Ask the Author: Wesley W. Walker
Answered Questions (5)
Wesley W. Walker
No, I can't. I'm currently being eaten by an indescribable shapeless horror of teeth and nightmare, and -
Wesley W. Walker
Above all else, be completely honest with yourself. While this obviously means you shouldn’t fool yourself into believing your writing is any better than it actually is, it also means that you shouldn’t baselessly believe your writing is worse than it is either.
Writing well is neither magic nor science. It’s one part talent and nine parts beating your face against your manuscript until you loathe every single word. It’s a torturous marathon where you are the runner simultaneously building the road while tripping over every misplaced stone, getting hopelessly lost in every dead end, and tumbling into every unbridged ravine with nobody to blame but yourself.
While pretty much anyone can write something at some point that could be accused of being a first draft, even talented writers are going to produce a pile of steaming hot garbage, and anyone who believes otherwise is either a unicorn or a narcissistic idiot. Much to my personal dismay, there are no such things as unicorns, and it would be impossible to type with hooves anyway.
Regardless, your euphoria from completing your first draft will begin to wear off as soon as you start reading it. Assuming you’re at all competent as a writer, you’re going to have the immediate urge to bury the abomination deep in wild and tangled woods far, far away from human eyes. This is absolutely normal.
However, there is little difference between being confident without competence (embarrassingly bad) and being competent without confidence (painfully bad). In short, the tortured artist trope is incredibly overrated, and it’s entirely possible to be exactly the right amount of confident and competent at the same time.
It starts with being totally (but not brutally) honest with yourself, which requires routine soul searching and daily gut checks. It also means listening to people you trust to be honest about your writing, which, yes, means you’re going to have to let other people read your work before it’s perfect (spoilers: it will never be perfect).
Writing well is hard enough already, so get out of your own way.
Writing well is neither magic nor science. It’s one part talent and nine parts beating your face against your manuscript until you loathe every single word. It’s a torturous marathon where you are the runner simultaneously building the road while tripping over every misplaced stone, getting hopelessly lost in every dead end, and tumbling into every unbridged ravine with nobody to blame but yourself.
While pretty much anyone can write something at some point that could be accused of being a first draft, even talented writers are going to produce a pile of steaming hot garbage, and anyone who believes otherwise is either a unicorn or a narcissistic idiot. Much to my personal dismay, there are no such things as unicorns, and it would be impossible to type with hooves anyway.
Regardless, your euphoria from completing your first draft will begin to wear off as soon as you start reading it. Assuming you’re at all competent as a writer, you’re going to have the immediate urge to bury the abomination deep in wild and tangled woods far, far away from human eyes. This is absolutely normal.
However, there is little difference between being confident without competence (embarrassingly bad) and being competent without confidence (painfully bad). In short, the tortured artist trope is incredibly overrated, and it’s entirely possible to be exactly the right amount of confident and competent at the same time.
It starts with being totally (but not brutally) honest with yourself, which requires routine soul searching and daily gut checks. It also means listening to people you trust to be honest about your writing, which, yes, means you’re going to have to let other people read your work before it’s perfect (spoilers: it will never be perfect).
Writing well is hard enough already, so get out of your own way.
Wesley W. Walker
My current work in progress (2021) is a fantasy novel I'm calling the Black Wall Chronicles. It is fairly early on in the manuscript process, though the zero draft is much further along. I suppose I'll have to revisit this as I get further along.
Wesley W. Walker
I have to be emotionally invested in the characters on a very emotional level, not necessarily because "I'm so incredibly profound", but because I'm prone to bouts of profound laziness, so, if I'm not emotionally invested in the characters, I just won't invest the time in writing.
Music, especially instrumentals, because vocals and lyrics are so distracting to me.
The end. I know some people consider it cheating, but I like to know how the story is going to end, so I can focus on the emotional catharsis that I am building toward and channel that into the writing of all that comes before it.
Pain. My characters are, in many ways, auto-biographical. I won't go into which character represents which emotional trauma from my psychic trauma (and neither should you), but I do believe that it would be harder for me to write characters with real pain if I didn't carry it around an abundance of my own.
Music, especially instrumentals, because vocals and lyrics are so distracting to me.
The end. I know some people consider it cheating, but I like to know how the story is going to end, so I can focus on the emotional catharsis that I am building toward and channel that into the writing of all that comes before it.
Pain. My characters are, in many ways, auto-biographical. I won't go into which character represents which emotional trauma from my psychic trauma (and neither should you), but I do believe that it would be harder for me to write characters with real pain if I didn't carry it around an abundance of my own.
Wesley W. Walker
Your mileage may vary with any of these, because I actually struggled a lot with writer's block. It took nearly twenty years to write The Night Chasers, though the vast majority of it was written in the last two years. I do believe that, for many writers, a writer's block is as real as a brick wall, and there isn't a lot you can do about it, at least in some cases.
I "wrote" a lot of notes for TNC in a notebook, jotting down ideas, scenes, character notes, etc. And if I couldn't make progress on the typed manuscript because I was "stuck" (one kind of writer's block), I'd break out the notebook and do some plotting and review my notes to look for inspiration.
If I was feeling depressed and thus utterly unmotivated, there was nothing but letting it pass. Sometimes I could syphon some of that despair for the darker points in the book but usually not.
"The trick is to keep breathing." - Garbage
I "wrote" a lot of notes for TNC in a notebook, jotting down ideas, scenes, character notes, etc. And if I couldn't make progress on the typed manuscript because I was "stuck" (one kind of writer's block), I'd break out the notebook and do some plotting and review my notes to look for inspiration.
If I was feeling depressed and thus utterly unmotivated, there was nothing but letting it pass. Sometimes I could syphon some of that despair for the darker points in the book but usually not.
"The trick is to keep breathing." - Garbage
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