To Live or to Write

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

We’ve all heard “write what you know.” If you haven’t heard that then you need to get out and live more. This is what I’d like to examine here. Do we live or do we write? Well, the answer is “yes.” The next question is, “How much do we live and how much do we write?” I hate to pose a question and not have a real answer, but that’s where I am with this question.

I wrote a few short stories when I was a teenager, and a few in my 20s and 30s. The part that is interesting to me is that I tackled a lot more things that I really knew nothing about when I was a teenager than I do now when I have so much more information available for research. It means that a lot of what I wrote in my teenage years isn’t really publishable without an explanation that, “Yes, I know what kind of problems this has.”

I needed to get out and live. I needed to have experiences. I needed to learn some things.

Those are all true statements, but I also needed to write. I learned so much about writing from those early years. In 2012, I wrote a better version of one of my earliest short stories, which I’d written when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I’m not sure it’s a good story even now, but I can read it without cringing. The difference is that in February 2012 I was 38 years old (I’m 37 now) and I knew better how to focus the details of the story. I had more life experience to base things on.

When I was 20 years old, I had an idea for a novel called “The Harsh Reality.” I wish two things about this novel. The first is that one day I actually write it. The second is that I wish I’d written it back then. The idea was formed out of a lot of my ignorance of the world. It was a surreal story, making the title somewhat ironic, and it was based loosely on my experiences and observations at the time. If I were to write the novel now it would lose every single bit of unknowing that I would have faked in my youth.

The problem is that I was out living my life whether through working or through playing. Every idea that I’ve had since then has been a result of me being out working and playing. I started a novel when I was 23 called “The Bowling Alley,” and it now holds the same issues. I had some wildly romantic notions back then that I would have to get in touch with again to write it as it should have been.

In 2005… maybe 2006, Nathan and I were supposed to make a feature length movie in ten days. I say that like it was a given that it was supposed to happen, but in truth he brought up the idea and I ran with it. He meant that it was something to do sometime later. I wanted to do it in ten days from the moment that he said it.

I wrote some notes for a shitty plot structure, and we did a little bit of work on it. Then it didn’t happen.

In 2009, just before Nathan and I were about to embark on a project to shoot all of Season Two of “According To Whim” in six days, I found my notes for the ten day movie. An odd thought occurred to me, which was to write it as a novel in ten days. It would only require me to write one page an hour for ten days. So I started immediately. I wrote 113 pages in the next ten days. I did this while working my guard job full time and delivering pizza part time. A few months later, I did phase two of writing the ten-day novel by writing for another ten days straight. I got less done this time. Finally, I realized that the two year mark was coming up from the day I had started the novel. I spent the ten days before that anniversary finishing up the novel. In a weird way, I wrote a novel in thirty days over the course of two years.

Every single bit of this novel being written hinged on the fact that I couldn’t stop working long enough to write it, so it was written as someone whose life wouldn’t slow down for him long enough for him to get anything done. It’s the only novel I’ve ever completed.

So how much should we live and how much should we write? I think that’s where being a professional writer must be so nice. Taking time to write doesn’t cause your paycheck to be smaller. It may even have the opposite effect.

I think my best answer is this. Write every day. Complete your projects. By the time I was in my 30s, which has gone on for a decade and a half now, I’m pretty sure that I’ve been one or two completed projects away from being a paid writer. It’s difficult to know that if I hadn’t lived as I have that certain projects I have completed might not exist, or at least wouldn’t exist in the same form, but that if I had written more that there may have been something better. It may even have been one of the books I wrote when I didn’t have the experience to write them well.

What I do know is that the one novel I have completed exists because I wrote it. I lived some of the circumstances that formed the basis, but it would be another incomplete project if I hadn’t drawn the line in the sand and pushed myself to write it.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who is trying to write more than live for a while. He’s not quite there yet.