For dubious reasons, I wanted to crave writing fiction.
Writing fiction, especially longform fiction like novels, is time-consuming. The only people who spend enough time on it to get anywhere, it seems, are the ones who can’t help themselves. They can’t stop thinking about it, their heads are constantly full of it. It’s a drive.1
If I wanted to write fiction, I needed to install a compulsion somehow, a compulsion I did not already have.
And why did I want to write fiction badly enough to attempt to rewire my brain about it?
Well, the main reason is a little embarrassing.
Getting deeply into writing fiction would be very convenient for my romantic and social life. Two of my partners and a lot of my friends write fiction, many of them collaboratively. Co-writing fiction is among the most popular social activities in my community. It’s probably my primary partner’s favorite thing to do for fun. (Well, second-favorite, and we’ve got his favorite covered.) It would be nice to have that hobby in common with him.
On top of my sketchy desire to socially conform and please my boyfriend, I also wanted to see if I could do it, in the same way that some people want to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there.” I’ve always admired the authors of my favorite books. It felt like a grand and worthy challenge to try to join their ranks. It would be hard, but I can do hard things.
Was it even possible, though? Can you really just decide what you want to do? I can choose to do things I don’t like, but I didn’t think I could drag myself through hours of writing almost every day unless I was fully on board, internally — and thus eliminate the drag. I needed to really want it.
If I were already a great fiction writer, I’d now switch from the “A” plot I just introduced and take you through a “B” and a “C” plot before finally returning to “A,” and then I’d have the main character try one increasingly reckless tack after another, encountering worse and worse problems, before finally revealing at the end of the story that she was mistaken all along, and that wanting to crave writing fiction was not what she really needed, and that the greatest power in the universe is actually… a mother’s love.
Well, maybe I’d find a better ending than that, if I were a great fiction writer.
But I’m not a great fiction writer, and so instead of building all that plot tension I’ll just go ahead and tell you what happened.
The main character (me) was misguided! Wanting to crave writing fiction was not what she really needed!
(What she really needed, besides a massage and a good night’s sleep, was to go deeper on non-fiction writing, and to take her boyfriend to more escape rooms.)
But what about the larger question? Can you just decide to want things? And in particular, can someone decide to want to write fiction?
The answer, I think, is “sort of.”
You can remove major psychological and logistical obstacles blocking your path. You can remove small but nagging bits of friction that are getting in the way of your regular writing practice. You can build self-reinforcing habits. You can engineer how and where you’re getting your reward signals. Overall, you can sculpt your own incentive landscape, to clear a path to exercising your pre-existing drive to write. If you do all that, you may be able to shift your writing from aspirational to active.
It seems considerably harder, though, to install a brand new fundamental compulsion.2 I failed to install a fiction-writing compulsion in myself. I’m letting that go.
But I’m not coming away empty-handed! Along the way, I read or skimmed more than fifty books about writing. I noticed some major deficits in what they, collectively, had to say, and I thought a lot about the missing pieces. I got much better at writing non-fiction. I have a far keener appreciation for other people’s fiction because I notice a lot more of their craft. And now, I tend to see a lot more of the world through a narrative lens, and that’s been a lot of fun. I’m pleased with how I’ve spent my time, even though I didn’t hit my original target.
Over the next three weeks, I’ll be releasing a series of articles about what I’ve learned. This is not just a book report — in many of the articles, it’s a scathing review of how all the writing advice books were disappointing and inadequate, and what I think they should have said instead. In the last third of the series, I’ll summarize the useful parts of the books and give specific recommendations and anti-recommendations.
Here’s what I’ve got in store for you.
Who Are You? What Do You Want?3
Advice about Being a Writer
Advice about Writing and Annotated Bibliography
Are you going to enjoy reading this series? I don’t know! Many of my readers originally subscribed for the relationship, sex, and therapy content, and this series will be pretty different. That said, I’ll make more than a few sex jokes, and the nature of motivation is pretty central to psychotherapy, so you might be pleasantly surprised.
But if it’s just not for you, if you have no interest in my non-fictional takes on writing fiction, I hereby give you permission to skip out! I’d hate to see you try to force yourself to love it, when you just don’t. Apparently, that’s not how anything works. Go read something else, something more fun for you. Maybe… some fiction.
In this series of articles, I’ll use the word “drive” colloquially, meaning the kind of motivation that feels like it has a push behind it. This kind of motivation feels easy and natural to act on, and may even feel hard to resist.
One of my friends has written millions of words in a fictional world where installing a compulsion would totally not be a problem.
The two important questions.
whomst are those footnote creatures
(and what do they want)
What would be the most polite way to remind Miranda aka Swimmer963 that she said there would be at least seven epilogue chapters of that saga and as of now there are only five?