Okay, okay…this page has read, “Coming Soon” long enough.

It’s time that I write something here about writing.

Like many people, I have in my head to write the Great American Novel.  Fortunately, unlike many people who want to do so, I do not have it in my head to start the narrative on a “dark and stormy night.”

It has become “that novel I’m working on” over a period of several years.  And it’s a novel that for some of those years I have not been working on.  Not even thinking about.

I once read another would-be novelist who was lamenting her lack of progress in writing and said words I found particularly biting:  “I guess I just don’t want it bad enough.”  I think I found those words biting because I know that I do want it.  But it’s not the number one priority in my life at the moment, so it isn’t the number one thing I try to do on a daily basis.

In the past, I have written more about writing, and clicking on category tabs like “Writing and Publishing” will take you to sample posts I’ve done on the subject.  I have developed friendships with some writers, and I have developed a few relationships that quickly went sour because of the topic of writing.

In one case in particular, disagreement came over the concept of the “Rules of Writing.”  The person with whom I so often found myself disagreeing felt that there are legitimately no rules to write, or at least, that one who is learning to write should be very wary of anyone who would suggest otherwise.  I understand this writer’s position; because she took such advice too strongly to heart, it stifled her creativity for a time.  I’d feel the same way she did, surely, if that had happened to me.

But it didn’t.  I found from an early age that when I read one published writer’s “rules of writing,” I was left craving more.   More rules, or more opinions about what the rules were.  To me, they came to the same thing, since no two writers write the same kind of material exactly alike, anyway.  There’s no one way to write; if there were, all of us who would like to be published and find our tomes on the shelves of popular bookstores would just write that way and we’d reach our goal quickly.

And live happily ever after.

But then there was the knock on the door, and when Pandora opened it, all thoughts of a single way to write were thrown to the wind.

So why should you care what I think about writing?  You probably shouldn’t, any more than you’d care what I think about television, or politics, or the proper side items to a nice steak.  But this is a personal website, and even worse, a blog, so the question of why you’d genuinely care what I think about anything is a moot point.  If you didn’t care, for some reason, you wouldn’t still be reading.

I’ve been writing since I was old enough to write.  I spent a good deal of my childhood, and even my adolescence and a few years of young adulthood writing stories in the form of comic strips.  The artwork was horrendous, much to the chagrin of my dad, who happens to be a professional artist.  For me, the proper foreshortening of the figure when turned at an obscure angle wasn’t nearly as important as what the character was saying, doing or thinking at that given moment, and how that would influence what came in the next artistically-unsound frame.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the first time I really knew that I might be able to make a living at writing, or at least that I had some level of talent in keeping folks reading from one page to another.

I’ve made a living at writing for years now.  Since the early 1990s, either through journalism — the “real” kind that doesn’t involve blogs — or marketing (writing promos and advertising copy for local television), I have brought home a salary, though nothing to impress a successful writer, by writing every day.

This brings me back to the role of “rules of writing:” there are writers who say that if you want to be published, you must write every day, whether you feel like it or not.  I take issue with this:  I write every day, in my “day job,” because I have to.  I do not write every day for my “work in progress” because I don’t feel like it, and because when I write when I don’t feel like writing, what I write is crap.  And that’s being generous.

My point here is that not all “rules of writing” work for me.  So they won’t all work for you.  The best thing you can do for yourself is to figure out what works best for you and do that.  Do it until it either no longer works for you or until you find another “rule” that you think works even better.  Under no circumstances should you find one set of “rules,” make it your own, and stop listening to what anyone else says.  That seems blatantly shortsighted to me, and it should to you as well.  If it doesn’t seem that way, please take my advice:  it is.

What I intend to write, or what I intend to get published once I finish writing it, is suspense fiction.  Take Dean Koontz, my favorite author, mix in a little Stephen King and Bentley Little, maybe even a little of Tess Gerritsen or James Patterson or Rod Serling, and you’ll begin to have a concoction that I’d like to believe my writing feels something like.

But of course that’s on a very good day, when I write because I want to write, and when what I am writing is definitely not crap.

This year — it’s April, 2008 as I write this — I intend to pull out the “work in progress” and make it a work actually in progress again.  I’ve said in years past that I’d like to make it a goal to finish the novel by the end of the year.  What I’d really like to do is finish plotting it properly, then finish the novel.  Period.  If I do that in the next nine months, I’ll be delighted.  And amazed.  If that takes five more years, I’ll still be happier with the result than if I force an ending just to meet a deadline that isn’t important to anyone…not even me.

Will I finish it this time?  “Well, I certainly hope to,” he said, hoping to end on a cliffhanger.

If I do, you blog readers will be the first ones to know.