Sometimes when I write, I switch off my brain and let my hands do the talking.

 
It’s a strange experience, watching yourself type something without knowing where you’re going with it.

 
Maybe I’ll start talking about pizza in the next paragraph, or sine waves, or abstract philosophical conundrums and how they interact with theoretical physics.

 
I enjoyed being an English major when I started, or at least I think I did. There was a long period of time where I was good enough at lying that I could convince myself of nearly anything.

 
About all I’ve learned after four years and the better part of $10,000 is that there are quite a few people who, in fact, do not enjoy the services of a sentient pair of hands and a mind so bored with reality that it spends most of its time in a bungalow made of star fire and madness.

 
The strangest, truest advice I ever got about writing I got from the Internet, which is a terrible place to get advice for anything because anyone can lie and provide convincing-sounding evidence that hummus is in fact poisonous to humans and we should all stop eating it right now.

 
Then they say there is cyanide in apple seeds. Then you point out that you would literally die by organ explosion before you ate enough apple seeds to get a lethal dose of cyanide out of them.
Then they compare you to Hitler and things spiral out of control.

 
Anyway, there was this quote I found from Neil Gaiman, or at least it’s attributed to him: “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard, and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”

 
It stuck with me, that simple summation of a writer’s struggle. Somewhere else he points out that writing is just a matter of putting the right words together, which is true but doesn’t help things when you can’t find them.

 
I can’t really help with the bored head part of being me, and I’m not sure anybody really wants that part anyway.

 
Sine waving across the depression spectrum isn’t as fun as it sounds and you lose a bunch of other really important things in exchange for it.

 
What I can offer is perhaps the most overused piece of advice in the book—practice.

 
I wasn’t born with my talking hands, I had to train the little buggers. Program them. Mold them into whatever the heck it is you call somebody like my hands.

 
You know what I spent my freshman year of high school doing?

 
Spawning what would turn into a 25,000-word piece of Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction.

 
It was absolute garbage and will forever languish in the depths of the Internet, but it was the beginning of that process of forming them.

 
You won’t start good, at least not on purpose. Find what you excel at, refine it, work on it, shine it.

 
Will it be a miserable slog of seemingly unending failure? Probably. Will you be a better writer for it on the other side? Totally.

 
Of course, I also spent that year struggling to pass geometry on account of not paying attention in class, so maybe there’s another lesson to be learned here. Namely, that apothems are a totally useless thing to learn about, and they will never be useful for anything ever.