"Embrace The Suck" Is A Philosophy For Writers To Live By

If you've been part of the American armed forces, know someone who has been, or if you're a sucker for iconic phrases, you've likely heard, "Embrace The Suck." Popularized in the early 2000s during America's activities in Iraq, the phrase has a rather simple meaning that can alter one's mental battlefield. In short, this phrase tells you, "You are going to have to do things that are hard. Things you don't want to do. Things that suck. But rather than fleeing back from it, or trying to lean away from this necessity, embrace the nature of the suck. This thing will be hard, it will be awful, and it might be traumatizing... but you have to fucking do it to get the job done."

This attitude is why you see people tackling the hardest, least-forgiving parts of a gym routine with energy and gusto. It's why you see people putting in long hours on a job site with a smile on their face and a cup of coffee in-hand. And if you're a writer, embracing the suck can be life-changing for how you engage with your work.

Editing... hell yeah!

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The Craft Is Often A Slog... Don't Shy Away From That!

The title of my recent blog, A Majority of Making Art is Boring and Tedious (And You Need To Get Used To That) really says it all. However, if you find yourself losing enthusiasm, getting frustrated, or worst of all attempting to start a new manuscript because it feels like the old one is getting bogged down, consider stepping back and embracing the suck. Acknowledge to yourself that no, writing this scene won't be fun because it's just a piece of connective tissue in your story. No, you aren't going to have a blast conducting the third editorial pass of this book, but it has to be done.

And so on, and so forth.

All right... only way out is through.

Embracing the suck is, at its core, about acknowledging the hard things that have to be done. It's that moment when the rubber hits the road, and everything seems way more difficult than training or experience led you to believe it would be. And it is the attitude that cringing away, putting it off, or trying to avoid it won't help... so you embrace it! You drive yourself forward, jump with both feet, and do the job with all the enthusiasm you can muster.

Because at the end of the day, it's better to fully commit to what you're doing than to mince about with it. Your results will be better, you'll make more progress, and overall the job will get done faster than if you'd tried to just skip the parts of it you don't like.

Embracing the suck is not about not being thoughtful or methodical in your plotting. It's not about just slapping words down on the page until you hit a goal. It's not about just doing something instead of doing nothing. It's about acknowledging that the way you think about writing a story or a book often bears no resemblence to how it actually happens. That process is long, difficult, frustrating, and filled with tedious double-checking and annoying revisions to make sure all the facts of your plot line up properly.

Even if it's long, annoying, and dumb, though, you have to do it. And it's a lot easier to do it if you commit to doing it, and you shove forward no matter how much it sucks.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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