I’m 18. . .I will get an idea in my head, and I could write for hours from that one idea. After that idea is gone, for several days not one word will be written on the paper. Is that normal for writers?—Josh Miller
Oh, yes, Josh. That is totally normal for writers.
You’ll hear a lot of push-push-push out here in the online writing community—“Write every day! Finish NaNoWriMo! Set yourself a deadline for querying!” It’s all bull. And it will turn the grand adventure of hiking up your backpack and heading out into the world of fiction into just more burdensome homework.
Don’t fall for it. There are rules for great writing, but there are no rules for how to get it done. This pressure is all really quite recent stuff, generated by the rise of marketing in our culture, and it’s completely meaningless in the context of great literature. It too will pass. All bad ideas eventually do.
I also started writing a novel when I was 16 or 17, and I also tried to finish it in a timely way. As it happens, I didn’t, because it turned out I didn’t know how to write a novel. So I started another, and another, and a few years after that another. In the meantime I was writing lots of periphery stuff—short stories, poetry, sketches, Natalie Goldberg-inspired exercises, a journal of my daily life complete with conversations and a record of where I went and who I saw, what we did together. I eventually finished a novel when I was 25. And another a few years later. And another later. In the meantime, I kept writing all that periphery stuff.
When I met my first agent, she asked me how many novels I’d written, and I said, “Three.” She said, “Good. If you’d only written the one, I wouldn’t take you.”
Start writing when you feel like it, stop when you’re depleted, write all kinds of stuff whenever it strikes you—particularly real stuff that really happens to you, in great detail. Get your hands on Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and have a blast with the exercises. Expect it to take the rest of your life to learn how to do right. Most of all: live your life.
You can always start another story, you know. That’s the beauty of creation. But this is the only life you’re ever going to get.