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The Myth of the Writing Fairy

 Joseph Devon

Why is it so difficult to sit down
and write a novel?  Here's a fun question to ponder

 What do The Stand, The Hobbit and A Christmas Carol all have in
common? The answer is simple. Too simple. Horrifyingly
simple. A few years ago I decided to write a novel. I had
characters all outlined and plot points galore. I had my
settings down pat and a nice storyline that would illuminate
the main character's journey into a self-activated person,
hopefully sending a touch of inspiration my reader's way
when they turned the last page of my novel. I had a large
amount of notes in an even larger amount of notebooks. I was
a writer. Right? Wrong. I wasn't a writer yet because I was
still enchanted by the Writing Fairy.

You know what the Writing Fairy looks like. She is that
magical creature that will take the dialogue running through
your head and place it onto the page. She is the person that
will fill in those little blanks that don't seem worth
worrying about while you're in the brainstorming stage. She
is the mythical beast that will take all of your imagination
and creativity and turn them into a book for you. The
Writing Fairy sits on your shoulder every time you pace up
and down your room thinking up great new ideas for where
your characters are heading and convinces you that you are
on your way to being an established author. The Writing
Fairy's touch is the only thing you are waiting for before
you begin to actually sit down and pound out the pages of
your manuscript. Yes, as soon as the Writing Fairy says that
it is time, you will begin to write in earnest. I have news
for you. The Writing Fairy is none other than you because
you are the only person who can do these things for you. And
the moment you are waiting for? I have some news concerning
that, too. That moment either comes right here right now, or
it never comes at all.

Am I saying that brainstorming about characters and muddling
over speeches is a waste of time? I most certainly am not.
What I'm saying is that you reach a certain point where your
outline doesn't need to be refined any more, where it's time
to put it onto the page and nail it down in a more concrete
sense. The Writing Fairy will make you hesitate to do this,
promising you that thinking really hard is writing. She'll
tell you that you aren't ready to put anything down on the
page yet, or you're not ready to go on with the next scene
because everything just doesn't seem right. Don't believe
her, she's deceiving you. I'd like to say that she is flat
out lying, but she's not. Things aren't going to seem right
when they first start to appear on the page. This is what
seems so contradictory about the writing process. Your
dreams and aspirations seem to shrink down once you actually
put them into writing. Being creative seems harder and
harder as more and more words get put down. Don't worry
though; your dreams are big enough. Acknowledging that your
finished piece is not going to live up to the sparkling gem
you have inside your head is something that every artist
goes through.it could be the reason why so many of us seem a
little bit crazy. Pick any piece of art. Now, as great as
that finished product seems to you, there is not a single
book, painting, opera, movie, whatever, that came out
exactly the way its creator intended it. That is a very
large part of the creative process: surrendering to its
limitations. And accepting this fact goes a long way towards
chaining down that Writing Fairy and actually producing some
work. Don't listen to her siren song. Don't think that it
should feel one hundred percent right the first time. It
won't. That's what the rewriting process is all about.
Believe me writing is truly in the rewriting. Even Kerouac
rewrote his stuff. However, in order to start the rewriting
process you need a hard first draft to pick over and toy
with. You need something concrete to look at and see which
scenes fit and which don't. You'll find that a lot of your
brainstorming gets thrown out the window. This isn't a
stifling of your creativity, is channeling your creativity
into your selection process. And it doesn't matter how
horrible and off the mark your first draft seems to be
turning out, you'll polish all of that out later. But you
need that first draft to really start things off, and it
will never get finished if you continue to believe the
Writing Fairy's misleading comments.

Take another look at the opening question of this article
again. Any closer to an answer?

