Getting Out of My Own Way: Rediscovering Why I Write

There are times when the greatest obstacle standing between us and the things we want to accomplish is not money, opportunity, technology, age, or even time. Sometimes the obstacle is considerably closer to home. Sometimes it is the voice inside our own heads that insists we aren't ready yet, that the project isn't good enough, that there is too much left to do, or that perhaps the enormous thing we have imagined for ourselves is simply too enormous to accomplish.

I know that voice rather well.

One of the things I have been thinking about lately is self-confidence, although perhaps persistence is the better word. Confidence suggests certainty, and I am not certain that creative people ever really possess that for very long. We can feel absolutely convinced about a story on Monday and wonder whether we have any business calling ourselves writers by Thursday. Creation has always contained that contradiction. You must possess enough confidence to believe that something inside your imagination deserves to exist outside of it, while retaining enough humility to recognize that getting it there requires work.

The trick is learning not to become your own worst enemy somewhere between those two things.

I was reminded of that recently by something utterly mundane: moving files.

The old Novel Factory site is finally being shut down, and although I had already migrated my work to Novel Factory 3, I found myself faced with that peculiar anxiety every writer who has worked digitally understands. Were all the manuscripts really there? Had everything transferred correctly? Was there some forgotten project sitting in an old account that I would remember only after the server disappeared forever?

There are few phrases more terrifying to a writer than permanently deleted.

So I started checking.

Then I started transferring.

And I kept transferring.

By the time I finally stopped, it was about 1:30 in the morning. I had spent hours making certain that manuscripts, projects, notes, fragments, characters, and stories accumulated over years of work were safely moved into their new home.

It should have been administrative work, the literary equivalent of cleaning out an old filing cabinet.

Instead, something unexpected happened.

I rediscovered myself.

As I opened those projects one after another, I began encountering characters I had not thought about for some time. There were stories that had once consumed my imagination and then quietly moved into the background while some other project demanded attention. There were unfinished manuscripts, half-developed worlds, scenes that still made me smile, and ideas that immediately reminded me why I had been excited enough to begin writing them in the first place.

It was rather like walking through an enormous house I had been building for years and discovering rooms I had forgotten were there.

Behind one door was space opera.

Behind another was fantasy.

Farther down the corridor were the survivors of a zombie apocalypse, still waiting for me to discover what happened to them.

Somewhere else neon reflected from rain-soaked streets while cyberpunk characters continued living dangerous lives in a future I had temporarily left behind.

Everywhere I looked there were people.

That may have been the thing that struck me most strongly. I tend to talk about worldbuilding in terms of maps, civilizations, histories, star systems, political boundaries, technologies, and timelines because those are the enormous structures that fascinate me. Yet when I went through those manuscripts again, what I rediscovered were not structures.

I rediscovered characters.

People with ambitions and failures, loves and grudges, victories and terrible mistakes. People who had once been little more than an idea and who, somewhere during the process of writing them, had acquired voices of their own.

They were still there.

They had simply been waiting.

That realization produced a feeling I hadn't expected from an evening spent performing digital housekeeping. Instead of finishing the night exhausted and irritated that I had spent so many hours transferring files, I found myself excited.

Look at all of this.

Look at everything still waiting to be written.

There is a danger in thinking that way, of course, because the sheer volume of unfinished creative work can become intimidating. Every writer with more ideas than time eventually confronts that problem. A dozen exciting projects can inspire you, but fifty can paralyze you. The imagination sees the finished library while the calendar sees Tuesday afternoon.

That is where being your own worst enemy becomes remarkably easy.

You begin measuring yourself against the finished version of everything you hope someday to create.

Of course you lose that comparison.

The finished novels exist perfectly inside your imagination. The actual manuscripts contain awkward paragraphs, continuity problems, unfinished chapters, scenes requiring revision, characters who need additional development, and all the other evidence that writing is something constructed rather than summoned fully formed from the ether.

The imagined career is equally perfect. Every book is finished. Every map is beautiful. Every series is complete. Readers have discovered the stories. The worlds are known.

Reality consists of opening the manuscript and writing the next page.

For a long time I think I sometimes allowed the enormous scale of my ambition to work against me. When you want to create something large, it becomes terribly easy to concentrate on how much remains unfinished rather than how much has already been accomplished. The horizon continually retreats as you approach it. Finish one world and ten neighboring worlds suddenly become interesting. Establish one historical date and it creates questions about the century surrounding it. Finish one story and the characters begin suggesting another.

There will always be more.

Perhaps the answer is not to resent that fact.

Perhaps that is the gift.

