Putting One Word Down Ater Another

A friend pointed me to Neil Gaiman's blog, specifically to an essay giving advice to writers. In one point, he mentioned that people will often come up to him, offering a truly fantastic idea that is sure to be a best seller and all Gaiman has to do is put the words on paper. At that point, Neil kindly explains that he already has plenty of ideas and doesn't have enough time to work on his own stuff. Ideas are pretty cheap. Everybody gets them all the time. Gaiman writes, ". . .no matter how good the idea, the execution is everything. And the real work is done at the keyboard or huddled over the notebook, putting one word down after another."

I find this particularly true. I have countless ideas in every stage of completeness. I have fully-realized ideas, ideas that need a good editing, ideas that need major revision, half-formed ideas, one-sentence ideas, and vague notions of ideas. And without a doubt, I have the least amount of fully-realized writing. It's hard. It's a pain in the butt. It's time-consuming and exhausting. Half-formed ideas and vague notions of ideas are way more fun to imagine certain scenes and how awesome it will be when it's real. Actually making it real can be way less fun (mostly because it takes effort).

Still, it should serve as a reminder and a motivation to writers. The difference between us and them is that we sit down and put one word down after another. We all have ideas, but writers do something about them. Instead of fantasizing about it and talking about how great it will be, we actually make something that's great. It isn't easy, but if it was, everybody would be doing it instead of just talking about it.