Oh, you're a writer too?

Someday I'm going to compile a list of things that no one ever tells you before you have a novel published.

And when I do, this is going to be the first thing: the moment people find out you wrote a novel they're going to tell you one of three things, a.) they wrote one too and just haven't been able to get it published (yet) or b.) they've always wanted to write one, or c.) they have a ton of great ideas and they definitely plan on sitting down one day to write them all out.

I get this all the time. I'm still not sure whether to be bothered by it, or just amused. Usually I alternate between the two, and I'll explain why.

The first example (I wrote one but haven't gotten it published) hardly bothers me at all. Those people are a lot like me, no more than two years ago. The main difference usually though, is that people who tell you that have generally written one manuscript, and sometimes not even to full novel-length. When I got lucky enough to receive my first contract offer for a book, it wasn't for my first book. Depending on how you count them, it was something like my fifth book that finally snagged me a publisher.

My actual first book (or first attempt) was part 1 of an intended fantasy trilogy I started when I was in the ninth grade. I worked on it all through high school and into my first year of college, when I began to realize that it was never going to be any good. After that I wrote several short screenplays, half a dozen short stories, three full length screenplays and three more novels, all of which were rejected by every professional outlet to which I sent them.

The end result though, was that by the time I finished my fifth one, I was a much better writer than I had been when I finished my first. And this isn't an unusual scenario. You get better by practicing something, and there's no other way to practice writing than to just do it.

So for those folks who tell me that they wrote "a novel" and just want to get it published, I smile and wish them, with all sincerity, the best of luck. Maybe they really are just that good. Maybe they have a story so compelling that people will want to read it, and maybe they managed to get all the little things right the first time out of the gate: believable characters, developed over an entire book, an interesting plot, a good balance between narrative and dialogue, a sound ear for how people actually speak, and the subtle differences between one character's cadence and another's, and a thousand other tiny things.

It wasn't so easy for me. I needed to work at it. Still, those folks are generally well-meaning and actually took the time to do it at least once, and for that they have my respect.

The other bunch of people, the "I've always wanted to write" and "I have lots of ideas" crowd -- I have a little less patience for them.

For one, having never even attempted to write anything, much less a four or five hundred page manuscript, they have no idea what it involves, and to me, they kind of demean the process (even if only unintentionally). It's almost as if they're saying, "well, it's great what you do, but I don't see any reason why I couldn't do it too."

But most of them can't. And never will. They'll just go on thinking they can without ever really trying, the way the guy on the corner stool at your local bar watches Alex Rodriguez strike out and yells at the TV -- he knows he could hit a fastball when he was 12, and somewhere in the back of his head, he still thinks he could have played for the Yanks if things had gone a little differently.

Years ago a professor of mine taught me a phrase -- "the habit of art." It applies to anything artistic, playing music, painting, sculpting and writing. You simply do it or you don't. It's part of how you live. You don't make an effort to do it, you don't make time to sit down and do it, you don't think about someday planning to possibly sit down to do it.

You either write or you don't. If you do, there's no stopping you, it's a part of who you are. And if you don't, then I suppose you could acquire the habit, but there's no substitute for actually doing it.

So please, don't tell me what you're planning to write, or what great stories you want to tell. Get to writing them. And plan on doing it for a long, long time before you ever see anything even resembling success, if at all. Of course, if that doesn't sound like something that appeals to you, then you were never going to be much of writer anyway.