The instructions are right in front of me, like learning how to replace color in Photoshop. (Something I learned this afternoon, self-taught out of lynda.com.) I mean the writing instructions:
1. Write your book every day
2. Make a plan. Schedule, make sacrifices.
3. List 25 books you could write yourself; include something specific about each
4. List 100 books you need to read (that one could take up an afternoon).
5. Make a slow notebook (try in pencil; nothing's slower than that). Note the changes in your writing when you slow down with this notebook.
6. Make a group of writers who write your writing
7. Surround yourself with 20 little assignments
9. Read aloud, then assess the fit. Write in your truest voice.
10. Make a list of things that drain you, plus a list of things that feed you.
11. Seduce yourself out of whining with confident sayings.
12. Find things out -- like especially one heart-based curiosity you need to discover about the reason to write your book.
13. Do the book -- it teaches you the fearlessness you need.
14. Make a list of the 10 Reasons Why I Am Writing My Book.
The above is all borrowed by Chapter by Chapter, the guidebook by Heather Sellars. She gets into the cracks of my writing valise, rubs them down with a gentle voice of a balm that seems to say, "I know it's not easy, but begin. The rest is easy." I know it to be true, the most difficult part being the page blank, the screen write and empty, the cursor mocking in its blinking. I think of Hemingway, my early beacon in my 20s, back when newspapering was my passport to the land of writing. Every day, he said, I open a vein and write 500 words. But he also said something else, about truth.
"Master, I asked, "what about truth in fiction?" The Zen-like retreat in my mind is laced with honorifics like Master, but who doesn't want to be Luke, on Degobah, being Yoda the master's pupil? My post-Catholic religion, Empire was.
Truth, like Hemingway's? I jumped at the connection. The Master -- who's probably Ron in 2020, by then marking 40 years of being a writer, and looking back -- he watched me reading A Moveable Feast in the dawn light on a set of early mornings. Hemingway, another master, he fed me what I wanted to hear in his voice, not just words off some page.
He said, "To begin, just write one true sentence. Then follow it with another. Think a bit, and then write another, the truest sentence you can. In this way, you begin. The rest is easy."
"Easy to say," I reply, "but hard at first to try, my Master."
He squints at me. "Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try."
