I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
In his writing guide and memoir Plot Twist, thriller author Harlan Coben shares the steps he took to get to where he is today: a bestselling author of thirty-five novels. He started in the 1980s with just wanting to have a book published, and finally succeeded in 1990 with Play Dead. After that, he set himself reasonable and moderate objectives, not thinking too far ahead of himself. He calls how he built his writing career incremental ambition.
It worked for him. He reached the New York Times bestseller list with his tenth published novel, Tell No One. Later, with his seventeenth published novel, he hit number one on the list, and continued to do so for eleven straight books.
He writes:
There is nothing wrong with being ambitious. Every successful creator I know—from the most avant-garde artiste to the crassest commercialist—is. If they tell you they’re not, they’re lying. Creatives lie all the time. Not just for a living, but when we give those speeches and interviews, most of us are interested in what makes us sound good rather than the truth, not unlike a little kid who is afraid to tell his friend he’d rather play Batman and Robin than baseball.
But may I recommend that you try incremental ambition? Rather than chasing some unrealistic and over-the-top goal, try to make your next step achievable, whatever it is, and then, dammit, celebrate it. Enjoy it. Relish it.
And you can do it with your writing too, he says: “If I can just get five hundred words done, I’ll be happy. That’ll be it for today. Just five hundred words.”
I’m working on a writing project right now, and it’s going slowly. I was going to write about just how hard it is to write, how I don’t want to use AI to do it because that ruins it, how I’m just slogging through.
Instead, I’ll just see if I can write 500 words of that project today.