If only we could read his thoughts.

So: you have this thing you’re going to write. You’re just trying to figure out how it’s going to work. You’re doing some serious thinking. You’re imagining the characters. You’re almost ready to start. It’s so close to making sense to you! As soon as you know what you’re going to write and how it’s going to go and where it will end up you are totally going to write it.

Oh, my dear. This is such a load of crap.

There is only one way that stories, novels, screenplays, memoirs get written: the author sits down and writes them. As long as something lives only in your head, you are denying its potential. Your concept is nothing. It does not exist. Ideas don’t count. Everything changes, anyway, in the execution.

So execute.

We tell ourselves that we’re sort of writing because we’re thinking about writing, but that’s like sort of painting because you’re thinking about painting. There’s no substitute for doing. You don’t fully have your idea figured out yet? Well, guess how you figure it out–you write. You write, and you revise. You take out the parts that don’t make sense, and you add stuff that does. Only in writing can you find out that your original concept was completely beside the point and the real story was behind it, waiting to be discovered.

Now, the problem might be that you don’t feel like you have any ideas. You, my dear, are laboring under the misapprehension that first you get an idea and then you write. It’s usually the other way around. As I’ve said, ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. Write every day, and ideas will come–or, better yet, characters, voices, stories that were waiting for you to sit and be quiet and notice them.

Writing is discovery. I didn’t know what I was going to write this week for Babble. And then I sat down and started typing, and my hands figured it out. That sounds horrifying, now that I’ve written it. Like my hands are not under my control and could do anything without my consent. And now I’m frightened. Thanks, hands. My original point, however, is still valid: write, write, write, stop making excuses, write, ignore your hands when they type KILL KILL KILL, keep writing, no killing, thank you.