Bo-Bo Knows How to Keep His Ass in a Chair

There's an old truism that successful writers know how to keep their asses in their chairs and write. I used to think this was pretty straightforward--the secret to writing as simple as finding the time to write. But there's a little more to it than that.

As I near the end of the rough draft of my novel, I'm finding that I paid so much attention to braiding the main storylines together that I failed to notice all the loose hairs I dropped along the way. I know that stray hairs are supposed to be tamed by the hairspray of revision, but you try ignoring a shrieking chorus of the what-about-mes and see how much progress you make! I would be galloping happily along and then--bam!--fallen tree. Sure, I could leap over it, but every time I tried that, the chorus only screeched all the louder: What about me?

These brain banshees made the nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart.

These were the moments I most wanted to check Facebook, play with Bo-Bo, study Greek, clean the toilet, torture myself with articles about Sarah Palin, and just generally invent hours of distraction under the guise of letting the fiction problem percolate at the back of my brain. But detours cause delays, and every day I'm still--still, STILL--working on this (expletive deleted) rough draft, I'm in grave danger of inappropriate laughter (yesterday, I laughed at a student when he told me how bummed he was that the only win his team logged during the entire football season was the result of a forfeit).

So for the sake of my sanity and social niceties, I kept my ass in the chair and forced my fingers to keep moving on the keys. And then the weirdest thing happened. Out of the corner of my eye, a character I hadn't realized was even in on the present dilemma showed up on the screen in my head and started hauling off that tree (oh, just stay with me a minute because telling you what he was actually doing would make very little sense given that you haven't read a lick of my book). I started to describe what the character was doing, and soon the tree was gone, and I was back to galloping.

In her novel, "The Fiction Class," Susan Breen says writing description is "like watching a Polaroid picture develop--first come the blurry shadows of the central forms, and then the details emerge slowly."

Yeah. What she said.

But I will add this. Our job as writers, then, is to keep our asses in our chairs long enough that our Polaroids make themselves known to us. Because once those Polaroids appear, you're not going to want to move your ass until your fingers have done their keyboarding thing.