I learned the hard way that I suck at writing.
It was probably the only way I was going to learn this lesson, honestly.
My daughter has always been impossible to teach. Throughout her 9 years of existing, she’s expressed interest in various pursuits. Crochet. Guitar. Ballet. Curling. Ukulele. Painting. Sketching. Cooking. She starts to learn, skims the fundamentals, and then expects perfection.
Sometimes I berate her about it. When I tried to teach her crochet, she couldn’t wrap her brain around how to hold the hook in one hand and the work in the other, and so she tried to invent her own ridiculous way of holding the hook and wrapping the yarn around it. And I’m like, “No, it’s not gonna work like that. Your way is going to take so much longer. It’s not as efficient. There’s a reason why there’s a right way.”
And she just kind of crumbled, defeated, and went on to watch her comfort show.
I’m not an idiot, but it’s taken me longer than I’d like to admit to see myself in her behavior.
I’ve been working on the same project since November of 2022. It’s an erotic black comedy about a Gen X mother ready to give up on the whole picket fence American dream. I planned on writing a second book from the love interest’s POV (you know, like Twilight and 50 Shades style, because that’s an easy cash grab). My plan was to make it, like, you know, good. And then the concept morphed into an X-style trilogy, with the second book being a backstory for my protagonist1.
It’s been over a year of nightly “writing”2 and I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing. I’ve done a zero-draft of two books (the first and the second). That’s like 60,000 words (which isn’t nothing, I guess?), but it’s not a complete novella with complete characters or scenes or anything. It’s just this “idea” with threads weaving back and forth between time periods.
Meanwhile, I keep wasting time on social media, watching other writers publish books and win awards. I end up feeling bad for myself, and I double down on writing even HARDER, so that soon I’ll have a book to publish and win awards.
It’s been over a year of nightly “writing” and I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing.
I also forget that I already have a fucking book that didn’t win any awards, BUT one that I can still fucking sell and I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to fucking do anything. I don’t know how to be a writer. I only know how to write short stories when I’m depressed.3
I’m being entirely real here, but in the nearly 20 years that I’ve been writing “pRoFeSsIoNaLlY”, I haven’t learned jack shit. I have all these big fucking dreams and I haven’t even got the fundamentals down. I just considered myself a “pantser”.
The other night, in a restless attempt to sort out the mess of my work, I ended up finding myself a romance novel beat sheet that I copy/pasted into my Scrivener document. With a little help, I read through each beat and matched it up to the half-thought scene I’d summarized in my document at some point in the last year.
And lemme tell you, something happened. Something so good happened. I might have been high, but the writer high came over me. Ideas were forming. New scenes were happening. The beat sheet helped me tie the whole room together.
I talked a bit on TikTok about this new revolution and the comments section recommended I check out the Save the Cat! Writes a Novel book. I’ve seen this book around for years but always thought I was past that fundamental stuff. The title also never made much sense to me and so I just assumed I didn’t need it. But I do.
I need to learn how to plot stuff. I need to learn how to organize my writing time into my life. I need to learn how to manage it just like all those ADHD app ads in all my feeds keep telling me to do.
Part of me fantasizes about where I could have been had I realized all this earlier, but there’s not much I can really do. It’s not the INFP way, and it’s not like I do nothing with my creativity. My ideas are all still floating in my head, and many of them I actually do write down in a fit of creative energy, quickly to become another unfinished manuscript in my folder full of unfinished manuscripts. And that’s okay. Because once I get the dang fundamentals down, I’ll have novellas for days.
And hey, maybe one of those novellas will actually become a novel. Maybe I’ll even rewrite that stupid cursed novel that got me into this situation in the first place. (See the introduction of Ending in Ashes for that lore.
[O]nce I get the dang fundamentals down, I’ll have novellas for days.
In the meantime, I’m setting sprint timers and giving myself room to breathe and just accept the kind of writer that I am. I’ve been writing “seriously” for over two decades and might only have two short story collections to show for it, but I’m going to fucking figure this out or I’m just going to get depressed and fill my unfinished manuscript folder with more ideas.
As for my daughter, well, she’s taken to religiously practicing her recorder in school. She plays Hot Cross Buns over and over and over and over and over and fucking over. She plays it for the cockatiel and it’s kind of cute, honestly. She’s got quite the passion for it, and I hope she can keep up her practice of the fundamentals better than I ever could.
My obsession with Woodstock 99 at the time and needed a place for that whole hyperfixation to go, which was into a novella, of course!
“Writing” usually includes (but is not limited to) the viewing of Woodstock 99 footage.
For all my 2021 post novel rejection depression era stories, check out my neo-gothic collection ENDING IN ASHES. There’s even an introduction in there about all my depression.