I don't actually want to reach a morning when I sit down at my desk and discover that there are no more stories I want to tell. I don't want every world completely mapped, every character's life resolved, every civilization fully documented, and every mystery explained. What an extraordinarily empty achievement that would be.

I want to wake up knowing there is something else waiting.

The work I did that night reminded me how fortunate I am to have accumulated so many things that still excite me.

I am a space opera writer, certainly, and that remains at the center of so much of what I want to accomplish. There is something about the enormous scale of space opera that continues to speak to me: civilizations separated by light-years, ships crossing the darkness, ancient histories, political struggles, exploration, war, discovery, and ordinary human beings trying to understand their place inside something unimaginably large.

But that isn't the only place my imagination lives.

I love fantasy because sometimes I want history to become myth, and sometimes I want the darkness beyond the forest to contain something that astronomy cannot explain. I love zombie apocalypse stories because stripping civilization away creates an extraordinarily brutal question about who people become when all the structures they trusted disappear. I love cyberpunk because beneath all its neon, technology, corporations, artificial intelligence, and urban decay lies a deeply human argument about identity, freedom, power, and what remains of us when technology can alter almost everything else.

Different genres allow me to ask different questions.

Yet the strange thing I rediscovered while moving all those manuscripts is how unmistakably they remain my questions.

The scenery changes. The characters change. A starship becomes a sword, a frontier colony becomes a ruined city, an interstellar corporation becomes a cyberpunk megacorporation, but certain things remain. People confront systems larger than themselves. They inherit histories they did not create. They struggle with duty and freedom, loyalty and ambition, civilization and chaos. They try to leave something behind.

Perhaps writers spend their entire lives asking a handful of questions in increasingly elaborate ways.

If so, I have plenty of questions left.

What I need now is the confidence to answer them.

Not the confidence that says everything I write will be brilliant. That kind of confidence is useless, and probably dangerous. I want the quieter kind: the confidence that allows me to keep working when a chapter is difficult, to finish rather than endlessly prepare, to revise rather than despair, and to accept that an imperfect completed manuscript can become an excellent book while the perfect unwritten novel can become nothing at all.

That last lesson may be one of the hardest for an ambitious creator to accept.

There is always another improvement available.

There is always more research.

There is always another map that could be refined, another timeline that could be reconciled, another character biography that could be expanded, another scientific detail that could be checked. I enjoy all of those things, and they genuinely strengthen my work, but they can also become wonderfully sophisticated ways of avoiding the frightening moment when the book must simply be finished and allowed to leave my hands.

At some point, preparation has to become publication.

At some point, dreaming has to become doing.

That does not mean abandoning the dream's scale. Quite the opposite. I have spent enough years imagining what I want to create that I see no reason to make the ambition smaller now. If anything, rediscovering those manuscripts reminded me that the dream is larger than I had recently allowed myself to remember.

There are a lot of books in there.

There are a lot of characters waiting for their turn.

There are stories I had almost forgotten that immediately made me want to start writing again.

So perhaps the path forward is not some dramatic transformation. Perhaps it is simply refusing to sabotage myself.

Open the manuscript.

Write the chapter.

Finish the book.

Then finish another.

Organize the worlds, preserve the notes, maintain the chronology, build the maps, but remember what all of those things exist to support.

Stories.

I have written recently about wanting to push myself toward greatness, and I remain aware of how uncomfortable that word can sound. Greatness is something other people usually confer after the fact, and declaring oneself great is a fairly reliable way of demonstrating the opposite. Yet I see nothing wrong with pursuing it. There is a tremendous difference between claiming greatness and attempting great work.

I cannot control the first.

I can devote myself to the second.

That may be the most useful form of self-confidence I can cultivate now. I do not need to know that I will succeed. I need to believe that the attempt is worthwhile. I need enough faith in the stories I rediscovered at 1:30 in the morning to give them the opportunity to become finished books.

And I need to remember that the person most capable of preventing me from doing that is probably me.

So I am trying to get out of his way.

There is an entire library sitting in front of me—not a hypothetical library anymore, but manuscripts, characters, settings, scenes, histories, and ideas that already exist in various stages of completion. Moving them from one piece of software to another reminded me that I have not spent all these years merely dreaming about becoming a writer.

I have been writing.

Now the task is to keep going.

Space opera. Fantasy. Cyberpunk. Zombie apocalypse. Strange worlds, ruined worlds, magical worlds, future worlds. Characters I know intimately and characters I have only begun to meet.

They are all waiting.

Maybe someday other people will decide whether any of it deserves to be called great. That judgment isn't mine to make, and perhaps it never was.

Mine is the simpler responsibility.

Do the work.

Finish the stories.

Believe enough in what I have already created to stop standing in its way.

And keep going.