How Do You Do It?

I don't know if you regularly look at the comments on these posts or return to see what other folks have said after you've left your mark; I get the wonderful task of moderating all that lands on the Elephant's Bookshelf, so I see them all. But if you didn't come back, you may have missed a great question from a reader who I presume is a relatively new writer.

Dr3am3r said, "I've just begun working on a manuscript, and the enormity of the task freaks me out like nothing I have ever before experienced. How do you all do it? What keeps you focused and how do you not become overwhelmed?"

As someone who has penned stories and poems and songs and anything else my little heart imagined since I was a small child, I can't really speak to the whole freaking out part of things. I've always written and started without any expectation of making money at it. As I grew up, I was more concerned with telling stories that I thought were interesting, and if I could get other people interested in them too, all the better. But I've worked with writers most of my professional life, and I've seen some of them freak out. I accept that the blank sheet of paper can be daunting.

The question reminds me of the story behind the name of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. I don't have the book in front of me at the moment, but it went something like this: As a young girl, she was putting together a report about birds and hadn't done all her research. The night before the report was due, she was in tears and her father asked why. She confessed what had happened and he agreed to help her. "How are we going to get it done? There's so many of them!" And he said, "We'll go through them one at a time, bird by bird."

Again, I may have gotten some of the facts wrong, but the gist of it is that her dad helped and explained that to reach your goal, you take it step by step. Perhaps I even said something like that when I offered a review of Bird by Bird back when the Bookshelf was still a young elephant.

But I'll ask you all, fellow readers and writers, how do you do it? What compels you to tell a story? What makes you go back to the story you've started to make it better? How do you overcome the seemingly enormous task of writing a novel? What have you been smoking to make you think you can do this and do it well?