The Persistence

Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do. We're not into it. We don't feel we have the expertise. Maybe it's just boring, drudge work. The best way to handle something like this? Not to sell any shoes or anything, but Just do it. Make a start and get into it.

Years ago, I used to work with a lot of writers, online. Some published, others dreamers. I got quite a bit of work through a few of them and ended up as a freelance writer, myself, for about a dozen years. One of the most frequently asked questions we got was "How do you sit down and write a book?" And the answer to that is in the question, itself. You sit down and write a book.

But there's more to it than that, of course. We used to have techno-thriller author Tom Clancy in pretty regularly and if someone asked him that question, he'd respond "I just sat down and wrote the son-of-a-bitch!" which I always thought was a disservice to the questioner.

But he's right, in a way. You do have to do it, eventually. But nobody, not even the mighty Tom Clancy at the height of his powers, could sit down and knock out a whole book at a single setting. But what you can do is to split the project up, reduce it to a whole bunch of little, easily-accomplished, tasks. Make a giant list for yourself if you need to, put everything on it—then just cruise through the list, crossing things off as you go.

Name the hero? Check. Name his nemesis? Check. Sketch out a plot outline? Check. Research the geography of the setting? Check. Gather historical facts? Check. Figure out how many characters you'll need to tell the story? Check. Flesh out the details for everyone in the book, including details that inform the character that may not actually even make it into the book. Check. On and on it goes. Then just move through it all, one at a time, building on what's come before.

You cannot write a whole book. But you can write a word. And you can string a few words together and make a sentence. And with enough sentences you have a paragraph, and with enough paragraphs, you have a chapter. And at some point you will have told your story, and you'll have enough chapters. And there's your book.

You may have a bunch of things to do for your next Web project. Find some way to validate forms data before sending it along to a database. Store the information in the database in a way that's not-so-easily hackable. Find a way to get the data out of the database, again, with at least some security. And finally formatting the data. You look at a site like Amazon.com and it's intimidating because there is so much there, there. But it wasn't always like that. Check out the WayBack Machine some time and see how Amazon has grown and changed, sometimes in subtle ways. I'd hate to start from here, designing and building Amazon.com. But you could do it. There's nothing magical about it at all. You could make a list, and then just put one pixel in front of another. Eventually, you'd have a e-commerce site.

There are a lot of problems with an approach like this. One of the main ones is probably that you will quickly run into things you don't understand. Progress slows to a halt while you read a book, or work out an issue on a scratch page. But eventually, you'll get it.

Grandpa had it right, I think. "Yard by yard, it's mighty hard. But inch by inch, Life's a cinch!"