The Only Thing You Can Control

Toil­ing away on index cards has a way of putting things in per­spec­tive.

Whether you’re hunched over a cubi­cle deep in your local library, or lying on your stom­ach atop your bed with the cards spread around you, scrib­bling on 3“x5” pieces of paper forces you to immerse your­self in the process of writ­ing.

It also helps you to let go of all of that oth­er “stuff” that hangs over you.

Now that I’m deep into a new project, I’m see­ing again how much of this thing called “writ­ing” is out of our con­trol:

  • You can’t con­trol the vicis­si­tudes of the mar­ket.
  • You can’t con­trol whether edi­tors are going to like what you write.
  • You can’t con­trol whether anoth­er writer is work­ing on a book “exact­ly” like yours.
  • You can’t con­trol whether or not a genre is deemed “too crowd­ed.”
  • You can’t con­trol those agents look­ing only to rep­re­sent “break­out” books or “best­seller-lev­el mate­r­i­al.”
  • You can’t con­trol how your friends, your par­ents, your neigh­bors or even your sweet dog are going to react to your sto­ries.
  • You can’t con­trol the size of your read­er­ship or the depth of your “plat­form.”
  • You can’t con­trol nasty, half-wit­ted, prej­u­di­cial com­ments in the blo­gos­phere about you and your work.
  • You can’t con­trol whether or not read­ers are inspired by you.
  • You can’t con­trol the U.S. Mail, FedEx, UPS or any oth­er deliv­ery ser­vice.
  • You can’t con­trol the ever-increas­ing price of stamps.
  • You can’t con­trol your fel­low writ­ers’ writ­ing habits.
  • You can’t con­trol whether or not your writer friends take your advice.
  • You can’t con­trol the out­come of con­tests.
  • You can’t con­trol whether or not peo­ple are going to laugh at your wit­ty line.
  • You can’t con­trol whether your sto­ry will be accept­ed by a jour­nal.
  • You can’t con­trol how peo­ple in your com­mu­ni­ty might per­ceive you when they find out you’re a writer.
  • You can’t con­trol the myr­i­ad tasks and nui­sances that mys­te­ri­ous­ly show up the moment you become immersed in a new project: snow shov­el­ing, den­tist appoint­ments, job respon­si­bil­i­ties or argu­ments with your land­lord or spouse.

 

 

Maybe it’s the work­ing close-up, maybe it’s the micro­scop­ic print, maybe it’s the card’s ten­den­cy to draw more and more detail out of you, or maybe it’s all of these things. What­ev­er it is, work­ing with index cards for the past few weeks has got­ten my mind off the long list above and taught me once again what I think is the most impor­tant les­son about writ­ing:

The ONLY thing you can con­trol as a writer is your writ­ing.

Whether or not you do it every day. How pre­cise and apt your obser­va­tions are. How true your dia­logue sounds. How many words you write. The tools you use. The media you work in. The qual­i­ty of your nouns and verbs. The vari­ety of sen­tence struc­tures you employ. How much you give to a read­er.

If you DO the writ­ing, if you keep your focus there, where your pow­er is, those oth­er con­cerns will take care of them­selves.

Get into the writ­ing. Love doing the actu­al work of typ­ing, scrawl­ing in pen­cil, chang­ing words, mak­ing sen­tences.

It sounds like some­thing the vil­lage idiot would say, but it’s true:

Love the writ­ing.

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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