K*A*E*P*E*R*N*I*C*K (and S A N D E R S O N)

Last Sunday, my facebook news feed was suddenly filled with posts like this:

• I may end up being a closeted Kaerpernick fan!! 
• K A E P E R N I C K!!!
• I'm a 49ers fan now
• The man has a rocket for an arm...amazing passes!!

(Granted, 3 of these 4 particular posts were all written by the same woman, but you get the gist, nonetheless.)

I didn't understand all the fuss. I'm not the biggest football fan ever, but even I could see that Kaepernick was leading his team to a spectacular fail. I kept asking my son things like, "Are you sure we're cheering for the 49ers? Cause those Ravens are looking pretty amazing." (In real life, I'm a Patriots fan. But one does have to cheer for somebody at these things, right?)

Then the lights went out.

When they came back on, I became a solid 49er fan, at least as long as they've got Kaepernick. Holy smokes, that third quarter rocked. I could watch it over and over, like it was a particularly fun episode of Psych. Unfortunately, it was 5 yards short of rocking to a victory.  But Kaepernick has a career of Superbowls ahead of him, so it's a little like only ending up as #2 on the NY Times Bestselling List on your first try. I should be so unlucky...

Then I learned why true football fans were so much more amazed by Kaepernick than I was. For those of you who don't already know, here it is: The superbowl was only Kaepernick's 10th start in the NFL. Can you say "overwhelmed"?

Sometimes, as a writer, I feel the way I imagine Kaepernick might have felt. Some of the things I want to write are too big, too complicated, too much for me. Sometimes, I purposely make them smaller, so that I have some chance at success.

Sometimes, I'm not true to my characters, because the line between complex and unlikable seems too fine for me to find.

Sometimes at the beginning of a project, I freeze, because now I've written a book or two, and I sense the enormity of what I'm trying to do again.

Sometimes I let it get to me, and give up.  And then I get so depressed I can barely get out of bed in the morning, because writers have to write, whether they are good at it or not.

But sometimes I get a 'lights out' moment that allows me to get my head back in the game. I often curse those moments, because they might signal the end of a writing era I wasn't ready to end. Story ideas may fizzle, characters may fade from my memory, but eventually, something new always begins.

I read an article about Brandon Sanderson last week. Brandon Sanderson wrote his first 8 books in college while working the graveyard shift at a hotel. He says the first five were terrible, which was exactly what he'd heard would happen. The sixth book was Elantris. I believe he's written 12 published books since then, and six of them were best-sellers.

After a while, he decided to make his books "bigger and full of all the nobility and awesomeness that I wanted to see in epic fantasy. It was flying in the face of what everyone had told me. I wrote the biggest, coolest, epic-est book I could."

He says, "Sit in a chair and write. Ignore this thing they call writer's block. Doctors don't get doctor's block; your mechanic doesn't get mechanic's block. If you want to write great stories, learn to write when you don't feel like it. You have to write it poorly before you can write it well. So just be willing to write bad stories in order to learn to become better. " (from BYU Magazine, Winter 2013, p. 55)

My advice for this week: Write. Write what you want, with characters that are so deep and complex that at first they seem shallow; with worlds so alive and vibrant that you fear you'll never be able to capture them on paper; with the best sentences you can manage to write, and without shame. And be grateful, when the lights go out, for it means something is happening...

(if only that something could be narrated by Ron Perlman, right?)