"Writing Is Hard Work" by Susan Dauenhauer Ciriello

Writing is hard work
". . . and bad for the health" ~E. B. White

"Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

~Gene Fowler

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."

~Samuel Johnson

Many people ask me why I need to set aside so many consecutive hours, even days at a time, to work on my novel, instead of just taking a prescheduled hour or two every day (or even just grabbing five minutes here and there) and slowly but steadily coming up with a finished product. Perhaps this method works for some people. However, I think it's a pretty safe bet that most successful part-time novelists don't have ADHD interfering with their ability to focus and actually get things accomplished in such short bursts. Author and creative writing teacher Brenda Ueland likewise found that,

"inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness."

Some of the greatest novelists were said to have sequestered themselves for days or weeks on end when working on their books, including Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. (Just think of all the Stephen King stories whose main characters are novelists seeking seclusion in order to write—a situation that sets them up as victims of all sorts of horrors!) Even today, the most successful female author of our time, J. K. Rowling, describes how she managed to write the first Harry Potter book (which took her five years to finish) while she was an unemployed single mother:

"People very often say to me, 'How did you do it? How did you raise a baby and write a book?' And the answer is I didn't do housework for four years. I am not Superwoman. Living in squalor—that was the answer."

Or, as author Doris Lessing put it,

"I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer."

And one of my all-time favorite writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, confirmed:

"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things."

So what's actually involved in writing a novel? What's so hard about it, and why does it take such sustained concentration?

In my opinion, there are five important things a writer should possess before even beginning a novel:

Imagination and the ability to daydream
A fascination with human behavior and psychology
Knowledge of pertinent facts (geography, history, etc.)—or an eagerness to learn them
The ability to translate your well-imagined story into words
Excellent writing skills

Then, assuming you have all these prerequisites, there are many more aspects to the actual process of writing a novel. Some of the steps involved are as follows:

Conceive the story from beginning to end, making sure it's interesting, exciting, logical, and original. (This can take years—or at least it did for me.)
Create the characters, get to know them as if they were real people, understand every aspect of their lives—their history, their backgrounds, their goals, their personalities and idiosyncrasies, their strengths and weaknesses, how they think, what they look like, how they dress, their mannerisms, the sound of their voices, their accents, their relationships and attitudes to each other, etc., etc., etc. Some writers go so far as to write a biography for each major character. (I'm one of them!) J. K. Rowling drew pictures of all her characters. One how-to book I read compared novel writing to acting—except that you have to get into the head of not just one character but those of every character in the story, often simultaneously, understanding their thoughts and motivations at all times, "good" guys and "bad" guys alike (of course, no fully rounded character is all good or all bad!), and give each one an internal logic for his actions. If you fail to do this, you end up writing melodrama, making the characters subservient to the plot. To me, such characters—or, rather, caricatures—do not seem believable, making it hard for me to care about them or their story long enough to finish reading it. My favorite novels are character-driven (think Dracula, Long John Silver), which, alas, seems to be rare these days. In fact, the whole reason I decided to attack this novel at all is because it's exactly the kind of book I want to read, and nobody else was writing it!
Develop a written outline.
Research the facts you already know you'll need in order to make the story credible. This will be especially time-consuming if you're writing a historical novel like I am. Some writers spend a decade or more just doing research before writing a book. To paraphrase a historical-fiction writer's how-to guide, if you don't enjoy research, historical is not your genre!
Unless you've already been there and know the place well, travel to the places in which the story will be set (assuming your setting is a real, accessible place). Observe, experience, and take notes on sights, sounds, colors, smells, landscapes, climate, flora and fauna. (It's possible through research to write about a place you've never been to, but your descriptions will lack the detail needed to transport the reader to your setting, and anyone who's actually been there will probably be able to tell you haven't. By contrast, reading my favorite novel of all time, Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, you can have no doubt that the author spent most of her life in Cornwall—making you want to do the same!) Of course, your budget, like mine, may be prohibitive, but think of it as an investment—if your novel is published and you've saved all your receipts, any travel you've done for research purposes is tax deductible!
Begin writing.

Whew! You're finally facing that blank computer screen (or sheet of paper or scroll of parchment) ready to start your first draft. With all that prep, it should be easy from here on, shouldn't it? The words should just start pouring forth, filling up page after page. This is the fun part, right? Well, in some ways it is, but to be truthful, there is no "easy" part. (Not if you want to write a really good novel, that is!) In fact, for the ADHD sufferer, this is the hardest part of all because here's where the concentration really comes in. Because for each individual scene, here's what I find is required:

Close your eyes, relax (easier said than done!), and imagine the scene. See, hear, smell, feel the surroundings; experience the weather. Envision your characters; hear them speaking; see them interacting with each other; perceive their surroundings through their eyes. While it sounds like daydreaming or fantasizing, this process isn't always fun, for, in order to create conflict (the essential ingredient of any story), you're going to have to invent some unpleasant scenarios—and your favorite characters probably won't be center stage all the time. Your characters are like your children, but you're bound to end up loving some more than others (these are the characters who spring naturally to life, practically writing the story for you, and when you put two or three of them together in the right situation, it may be hard to stop writing at all!), yet you need to give all your characters some time in the spotlight. If a character is irrelevant to the story, get rid of him! In fact, at times you may have to face killing off a favorite character for the good of the story. This is the least fun part of all.

"Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it."

~W. Somerset Maugham

Choreograph the characters' movements throughout the scene and know at all times where each character is and what he or she is doing—or planning to do. (For example, if your pirate has just plunked himself down upon a treasure chest, sharpening his cutlass, a few lines of dialog later, he shouldn't be standing at the ship's rail peering through his spyglass—unless you've intentionally moved him there. This may seem obvious, but it's easy to forget where you've actually placed your characters when you're absorbed in writing a long section of dialog!)
Make sure the scene flows naturally yet is consistent with your outline and your character profiles—and at the same time (the cardinal rule of novel writing) contributes in some way to advancing the plot!
Develop characters at an appropriate pace, revealing just the right amount about their backstory at the right time.
Build suspense while knowing when and how much to reveal about any mystery you've chosen to unfold.
Remember everything you've written so far so that you don't contradict or repeat yourself. Naturally, this becomes increasingly difficult the more you've written—and becomes a real challenge when you're forced to work in spurts, putting your work aside and coming back to it weeks or even months later.
Make sure everything that happens is consistent with the locale you've chosen, along with historical facts of the time period, the political atmosphere, and societal attitudes of the time. Even a seemingly arbitrary decision like what to name a character can result in an anachronism; for example, the nickname "Bob" (for "Robert") was not coined until the 1800s.
Do more research as you realize just how many unforeseen yet vital details you don't know about everyday life in a faraway place and time period!
Write dialog in the language of the time. OK, obviously this isn't required (especially if you're writing in Anglo-Saxon times!), but I find, if (like Anya Seton, another of my role models) you can make the dialog sound authentic, it really adds to the richness of the story and helps to transport the reader back to the time period. In fact, I get annoyed when hack novelists assume that writing old-fashioned speech is merely a matter of omitting contractions. The minutest bit of research would have revealed to them that, though they've changed over time (think of "'tis" versus "it's," for example), English has been fraught with contractions at least since Shakespeare's day. There's a lot of work involved in getting the dialog to sound authentic, and I admire authors who take the time to do it. The methods I've been using include, first of all, looking up every word I'm not certain of in the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (a) to ensure that the word was in use at the time of my story and (b) find out what it actually meant at the time—which is often different from what it means today. I've also tried to immerse myself in the actual writings of the day to get a feel not just for the vocabulary, but for prevalent grammatical structures as well. For example, the real-life pirate and explorer William Dampier's two books published in 1697 and 1703 have been invaluable to me, while eighteenth-century novelists Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding convey a feeling for the way people actually spoke (when they're actually writing dialog instead of pontificating on their respective philosophies of life!). Some of the most revealing reading has been actual accounts given by real pirates not so learned as William Dampier because their "misspellings" give a feel for pronunciation, while their uncorrected grammatical constructions demonstrate, for example, that pirates really did have trouble with subject-verb agreement. Based on such real-life accounts, I'd say Robert Louis Stevenson's re-creation of 1700s sailors' talk in 1883's Treasure Island is pretty true-to-life (minus the swearing, which, back then was usually religious in nature)!

"Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all."

~Franklin P. Adams

OK, next comes the fun part (for me, anyway). All those ideas are finally out of your head and on the paper; the flesh is on the skeleton (for the current chapter, at least). Now is when you get to fine-tune and sculpt those rough ideas and spiff up the wording so that it seems like those eloquent ideas just flowed out of you without any effort at all and the story seems completely natural and believable.

Edit, edit, edit! This involves going back and reading what you've written as though hearing the story for the first time. I end up doing this at least seven or eight times for each chapter, and each time I go back, I find more improvements to make, although they grow increasingly minor with each pass. (As Oscar Wilde said, "Books are never finished; they are merely abandoned.") Since it's hard to distance yourself, I've found it helps, if you can get them, to have people you trust read the chapters as you go along to give you gentle yet honest criticism. It may be painful to have to go back and completely rewrite eight chapters, as I actually did (that's what I got for not showing it to anyone until I had gotten that far!), but I imagine it's far less painful to do it now before you've completed the entire draft than (a) to have an editor be the one to break the bad news to you and have to go back to the drawing board after you've already put so much hard work into it or (b) to have your novel rejected outright!

But when you know you've finally got a chapter right and the novel's working and people are begging you for the next chapter and trying to second-guess what's going to happen next, even telling you what they want to happen next, and then you go back and read it one more time just for pleasure, as if it were someone else's novel custom-written just for you, there's no high like it in the world!

"First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

~Robert Cecil Day Lewis

(By the same token, there's no downer in the world for a writer like writer's block—or simply not being able to find the time to write.)

All of this is why I consider writing a profession, not a hobby, even though I'm not getting paid to do it—yet. Unfortunately, until I finish this one and get it published, moving up from aspiring novelist to published author, for the time being my official job title is "starving artist"! But I have faith it will all turn out to be worth it in the end. Like the sweepstakes slogan goes, "You can't win if you don't enter." And even if I don't "win," I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that I gave it my best attempt. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it,

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."

You never know what you're capable of becoming until you try!

~Susan D. Ciriello