Want To Write? Permission Granted!

WRITE GOOD!

So you want to write—or you want to write more or mo’ better—but you have no idea how to get started. Instead you spend most of your writing time talking yourself out of writing by remembering shortcomings so numerous your words have no chance of escaping the wordless twilight zone of might-have-been.

Your endless excuses fall within the broader art of procrastination. Maybe you even buy self-help books to help you get text onto page or screen. You make plans and then decide you suck when you come up dry. Then you rinse, perhaps with an adult beverage in lieu of mouthwash, and you repeat the self-defeating cycle all over again.

Nothing seems to work and you have no idea why.

In most cases you can’t write for the simplest of reasons—because you have not given yourself permission.

When I teach a writing class, I bestow permission by getting everyone to write before they have time to think, usually for five minutes right from the get-go. Forgoing self-doubt, people with no portfolio often come up with astonishing things from their own lives or imaginations theretofore untapped. I would love to ascribe this to great teaching or the magic touch, but as you can see I had done no teaching before the writers begat their individual miracles.

I had merely given them permission to write: in many cases, that was all it took.

I have a friend, a journalist with the kind of career as a foreign correspondent I can only dream of. He’s reported for major media from 60 different countries under the most difficult of deadline pressure—and he never blinked. A newspaper editor once said to me: “Everyone wants to wear a trench coat.” My friend wore the trench coat of the foreign correspondent for decades with distinction.

Even so, my friend—a terrific writer with thousands of stories under his byline—really wants to write a novel and has said as much for at least ten years. He has these incredible life-threatening experiences in the bank, and yet he’s no closer to lift-off then ten years ago.

You can guess the problem: no permission equals no pages.

I think about permission all the time. Though I’ve written for over forty years, and only missed a deadline once in my life, I still have to petition myself for a writ of permission in order to write anything—including this newsletter—because I can think of at least a half-dozen things I’d like to be doing instead.

My own inherent unworthiness never enters into the equation for reasons both logistical and familial. Logistically, I know I can keep working a story on my word processor until I’m happy: perfection is never possible but pretty damn good can arrive if you keep hacking away. So I give myself permission not to worry when stories don’t arrive full-blown because they never do. That’s a given for everyone who isn’t God his own self.

Permission also arrives from my forbears. My father was a terrific newspaper writer and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize. My uncle on my mother’s side published his stories in The New Yorker. My older brother is a songwriter. My younger brother was one of the writers on the hilarious Comedy Central cult hit Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Hell—my first cousin once removed wrote one of the Spiderman movies.

If you add in my genetic makeup—91 percent Irish American—someone in my shoes should have full and absolute permission to write, no questions asked, with portions of blarney a promissory note at the very least. When I sit down to write something I never think I’m going to come up short—I always know I’m going to finish because I have no excuse not to.

And oh yeah: I have given myself permission not only to write, but to fail if it comes to that.

So, like the Wizard behind the curtain, if you click your heels I promise to bestow upon all ye within earshot complete and total permission to write. That’s all you need to be an ink-stained wretch. Nothing can stop you now.