The Daily Grind (of a Working Writer)

Here are a few tricks I've picked up over the years

There are pieces of advice that are trivially true and utterly unhelpful.

For example, it does no good to tell an alcoholic, “well, just don’t drink!” It’s equally pointless (and insulting) to suggest that a morbidly obese person “just eat less.” If you’re good at doing something, you likely have a huge blindspot towards how difficult that activity can be for others. This is often the case when it comes to writers dispensing writing advice.

The trivially true advice about becoming a writer is that there really is only one thing you need to do, which is to sit your butt down in a chair every day and do it. Any other how-to suggestions are just filigree to decorate this one fact.

And this is true. It’s also, for most people, useless advice. Most of what I’m about to describe are techniques for sneaking up on the chair that you intend to plant your butt in.

Cheerfully Bulldozing Variety

Most of us have a kind of back-country yokel’s view of writers who blithely write everyday; we squint at them sidelong and say “now that just ain’t natch’rul!” This reaction is, well, valid. Composing and writing are irreducibly hard, even painful. I love to have written. But do I love writing? That’s a more complicated question. For most of us an actual love of writing, as opposed to a love of having written, takes years to develop. We’re all neurologically different, and our life circumstances are different, too. We are not all able to just “sit down and do it.” That takes years to master, and sitting down is just the tip of the iceberg. Much preparation goes into the sitting-down and it becomes so natural to working writers that they forget they even do it.

My Own Journey

ADHD was not a thing on the Canadian prairies in the 1970s. Straight white people were divided into easy-to-remember categories: geeks, jocks, creeps, spazzes and ‘odd ducks.’ (We had less flattering categories for everybody else.) Regardless of which of these you were, when it came to your schoolwork, you either ‘got it’ with everything or you didn’t. I didn’t ‘get’ math, at least not the way it was taught to me, with the result that my course mark in Grade 11 was 30%. In Grade 12, I skipped math classes entirely. I didn’t finish high school; but I did finish my first (never published) novel when I was 17.

There are reasons why this was easy for me and they have nothing to do with ‘talent,’ whatever that might be. My mother, Anna Schroeder, had come from an even more restrictive cultural background, growing up a woman in a highly conservative and deeply religious farming community, yet she managed to write and publish two novels before I was even born. I grew up seeing these books on the shelf—so clearly, storytelling was something anybody could do. Writing was normalized for me before I even tried it.

My siblings are the ones who ultimately set me on my career path. My sister Wilma, comforting me one night when I couldn’t sleep, suggested I tell myself stories rather than give in to anxious ideation. On a long vacation car ride one summer, my eldest brother Andy drew us a multi-page comic book. All he had was a black ball pen and a yellow highlighter, but he somehow summoned a fascinating tale about ‘Noman, who has discovered a way to turn oil into gold.’ My brother Mark showed me how to draw human figures and that got me started drawing silly cartoons. By the time I was fourteen, I had switched from comics to prose.

I sold my first short story when I was sixteen, though it would be many years before I sold another.

It was a privilege to be gifted these experiences. Without them, I doubt I could have become a writer, granted the constant distraction and anxiety of ADHD. We had a stable, quiet home life, too—but it is telling that after having us kids Mom needed to lock herself in the bathroom to get any writing done, and between raising us and holding down a full-time job she found ‘just sit down and do it’ increasingly difficult.

The only privilege I lacked was geographical, growing up a two-hour drive north of Minot, North Dakota in the ‘70s. So as soon as I could, I moved to the big city (Toronto), and as it turned out, arrived at exactly the right time. I got very, very lucky over the next few years. I learned a lot of stuff from some very brilliant people about all the things that go into being the kind of person who can ‘sit my butt in a chair every day and do it.’