The answer is…I don’t. As a person with a family and a full time job, the author gig gets fit into very specific slices of time during the week. If I want to make any progress at all, I have to show up at that time and start typing, even if I don’t feel like it. The one thing I’ve found is that waiting to be inspired means you miss opportunities to do something.  Woody Allen famously said, ” 80 percent of success is showing up.” I firmly believe that.

There are many days that I come home from an awful day at work and that night is one of my scheduled writing times and I think I just can’t face it. But after dinner, I force myself to go to the computer and just start typing. It probably isn’t very good and I’ll probably end up rewriting it later, but I keep hammering away, word by word, sentence by sentence. Those nights can be such  drudgery but I have put words to paper (or at least digitized them) and I can call myself a writer. And usually I find that everything is very slow and taxing in the begin, the words eventually start to break out of my head a little quicker and I get on a roll.

Of course, the best days are those rare days that my fingers can’t keep up with ideas spilling out of my head. Those days are precious and should be treasured. But I think it’s just as important to honor the days that you didn’t give up and just kept writing. Just like the old joke: How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.  The answer to “How do write a novel? One word at a time”

And now for more shameless self-promotion: If you’ve read The Reluctant Captain, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, or wherever you purchased the book.  If you’ve borrowed it from the library (there are two copies in the Four County Library System), likewise, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews help me learn what people like and didn’t like and also (here’s the self-promotion part) make it more intriguing for other people to read my book.

Thanks again and Happy Journeys!

Mike