5 Writing Tips from Marcus Aurelius
Most writers are experts at self-flagellation, but, just for a few minutes, let your inner critic take a break and have the motherflipping Emperor of Rome tell you what’s what.
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, written around 170 A.D., is a cornerstone work of Stoic philosophy. He wrote only for himself, never intending his work to be published, so he is brutally honest about his own flaws and direct in his advice to his future self. This means Meditations lends itself very well to writers wanting to give themselves a hard time.
Here are 5 particularly useful admonitions from the most powerful man on the planet.
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Writing is hard. Even seasoned plotters sometimes find their characters behaving erratically and ruining their carefully crafted spreadsheets. It’s important to remember that it’s incredibly rare that a finished book will be exactly how the author envisioned it. Wedding yourself to an impossible ideal, especially on your first draft, will slow you down and may even cause you to abandon a project completely.
Sometimes the only way to write a good book is to write a bad one first. Think of your first draft as digging up the raw material for your story. Your obstacle, being the fact that your first draft is hideous, will become your material for moving forward.
Concentrate every minute on doing what is in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And concentrate on freeing yourself from all other distractions. That is all the gods can ask of you.
Writing time is time for writing and nothing else. Turn off your router. Schedule separate time for research if you must. Just write. If there’s some detail you absolutely need to look up to put in your manuscript, then just type TK and move on. You can pop that in later when you’re not in writing time, because writing time is time for writing.
We are all losing the ability to concentrate, author Cal Newport argues. Whenever we come out of our work, even for just a moment, it takes us longer and longer to get back to where we were, mentally. If you can block out whole hours of writing time (time for writing!), you’re onto a winner, but you also need to protect your attention with your life.
I have very little free time between working a full-time job and raising a one-year-old, so my only hope is, as Marcus says, to “free myself” from distraction. The Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of focused work followed by a 5-minute break) works wonders for me. The internet goes off, the phone goes in a drawer, and I can write safely for 25 minutes without worrying that the world will end. Some days I only get one session in, but that’s OK. A book written 200 words at a time looks exactly the same on the shelf as a book written 2, 000 words at a time.
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
It’s impossible not to feel a little professional jealousy when you see other writers landing agents and book deals and swimming in followers on social media. There’s nothing wrong with feeling whatever the heck you want, but to dwell on it is to deliberately injure yourself. You will always find someone who is more successful than you. Use their success as a road map and treat other writers as travelling partners rather than competition.
There is, of course, a huge part of publishing a novel that relies upon the approval of others, including agents and editors. Refusing to tie your well-being to their words and actions doesn’t mean you ignore them and it doesn’t mean you should pretend you don’t need them. Your novel lives and dies on the people who help you along the way. Just keep it all about the work. A rejection of your novel is not a rejection of your entire existence. A suggestion of how a story could be improved is not a judgement of your worth as a person, or even as a writer.
I’ve taken these kinds of judgements to heart myself in the past, particularly when my work has been hugely improved by readers’ feedback (from my brilliant wife, especially!). “This book would be so much better if they had written it instead of me,” is a little theme tune for myself that I’m always humming. I torture myself with a untestable, hypothetical time-travel scenario when I could focus on making the book better. It’s easily done.
Enough of this miserable, whining life. Stop monkeying around! Why are you troubled? What is new here? What is so confounding? Who is the one responsible? Take a good look. Or just look at the matter itself. There is nothing else to look at.
Marcus was clearly quite upset with himself when he wrote that! The point is a good one, though. If there’s something wrong with your story — if the dialogue sounds stilted or if the events seem unbelievable — fix your story. If there’s something wrong with you — maybe you’re too tired or sad or hungry to concentrate — take a break.
And that’s it. There’s no magical writer’s block that will descend upon you and ruin your plans and there is no warm-up ritual that will sort you out. If the words are hard-won today or if they’re not coming at all, look the problem in the eye and figure out how to fix it. It will be your story or it will be you. There is no need to look for other culprits. (Me, I usually just need a snack.)
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
Stop worrying about whether you are a real writer or not and do some bloody writing. You are banned from using the word “aspiring”. If you write or have written, you are a writer.
If I see the A-word in your Twitter bio, I’ll be sending a snarky GIF in your general direction.
