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You score your own goal when you set a target and meet it

Climbing a mountain begins with a single step. In fact, achieving anything requires some action on your part. The more you attempt, the more you will achieve; but especially in writing. For to be a writer, is to write. If a tree in a deep forest does not fall if nobody hears the sound; then writing is not complete until it appears on the page and is read by a reader.

But how to get there we hear you cry! You are standing at base camp and the summit looms away above you in the high mist. It seems an impossible task to climb so high and to stand aloft waving at the world far below you.

The secret of course is to place a single word on the page and step away. Look at it from a distance much as a painter surveys a canvas. In a way, the process is the same for both artists. You have a blank manuscript to fill in as much as the painter has a blank canvas. Go to it. The story is already there; it is your task to find it and reveal it to others.

The climber of mountains takes a first step and another and more and more until the journey is completed.

As a writer you add words until you have a sentence. Then you think of another sentence and another if necessary until you have a paragraph. Add more and more paragraphs to make a page. Add pages until you have a chapter. Add chapters until you have completed the work.

If it’s a short story you are writing, you may complete fewer pages; if it’s a feature article you may cut the length according to the market for which you are writing.

Just as the climber does not intend to climb a few feet and hop back down once her picture as a mountaineer is taken, neither should you as a writer intend to write a few pages for deposit in your deepest filing cabinet and walk away to declare you are afflicted with writer’s block.

As the climber identifies a peak and a series of steps to get there; so do you set particular points to reach in a given time. It can be chapters; it can be pages; it can be anything you wish it to be. However what it absolutely must be must be a specific goal you will tell yourself you will reach by a given time. A specific date, in other words.

A climber must be off a mountain before severe weather arrives.

You must finish at least the first draft of your work before thunderclouds of doubt and anxiety arrive to plague and thwart you.

For if there are fiends on the mountain waiting to seize an unwary climber there are fiends of the mind waiting to lead you astray as a writer.

It is your task to thwart them in turn by finishing the book.

© Brendan Nolan 2009
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