Butt in chair.
I don’t know how many times I’ve referred to the BIC philosophy since beginning this blog thousands of days ago. It’s been a lot and yet even I still fail to grasp the tidal power of the simple habit. If you put your butt in the chair for a specified amount of time and just write, you will produce work. I am not saying you will produce good (or even decent) work. You can write a bunch of crap for weeks at a time–every single day of crap–until writing something that is not terrible. That is how writing works. Good writing is lightning striking the rod. Writing is lightning in the skies above. You need to keep writing in order for good writing to hit. You cannot expect to just produce good stuff. I’ve written a lot of very bad stuff. Some of it even got out into the world…
Your mental focus is a habit just like everything we do with any regularity stems from habit. Your mental focus and the habit thereof is how good writing happens. It all stems from the idea of production. You have to be able to produce. I’ll say it again. You have to be able to produce. This is the only pathway to success. Anyone that tells you otherwise is gaslighting you for their own purposes.
AI is billed as the greatest shortcut to production, and maybe that will be true one day. AI is not there yet. I spent a little time playing with AI in regards to an unpublished novel I’ve been toying with. I have a solid outline–the kind of thing that a guy like Patterson writes and hands off to another talented writer to turn into a full feature. I handed it off to AI to see what might happen. What happened was terrible. Flat characters, no insight, no vibe whatsoever. I trained that AI to have a sense of what it was like to write this kind of novel and it failed so miserably at the job that I now have the proof (if anecdotal) to argue that you gotta put your butt in chair and write the darn thing yourself.
This is a pep talk. Not just for you but for me as well. I am here in front of a trio of screens staring at windows of data that constitute the start of research for a 12000 word project I intend to complete over the next 15 days. It only happens if I keep my butt in this chair on a regular basis and put in the time and effort to get the words on the page. I’m telling you now because, as we look in the rearview at NaNoWrimo, it doesn’t end because of the fanfare. Writers keep writers going. We find ways to keep ourselves going when nobody else will. We hold ourselves accountable the way we expect our fans to hold us accountable for producing. So, that is what I’m going to do over the next 15. I’m at Zero. I’ll see you at 12k.