Building Writing Stamina: Excerpt from my book: A Friendly Guide to Writing and Ghostwriting

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

                                                                        - - - John Irving

When I was writing my first book, I had to face some problematic issues like continuity and tension. I knew nothing about them. They hadn’t come into play when I was writing a story or an article. But penning an entire book with a theme, characters, and story arcs, one chapter flowing into the next, tying up loose ends and finally ending up somewhere that made sense, was brand new. I had no idea how to organize such a huge undertaking. Writing an article was a sprint, but writing a book was a marathon. Did I have the stamina to get through it?

When I voiced my reservations to a journalist friend, she gave me some great advice. “At this point, don’t think about the book as a whole,” she said. “Think of each chapter as a separate story or you’ll end up in bed with the covers pulled up over your head.”

I knew that posture all too well and it sounded like she did, too.

“Just write one chapter at a time,” she advised me. “You’ve already written stories and articles. You know how to do that. When a chapter feels like it’s over, go on to the next one.”

“But where should I start?”

“Write your chapters in any order you like,” she said. “You can go back later and place them where they belong.”

Begin in the middle, is what I heard her say.

I didn’t know how to connect one chapter to the next but I knew all about stamina. I’d learned it the hard way (is there an easy way?) when I was a teenager, traveling with a ballet company. Our ten-week tours of one-night-stand performances across America were brutal. An average day went like this:

We piled into a bus early in the morning with assigned seats according to a hierarchy – the principal dancers sat at the front and the soloists were next. That put me, a sixteen-year-old corps de ballet member, at the back of the bus, bumping along over the tires. About three weeks into my first tour, I remember thinking, I can't do this for one more day. But I did. I was building stamina.

When we reached our destination, a different city each day, (anywhere from Hayes, Kansas, to Muskogee, Oklahoma, from New York City to Chicago), we checked into a crummy hotel and we showed up at the designated performance venue. We did an hour and a half warm up class and we rehearsed that night’s program for musical tempos and stage placement. We found something to eat in our current city, it was mostly diner food, and it was back to the theater where we warmed up again, did our hair and makeup, and we performed.

We conked out pretty hard at night and when the alarm went off the next morning, we hauled our suitcases into the elevator, piled back onto the bus, and started the same routine all over again. If you slept past your alarm, someone went to your room, woke you up none too gently, and you did the walk of shame onto the bus where forty dancers were waiting impatiently and grousing at you. And then there were the bleeding blisters on our toes and heels and the inevitable injuries that we learned to ignore as we smiled for the audience.

I’m happy to say that I always made it to the bus. I developed a great deal of stamina and pain tolerance during my ballet career, but I wasn’t sure if I could turn my hard-earned physical endurance into the mental stamina I needed to write a book. I decided to try, so I took my friend’s advice and faced the computer daily, one page and one chapter at a time. Some days, I couldn't wait to tell my story. Other days, I dragged myself to my desk, feeling like a victim, resenting my lot in life, forcing myself to do something I didn’t want to do. I felt trapped and wondered why I should even bother.

In Stephen King’s novel, Misery, a demented fan traps a writer in her home, breaks his legs, and forces him to pen another book in his series. That’s what being forced to write looks like. Nothing like that was happening to me and it isn't happening to you either. You’re not a victim. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. You can stop working if you like, but if you put off writing until you feel like it, chances are you’ll never get back to it. Fear and doubt have a way of overpowering desire until you get a firm handle on them. There have been times I’ve chastised myself with such harsh criticism and judgments, it’s a miracle I survived my own thrashings. But I kept on writing and after a period of time (it felt like forever), I held my first book in my hands. It was mediocre at best, but I’d built up the stamina to face the next project with less fear and more resolve.

“How do I get myself to write every day?” one of my students asked me. “I think about it all the time, but something else always comes up and I put it off.”

He was hoping for a magic bullet so when I told him that he needed to schedule his writing sessions and simply show up at the designated time, he was disappointed. I understood. I’ve tried a lot of different ways to get the work done like meeting a friend at a coffee shop to write together or calling a fellow author to talk about my ideas and my challenges. They didn’t work for me. Ultimately, I have to show up at the computer like I would for any other appointment.

I found out that if you don’t schedule your sessions, you won’t write.

If you don’t write, you won’t build stamina.

If you don’t build stamina, you can’t write a book.

This is how I’ve managed to build my writing stamina over the years.