NovelMasterClass’s 200th Blog Post – What Makes a Writer a Writer?

NovelMasterClass’s 200th Blog Post – What Makes a Writer a Writer?

Today’s a special day. Today is NovelMasterClass’s 200th Blog Post – What Makes a Writer a Writer? It’s a milestone that’s taken just over three years to accomplish, and I’m proud of what I’ve done in that time. Today marks the two hundredth post thrown up on NovelMasterClass.com. We’ve had interviews with some great authors, professors, and nonfiction writers, and we’ve learned plenty about the craft of writing. We’ve done book reviews on nonfiction masterworks about Thalidomide, with Jennifer Vanderbes’s Wonder Drug, a fascinating and tragic exploration of a “wonder drug” that was supposed to be a sedative but was anything but, which caused phocomelia (a shortening of the "limb/s being reduced or missing and leaving distal elements (handplate) in place.” We’ve reviewed novels like Stone Angels by Helena Rho, about the sexual exploitation of Korean “comfort women,” who were raped and treated horrifically by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces, and a thriller by Nancy Stancill called Deadly Secrets, which BestThrillers.com called “an unforgettable political thriller about murder, corruption and personal freedom in the divided states of America.” And who can forget John Dufresne’s My Darling Boy, about a “brilliant and gut-wrenching novel about a father and son from a “master” (Lee Martin) of the tragi-comic.” Oh, and my name is used as the “boy!” in the novel.

We’ve learned about what makes good dialogue in fiction and how to use dialogue tags, what good scenes are made of, the different structures novels and drama can be built around, how to build believable setting and worlds, character arcs and why they’re important, the steps from beginning, middle, and end of how to write fiction, in particular longer works, and much, much more.

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But all of that aside, I want to get into what the 200^th blog post on Novel Master Class is all about, which is helping us, the broader community of writers and aspiring writers, learn and improve upon the one craft we’ve devoted so much time to: the craft of writing.

Writing, to me (and this is something I’ve stolen from my friend and mentor John Dufrense) is how I make sense of the world. It’s where I can create and travel to on my own, with my own thoughts about life, death, and everything in between. I am God when it comes to my writing. I get to choose the world in which MY characters live and breathe and suffer in, where they experience the highs of incredible joy and, more than anything, the extremely distressing struggles that make them human, which we see through their actions and reactions to difficult situations. Writing is a passion. It is something that’s within in, though we can, in time, assume it as an identity even if we aren’t born to it, even if we don’t have that yearning within us every morning we wake up. Writing may be painful, but there’s nothing like sitting back after writing a first draft. There’s nothing like the excitement at having created something that we’re proud of, and that no one, no matter what, can take away from us. My mother has a saying: “No one can take away your education.” Well, no one can take away the fact that you’ve created something by writing—a poem, a short story, a novella, a novel.

Today is the 200th blog post on Novel Master Class

I am lucky enough to write for as long as I want to throughout the day. Sometimes I write from eight in the morning until noon. Other times I write from seven in the morning until ten at night. It depends on how the writing is going for me. I may work out in between. I may take my dog for a walk. I may fix a leaking toilet. I may run some errands. I may go to an event for one of my daughters, because I support everything they do that makes them better people and contributors to the society in which we live. (I sound a little like Dr. Seuss here, I know). But I write. I take it seriously. It’s my job—at least now it is. Before this, not that long ago, I had different jobs. “Real” jobs, as some people like to call them. Yet I still wrote. My time was limited—I had young children, a job that took sixty and seventy hours out of my week to accomplish, traveling across North America for work, and I still kept in shape by working out. That said, I also rose at three a.m. just so I could get a couple of hours of writing into my day. I wrote entire books this way. Or first draft, which I later edited (I still continue to edit some of them, while I have three different novels out on the query circuit). But I wrote. I write. I am a writer, and I’m proud to say I treat it as a job. Because that’s what it is—a job. I may like it. I may hate it. I may get a little annoyed when people call it a hobby, because it absolutely is not a hobby for me. It’s why I was put on this earth. I know it. I have no doubts about it. If you’re a writer, you write. If you’ve wanted to have written, this may not be the profession/passion for you. And that’s fine. But if you’re a writer, you put the effort into writing. Whether that’s five or ten minutes a day, or fifteen, you make time to write. There is no other way to write than to sit your ass in the chair and write—the muse will come to you then; it won’t come to you and then you write (this, also stolen from John Dufresne).

NovelMasterClass.com began with the idea of starting an editing business. It has turned into so much more for me because of the blog piece of the site. Writing a weekly blog post has helped me stay in the game, if you will. Every time I write a blog post, I pull from my own experience, and I research other writers’ experiences to learn from and/or enhance what I’m posting on the blog. The goal has always been to help beginning writers, intermediate writers, and experienced writers, which, from what I can tell, it has done so.

I also rose at three a.m. just so I could get a couple of hours of writing into my day. I wrote entire books this way

But writing the blog also helps me, as I am not around writers on a daily basis. Yes, I go to a writing workshop with a core set of writer friends mostly every year, where we work on each other’s novels (not many writing conferences do novels, as they take a great amount of time to read and provide constructive feedback on), and I enjoy those yearly events immensely. I have built friendships with people I cherish and who have become some of my best friends. I learn from them, and hopefully they learn from me. We’ve built a community together that is productive, positive, and one we’ve learned to maneuver with grace, honesty, and, often, painful truths about our fiction. It’s my Super Bowl each year, and I look forward to it every day of the year.

If you’re a writer, you write. If you’ve wanted to have written, this may not be the profession/passion for you.

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I am proud to be writing my 200^th blog post. I will continue writing blog posts for as long as I can, and I will continue writing novels as long as I can. Today, right after this post, I’ll be jumping right back into a novel I started on October 11^th of this year. Right now I am 222 pages in, or just over 67,000 words. That’s not abnormal for me: I tend to write first drafts quickly, and then edit them for a while, often years. It’s just how my process works. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m not trying to make millions of dollars. That’s not my goal. I’m not looking to kick out a book every year, or six months. No, my goal is to write literature that people love. That people remember. That makes an impression on someone strong enough that they may take some sort of action because they’ve read and been changed somehow by whatever insights into their lives I have somehow touched. So that, like what happened with me after I read John Kerouac’s On the Road  (I sold everything, jumped in a car, and traveled and worked around the U.S. experiencing what I could never experience by remaining in Miami, where I am from).

I hope my blog posts help you in your writing. I hope you write the books you want to read, and meet the people who make you think: "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars..." as Kerouac wrote in his novel.

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I’d love to hear from you in the comments, if you like, or in private messages. If not, no worries. And if I have any advice from you from this point on that you take to heart, it’s this: Write. Write until your fingers bleed. Write until your back hurts. Write until the sun comes up and sets in the West. But write. We need literature, for it sustains us all. Write in the summer and write in the winter. Write when it’s loud and write when you’re out in a cabin hundreds of miles from the nearest human, for without writing we’re headed nowhere. Without writing, we’ll have no memory, no adventures from our chairs without some sort of screen before us, without a sense of purpose, if we’re true writers. Now pick up that pen, turn on that computer, pull out them crayons. And write the book you want to read.

Happy 200^th post to you!

Cully Perlman is author of a novel, THE LOSSES. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com

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