Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

On why it pays to have an audience

Ten years ago, I completed my first fiction book: off my own bat, with no expectations of it ever being published, just for the fun of it. The secret? I handed over a new chapter to my friends every Monday morning.

I mention this because I was just procrastinating over at Three Guys One Book (found via Lisa Dempster’s post today on book reviews), where Jonathan Evison advises:

My advice to the overwhelming majority first time novelists: first, finish the fucker, even if you sense it’s not working on any number of levels— you’ve got to get into the habit of seeing things through, or you run the risk of being a serial starter, or worse one of those people that has “a novel in them” who spends more time talking about it, than laying bricks.

“Oh god,” I thought to myself, cringing inwardly, “I’m going to be a serial starter.” It’s not out of the question: I am, after all, an ENFP.

And then I remembered that dramatic, emotionally tone deaf “saga” I wrote over the course of 1998. I had finished something! (Well, now that I think of it, I’ve finished lots of things, actually - my degree, Interface, countless articles - but this was something long and involved that required prolonged commitment and sitting by myself.) It wasn’t particularly good - were I ever to submit it to a publisher, it would require major rewrites (let’s just say teenage me didn’t have the most accurate grip on the nuances of human trauma), but it was finished. And I suspect the reason I finished it was because I had a handful of friends (and later, online readers) hanging out for fresh meat each week.

The truth is, while I’m driven to write in a general sense, I’m most driven to write when I know there’ll be someone reading - even better when that audience is a group of people who respond, and whom I can respond to in turn. It’s why I put - well, I would say “so much time”, but compared to people who post 20 times a day, it’s nothing, so I’ll just say “time” - time into this blog, which would probably be more practically spent working on my thesis, or book, or freelance stories. That, and as I’ve written before, I think it’s an essential part of the vocation of a contemporary non-fiction writer.

But it occurs to me that perhaps this energy can be chanelled for good, rather than just procrastination. I’ve been planning on launching a website for my major research project (which feeds into said thesis and book) for a while now - domain name and launch posts all ready to go - but have been holding off until a certain article I’ve been working on goes to market.

Maybe, if I want to hurry this book along more, I should just throw caution to the wind and blog it, much like I use to hand out those new chapters to my friends every Monday morning.