I have more bad news about the Writing Fairy. Simply sitting
down in front of your keyboard and starting your novel
cannot vanquish her forever. She'll be back. She always
comes back. Here and there she offers a much-needed break
and a much-needed step back from your work to rethink
things. More often than not, though, she'll pop up as you
write more and more detailed character sketches, or get
sucked into researching something for hours and hours and
days and days. She is very good at convincing you that more
outside work is needed and that you don't need to sit down
at your keyboard quite yet. She must be stopped. When you
really hit a roadblock, you'll know. If you just need to
sort some things out that does not qualify a three-week
break from your manuscript. That's the Writing Fairy singing
her sweet song. You need to do more then just sit down and
start in order to silence the Writing Fairy. You need a
schedule. "But how can you turn your writing on and off like
that? How can you force yourself to write if you aren't
feeling it?" I imagine that some of this is flowing through
your head right now. The answer is that you can. It's that
easy. I'm not saying that you're going to sit down and write
Nobel Prize winning page after Nobel Prize winning page. But
you must keep writing. Keep fleshing out your story and your
scenes. Keep plowing through with your writing when you say
your going to even though it doesn't seem to be very good.
You're not going to submit it as it is anyway. The ending of
my novel changed about three hundred times in the course of
writing it. What's more, I never would have reached the
ending if I had continued to go over and over my first
twenty pages wanting them to be perfect. It's really silly
when you think about it. You don't have an entire book yet,
how can you make sure the opening is perfect if you don't
know where it's supposed to lead the reader? You don't
really know your characters yet, how can you expect them to
be just right? Believe me, it is better to write it horribly
wrong and then fix it than to never write it in the first
place. Keep plugging away, keep going, keep heading towards
that ending that doesn't seem to fit and that you don't
really even like. Carve a few hours out of each day and just
type away at the keyboard. You can always make a scene
longer. You can always take out some dialogue. You can
always change a character or a point of view. You can really
do anything you want to, which is why it's easy to get
bogged down in the beginning. Keep in mind that while you
can always change it, you have to write it first.

Now, do you want to know the Writing Fairy's
major-super-bonus-end-all-be-all secret? Here it is. Keep it
quiet. Put it in the bag somewhere next to the cat or under
your hat if you prefer. Here is my secret. You are a writer.
Right now. With only what you have in your head as it is.
You don't need anything else. You are a writer. You just
need to keep writing. Don't let the Writing Fairy tell you
that you aren't. That you need something more, that you're
pretending to be something you're not. Hemmingway wasn't
Hemmingway when he started. He was just a guy names Ernest
who sat down at his typewriter. Believe me. You are a
writer. You are a writer. You are a writer. And no, you
don't have to repeat that while clicking your heels three
times. You don't have to do anything but write. And that's
the Writing Fairy's horrible little secret. I stumbled upon
the moment I stopped waiting for her to show me a sign that
the time was right to actually start typing and just went
ahead and did it. Now is the right time; now or never.

So let's go back to the question at the beginning of this
article. Any ideas on what those three books have in common?
They're all in English? Okay, I'll add Les Miserables to the
list. They're all from the last few centuries? Okay, let's
throw The Iliad on there. Give up? What those books have in
common, what every book you read has in common, is that it
was written. Simple isn't it? I told you it was. That is the
only difference between what is in your head and any book
you have ever picked up. All the books you see every day
were actually written. Someone sat down and wrote them out.
That it. That's the secret. That's what the Writing Fairy is
hiding from you. You're ready to write your book. You just
have to sit down and do it. I said that the secret was
simple.I also called it horrifyingly so at the beginning of
this article. Why is it horrifying? Because, as I've
mentioned, the Writing Fairy is you. She makes it seem like
she's someone else. Someone or something you're waiting for
before you begin. But that someone or something doesn't
exist. The only thing that exists is the fears she creates
inside of your head. And that means that the person telling
you to wait is you. The person holding you back is you. The
person hesitating to write is you. And the only person who
can make you ignore all of this and just start writing.you
guessed it.is you. So come on, stop reading this, open up a
new document, start clicking away at those keys, don't be
afraid, just trust me on this one.you're a writer.

Joseph Devon is an author of two books and freelance writer.
To learn more about him, view more of his work, or contact
him please visit www.josephdevon.com