Norman Green

What’s it like to be a working writer?

Well, it’s like this: my football team is losing, there’s a television on somewhere in the house but I’m gonna have to read about it in the Daily News tomorrow…

That’s what it’s like.

I don’t believe that the talent for writing is all that rare.  If you love to read, you have probably had moments when you’ve said to yourself, ‘that was awkward,’ or, ‘I probably could have done better than that.’  You know what?  You might be right.  Writing is just communication, after all, just story-telling, which has to be a natural part of being human.  What is rare is the combination of the talent, to begin with, and the insane drive it takes to get from page one all the way to the ending.  And even if you make it that far, you are not finished, amigo, you don’t have a book yet, you only have the raw material for one.  That’s what first drafts are.

Almost anyone can run.  How many people actually run a marathon?

You have to be nuts to run a marathon.  It’s a huge commitment, it takes time away from your family, it compromises your attention when you should be working on other things, it takes months and months of training, there’s no guarantee you’ll get anything other than sore feet out of it, why would anyone put themselves through it?

Writing is like that.

I just started work on my seventh novel.  I try not to think about the twenty-six miles in front of me because if I focus on the size of the job I will fall into the slough of despondency and that will be that.  And this time it will be different!  (I tell myself that every time.)  This time I will not create huge plot-holes, I will not write myself into dead ends, I will not have to do massive re-writes to fix my screw-ups, this time, I swear, I’m gonna nail it, right out of the box…

Yeah, right.

But there will be one difference this time, because I’m going to take you through it with me.  I promise not to talk about The Wonder Of Me, or to be too blatantly self-promotional.  What I would like to talk about is process, how it works for me and what it costs.  And at any time, please feel free to ask questions or to tell me to quit whining and get back to work.