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The Novelist’s Guide to Abject Failure
You need some advice, right?
1. Before you even start, make sure everyone in your life is perfectly satisfied.
In order to write, you’re going to need a lot of time to yourself.
Seriously, a LOT of time. And, God help you if anyone interrupts you, because you’ll never get back on track. You need great, big gobs of uninterrupted time.
If you’re going to write, you’ve got to do this right.
Once you decide you’re going to plant yourself at your desk — and it HAS to be a monstrous slab of wood, like the desk Stephen King describes in On Writing — you need to partake in the great NASA tradition of a Go/No-Go check, to make sure that everyone in your life is willing to let you retreat into your writing.
You start calling people:
Kids — Go or No Go?
Spouse — Go or No Go?
Work — Go or No Go?
In laws — Go or No Go?
And so on. If you’re really going to be a writer, the universe will respect your decision, and all of the people in your life will find ways to help themselves. That’s how you know it’s meant to be.
