How to Do Something You’ve Always Wanted to Do (After Putting It Off Your Whole Life)

Posted: Saturday November 19, 2011 under Lead Myself

I can think of three big things I wish I’d done years ago when I first wanted to do them.

• Invest in Apple back when I got my first Mac in 1990 (and thought it and I were the coolest things around),
• See Paul McCartney in concert back in the 70s (instead of waiting until he was in his 70s), and …
• Finish the novel I started back in 5th grade (though, granted, the story of a mob hitman turned on-the-run circus clown was a little thin).

Not so horrible I guess, as regrets go. And, I’ve been making amends lately. This year I bit the Apple and bought six shares (it’s really pricey now), I’m tracking Sir Paul’s upcoming tour dates, and I just finished my first novel, which has nothing to do with hitmen or circus clowns. Buying a stock and going to a concert are really too easy (ugh!), so I thought it would be worthwhile to look back at what I learned from finally taking the plunge into novel writing, after putting it off my whole life.

Lesson 1: Figure out what’s been holding you back.

The main question I had to ask myself (and, I think, we all have to ask ourselves) is: Why do I keep saying “some day I will” instead of saying “today I will”? The top things on my list are probably pretty typical:

• Writing a novel is hard.
• It’s going to take a long time.
• I write all day for work, and the last thing I want to do at the end of that is sit back in front of a computer and write some more.
• I’ve waited too long; I’ve missed my chance.
• There’s a good chance I’ll work really hard and really stink at it.
• Maybe it’s not as important to me as I thought.

All these thoughts went through my head for years as I kept putting off the thing I kept telling myself, and other people, was my biggest dream. These are the thoughts that had been holding me back.

Lesson 2: Chip away at what’s been holding you back.

I knew that writing a novel really was important, during all those years of not writing it, and I never gave up on it completely. I had ideas, I took notes, I read other first-time authors, I kept loitering around the bookstores, and I kept saying “some day I will.” Then some key things aligned that finally got me thinking differently.

• More Time – Thanks to a lull in the economy and in our workload a few years ago, I wasn’t spending 10 to 12 hours a day writing for work. I was still working, but the idea of splitting my time seemed a lot more doable.
• Short Novels – A lot of the new books I was reading were under 300 pages and read like glorified movie scripts, which didn’t seem all that hard. These authors weren’t writing Moby Dick or anything. I figured I could do that. I could even do better than that.
• Old Authors – I began noticing authors who started writing later in life. Ian Fleming didn’t write his first James Bond novel until he was 44, and he wrote a bunch of them. One retired engineer was Paul McCartney’s age when he started writing a popular mystery series (he just released book four). I realized it definitely wasn’t too late for me.

This was how I, personally, started chipping away at the obstacles and justifications that had been holding me back. One at a time. Figure them out and challenge them.

Lesson 3: Take the first small step.

It’s easy to look at the giant task ahead of you and decide it’s just too much to tackle. For me, there was the writing 3 to 5 hours a day, most every day. Then the trying to find an agent and trying to get published and trying to market a book once it’s published. You look at all the books in the bookstore and you don’t realize that an extremely small percentage of writers ever get published and a much smaller percentage of them ever make any money at it.

But my basic goal was to write a novel, not THE novel, or even a published novel (though that would be great). I just wanted to take the leap, take the step. I figured after doing one I’d have a pretty good idea if I had any desire to do more.

So, I tried not to think about the whole scary animal sitting in front of me. My first small step was committing to sit down from 6 to 10 in the morning to try and write. I didn’t put any pressure on myself to crank out 5 pages a day or anything. Just sit in the chair and try. I had a vague sense where I wanted to go in the story, but no definite path. I just hoped one small step would lead to another until I ended up somewhere.

Lesson 4: Keep at it.

The one thing you learn after your first small step is that there are lots of reasons to step back off, to take a day off (or a week or a month), to let those things that held you back before hold you back again. It’s not easy to keep at a first novel: you get writer’s block, you read over what you wrote yesterday and gag, you spend a whole day trying to get one sentence just right. Even if you’re not writing Moby Dick, it’s hard.

But it helped to go back to my one simple goal: to sit in that chair, just that, even if nothing came out. That wasn’t so hard. Sit there. Think. Doodle. Play with a character’s name. Something. Anything. One small step at a time.

Kathryn Stockett submitted her first novel, The Help, to over 60 agents before anyone even agreed to try and sell it to a publisher. That’s 60 rejection letters. (I’ve gotten about 10 so far.) What if she’d given up after rejection number 10? Or 20? Or 40? Or even 60? She didn’t. She kept at it. Now she has a bestselling debut novel that also became a hit movie.

Lesson 5: Enjoy it … Enjoy the journey.

This is the biggest lesson I learned. Life’s too short to fill your days with sucky stuff. Writing is hard, and it can really suck sometimes, but the overall doing of it is highly gratifying, I found, enough so to get me to well over 500 pages in my first draft (which is way too long). After four drafts, I’ve gotten it down to 400 pages, and now I’m five chapters into novel number two, which I’m enjoying … mostly.

I reached my goal of becoming an unpublished novelist, and now I can work towards my next goal of becoming a published one. I’ve learned some good lessons about how to do things I’ve been putting off. Now I’m just trying to make sure I take some leaps, take some small steps, and enjoy it all as much as I can.

Wonder if I’d enjoy reading over those old hitman clown chapters.