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[Ep 193]\n\n\nLeveling up, according to my teenage son, who is familiar with several different video games, refers to a character or creature that gains enough experience to unlock new skills or features.\n\nFor example, let\u2019s say you\u2019re playing a game with a dragon that has one primary skill: he can breathe fire. But not big fire; he shoots out just a little flicker of flame, like a cigarette lighter clicking open and shut.\nDiscover Your Base-Level Abilities\nYou start the game and figure out how your dragon\u2019s power works. He gains plenty of fire-breathing experience, as you torch abandoned sheds and defend against enemies with a burst of his flame.\n\nAt some point, you play long enough to make full use of his current abilities. You encounter every threat at least once if not twice, and you know the lay of the land. The dragon can scorch castle doors and scale turrets. He can flick out his fire to burn through the base of a tree to fell it and form a shelter.\n\nHe\u2019s ready to level up. Unlock that achievement and suddenly you face another dragon and yours breathes out a big ol\u2019 fireball twice the size of his original flames. This opens up new possibilities and invites bigger challenges. And with these newfound abilities, he can face them.\n\nWriting is something like that. When we begin writing, we start with natural abilities and skills. We write and we learn what we\u2019re capable of and we gain experience along the way. At some point, we may feel the nudge to level up, so we can see our writing expand\u2014even explode\u2014like a fireball doubled in size.\nYou\u2019ve Got to Get in the Game\nBut before any of that can happen, we\u2019ve got to get in the game.\n\nIf you want to write, you have to start writing.\n\nOnly when you get in the game will you begin to figure out what you\u2019re capable of in the first place. Only when you\u2019re actually writing can you test your skills and talents. Only when you\u2019re in the game can you develop a writing practice, learn the craft of writing, and slowly grow comfortable and confident.\nWhen Hemingway First Got in the Game\nI\u2019m reading Hemingway\u2019s A Moveable Feast, reminded of his early days in Paris, when he started writing stories and was figuring out his writing voice, his creative process.\n\nHe found that he liked to write in a notebook while sitting in cafes. While he was still a literary unknown he was meeting and learning from his more experienced contemporaries like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound.\n\nHe discovered a system for how to stop and start his work in progress:\nI always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, \u201cDo not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.\u201d So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.\u201d1\n\n\nHe also learned to trust his emerging style\u2014his now infamous spare style\u2014that relies on declarative sentences. \u201cIf I started to write elaborately,\u201d he explains, \u201cor like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.\u201d2\n\nIn those early days he wasn\u2019t yet famous; he wasn\u2019t a household name. He didn\u2019t have an editing app named after him. Like every writer throughout history, Hemingway had to get in the game before he could level up.\nFigure Out Yourself as a Writer\nAs you commit to writing,