Fake it til you make it

Or, the fine art of pretending like you know what you're doing. Ah school. How I miss thee. Well no, I slept through more classes than I want to admit and only vaguely remember that I had certain ones (I'm looking at you calculus). I mostly remember that A squared plus B squared equals C squared and also that my friend ruined the end of 'The Great Gatsby' before we ever started reading it. Not exactly life changing lessons there.

What I did learn in school, and the most important lesson of all, is how to bullshit. Papers, reviews, excuses, whatever I was supposed to know that I didn't know for some reason. All bullshitting. If I had to write a paper about why the film 'The Intruder' nearly gave me an aneurysm, I could do it half asleep while watching 'Top Chef' reruns. I know this because I've done it before (seriously that film almost gave me an aneurysm).

And it is a fine art I continue to practice today. Let me explain. I write notes to myself, ideas for books, questions about plots, all kinds of things. And by notes I mean full notebooks and giant sheets of loose paper and post-its occasionally when I have an idea but nothing to write it on. There are probably more pages of notes than actual novel. And this is fine.

Except when I write the note it's generally a spur of the moment thing or a brainstorm or I'm trying out ideas. I'll write down things like "Is her father alive?" and then move on to something like "pack mentality" and then do a bunch of research on mermaids for some reason. I never write down useful things like, what day does a certain event happen on? Or, what is the work schedule of these characters? Which means I have to go through after the fact (which is sort of like sifting for gold except the gold is words and you are sifting through lots of other words to find it) and make new notes that answer the questions I should have thought of originally.

Ah but I see you are still questioning where my fine art of bullshitting comes in. It comes in because I write notes on a manuscript and then immediately forget what they mean. So when I go back to fix something that I marked just as "fix this" I can't remember what I decided was wrong in the first place. But I can't admit that I have no idea what the hell I'm doing so, fake it til you make it. I'm eighty pages in, only slightly more than eighty to go. Ok so it's actually ninety but if I say slightly more than eighty it makes me feel more accomplished than I currently am. And when I said I was just editing apparently that was also a lie because I rewrote a few things even though I promised (myself) that I wouldn't do any more rewrites.

I'm giving credit to anyone who actively decides they want to be a writer instead of accidentally stumbling into the idea that maybe they could write and publish a book. Because man, this shit is hard.