This is the juice of being a writer. This is as good as it gets, right here in the thick of this first draft. You’ve got to be fully conscious of this moment and know that this is what you do it for. You don’t do it just to show off the finished product or to be recognized as some great genius or to get paid a lot of money. All of those things are nice, and I wish every writer in the world that kind of success, but at the end of the day that’s not what writing is really about.
It’s about the doing of it. That’s the only part of it that’s truly meaningful—the actual act of writing.
If you have the writer gene you know exactly what I’m talking about here, even if you won’t (or can’t) bring yourself to admit it. As writers, we’re so full of passion and ambition. We have so much to say to the world, so many things we want to express, that we sometimes get caught up in this grand notion that the next script is the one; the next book is the one; the next great whatever is the one. But the truth is, it’s the little moments of pleasure you receive along the way, the little successes that make it all worthwhile—writing a breakthrough scene or fixing a problematic line of dialogue or realizing that cutting a character will strengthen the whole piece, even when it’s a character you’re in love with. Especially when it’s a character you’re in love with.
Understanding and accepting this reality is so vital to your career. Why? Because no matter how much you’ve written in your life, you still have to start at square one each and every time. No two stories are the same, yet you will run into the same problems on story number one thousand that you ran into on story number one. Sure, some will come together easier than others, but you never get a free lunch. You still have to make each and every story work in its own unique way.
And what’s the only thing that you can really count on through all this, the only thing that’s consistent from one effort to the next? That’s right, your process. Your process. Not the one that someone else has neatly laid out for you in a book about writing (including this one). The process that you’ve developed for yourself, the one that makes sense and works for you, the one that you will never enjoy more than when the story belongs exclusively to you. The one that you have no choice but to hone, refine, and love. That’s where your gold is.
After all, if you’re going to spend your entire life doing something day in and day out, year after year, you better love it. Otherwise what’s the point?
Villains vs. Villainy
There’s one particular storytelling element that is especially relevant to this discussion about keeping your original story to yourself while it incubates. It has to do with the tension or central conflict in a story, which frequently involves the presence of a villain.
It’s often said, and I think quite correctly, that the best villains are the ones that aren’t just evil, but are truly flawed human beings. While you clearly don’t empathize with these characters in the same way that you do the hero of the story, you understand their motivation, and you can see why they’ve become such a powerful force of antagonism in the hero’s world. In the case of theater, film, and television, if these villains are also portrayed by gifted actors as real, believable people, then their twisted, immoral agendas enhance the experience all the more.
In some stories though, there is no villain in the form of a person. The true villain is a thing, an idea, an emotion. Take Romeo and Juliet, for example. There are characters in the story that antagonize in various ways, but the real villain is the intolerance that exists between the two families, the fear of the other. It’s this human failing, this overwhelming villainous force that conspires to ruin the happiness of the star-crossed lovers.
If you embrace this concept and start looking at every story through this lens, you quickly come to the conclusion that every hero’s struggle is really a struggle against the underlying villainy, not the villain itself, even in stories where an actual human villain plays a clear and prominent role. In the hands of a talented writer, this character becomes a three-dimensional person, but really, it’s just the personification of the conflict.
Where does this conflict come from then? What is the true source of this antagonism?
As I’ve already mentioned, I think you always need to be able to clearly articulate what you’re writing about thematically. I think it’s also important to be able to identify what it is in your own life that’s inspiring you to tell a particular story at any given time. In other words:
How is your life experience shaping this work? What’s going on in your life right now that you’re struggling with? What villainy, past or present, are you personally trying to overcome?
When you can answer these questions, you’ve probably found the source of your main character’s antagonism. Even if your main character is nothing like you, even if their background, their personality, and their circumstances are completely different than yours, even if they’re not the same gender as you, their struggle is your struggle. This is another reason why it’s so critical to keep the process to yourself in the early stages of development, to allow yourself to become more conscious of this relationship between you, your story, and your main character
