Month: October 2016

The Weekly Re-Motivator: No Such Thing as Coincidence

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I posted earlier this week about my missing flash drive.

It’s now been a solid week since I realized it was missing, and having now cleaned the house and looked in every reasonable place three times (and the unreasonable places, once or twice), it’s hard to argue with the simple, impassive truth. It’s gone.

And because I’m an idiot, the missing little chunk of plastic and silicone has taken with it about 40,000 words of work — the bulk of almost three months daily wordhammering — on the latest novel.

Just gone. Not like somebody broke into my house and my TV, dvd player, and all my wife’s jewelry are missing — that sort of thing, while senseless and random, would at least make sense in a causal sense. There would also be the lovely spectre of somebody to blame. No, it’s rather like I went to the grocery store and came back to find my dog gone. All of her toys still strewn around the house. Sprouts of fur on her blanket and bed. Leash on the wall hook. But no sign of the mutt herself; just the back gate swinging in the breeze. The gate I forgot to close before I left the house.

It’d be tempting to think that it’s an awfully big coincidence that my entire project literally vanishes when I’ve been struggling so mightily with it over these past few months. Some of the days have been good, but most of them have been a bit too much like work, and as much as I like the central idea of the book, there’s just something … off about it. Maybe it’s the tone, maybe it’s the point of view, maybe it’s the setting; hard to pin down, but the idea just hasn’t caught fire with me the way I wanted it to.

So it disappears when I haven’t backed it up in months, and wipes out all those months of work.

But I don’t believe in coincidences; at least not in that cosmic, maybe it was meant to be kind of way. I’m furious with myself for losing it. I’m ready to throttle myself over the idiocy of failing to back up my project. And no matter how the project might have pained me, I don’t believe that simply throwing all that work out the window — literally, it turns out — would have been the best choice. Even bad writing sometimes reveals hidden gems, turns of phrase worth keeping, little narrative nuggets buried among the scree and scrap.

But I also don’t believe that it just happened. I think that, if I were really proud of this work, if I really felt it was worthy of my time, I probably would have safeguarded it a little bit better. I think if it mattered to me that much, I would have found the time to click a few buttons and back it up.

I don’t think me losing the flash drive and the project is the universe’s way of telling me that the project is wrong. I think that me losing the project was my own way of telling myself that the project was wrong.

Because here’s something I noticed in edits for my first novel: as much as I changed things, there was a hesitation to really deconstruct the thing, to shred it to pieces and rebuild the stuff I had spent so much time building the first time around. I did that deep rebuilding in places here and there, but a not insignificant portion of the first draft survived, coming through with only cosmetic changes.

With this project, though, I won’t have that option. I know the outline of what I wrote — the plotlines and the character developments that need to take place to get me to the middle — but I won’t have the fleshy bits, the meat of the story. I’ll have to rebuild all that.

Which is frustrating, but also kind of liberating. Not only am I not tethered by the shortcomings of the draft, but I can’t even see them in the rearview mirror. I’ve got no choice but to take this in an entirely new direction.

And the fact that I’m not filled with dread at the prospect tells me that, even though it burns worse than a throatful of rotgut bourbon, it doesn’t have to be all bad.

So maybe it’s just a coincidence that my project vanished into the ether when I was filled with so much doubt about it.

But I kind of don’t think so.

Maybe it’s just more likely that I’m devoted enough to this thing to turn this lemon — and man, is it a hell of a lemon — into something like lemonade.

Or maybe I have an alter ego who knows what’s best for my writing and chucked the thing in the garbage disposal while I thought I was asleep.

Either way, it’s time for a fresh start.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Lost

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I have a confession.

A writer’s confession, which should be taken with all the appropriate hand-wavings and grains of salt. When you look at the real problems of the world, my meager problems mean little. But it’s weighing on me nonetheless.

I haven’t worked on my novel in almost two weeks.

On the one hand, I feel okay about that, but on the other hand, I feel very much not okay about that, because I know I’m not going to be able to work on it today, and it’s dubious whether I’ll be able to get to it later this week either. The excuses for this are twofold:

One, it was vacation last week, and as much as writing is a release and an adventure in pink unicorn land, there are days when it’s work, too. And of late, the writing has felt more like work than like a unicorn frolic. As such, a little vacation from it is, I think, warranted, and what better time than when I’m on a vacation from actual work? I got to turn the ol’ brain off, veg out and watch some TV, take the kids and the wife on a few day trips … it was good. Didn’t have to worry about how to get my protagonist out of his latest scrape. Didn’t have to construct the machinations of the villain working behind the scenes. Didn’t have to batter my brain against the Rube Goldberg machine of gears and spindles and flywheels that constitutes the plot of this thing.

Still, I felt guilty about leaving that creative garden untended for the week, sort of the same way I feel about letting my lawn continue to grow, sprouting weeds and dandelions and the occasional mushroom, while my neighbors keep their lawns neatly trimmed.

Sidenote: there’s a new show out called Speechless, about this deadbeat family with a handicapped, mute son. No idea if the show has any staying power or not — the first few episodes have been pretty funny, but who knows — but I at least resonate with the family. Not because they’re jerks — the mother proudly drives in the emergency lane, runs stop signs, and flings bluster and righteous indignation and her son’s handicap at anybody who even looks sideways at her. And I have a hard time getting down with that. What I totally get, though, is that they just don’t give a sharknado what other people think of them. Lawn is overgrown? Paint is peeling? Car’s looking a little dumpy? Yeah, no, we’re not going to fix those things. They just don’t matter to us; we have only so many fargos to give. To that, I give a deep, sonorous AMEN.

So I returned to work on Monday, all set to hunker down and return to the love-hate relationship I have with my current novel. Which brings me to…

Two: I can’t find my flash drive.

Now, before you say anything, know that I’ve already said every possible thing to myself, mostly inside my own head, occasionally in raging, fists-pounding-on-the-desk angry shouts. How can you be so stupid? Haven’t you heard of backups? How could you possibly lose it? Dunce! Idiot! Disorganized, sloppy, careless!

And my excuses are like the rain in Arizona: woefully inadequate, but all there is. I write the novel mostly at my job, so keeping it on the flash drive makes sense for taking it home, back and forth. But I have to steal time at work to write, so I don’t exactly have a routine, and, well, backing up is the last thing I’m thinking about, because usually I’ve either got parent calls to make or meetings to get to or students coming to my room and …

Well, here’s my other dirty confession. I haven’t backed up outside of the flash drive in over a month.

Sigh.

And of course, with the whole of the novel missing (or at least my recent work on it), I can’t re-read to get inspired to write the next bit. Not to mention the soul-crushing stupidity I feel when I think about the project at all, which pushes every creative thought right out of my ears.

But I’m going to have to face up sooner or later. If the drive doesn’t turn up in the next few days, it probably never will; there’s only so many places it could reasonably be, and considering all the places we went over the break … well. That little piece of plastic and silicon could be anywhere in a fifty-mile radius, which means it might as well be on the moon for my likelihood of stumbling across it again.

Luckily, the weather is changing. Morning runs have been downright pleasant — sixty degrees or so with the stars twinkling overhead — and have done good things for my blood, which on Monday was boiling, and which today is only simmering. Further, when I think about it, the beginning of the novel was going to need massive re-working anyway, probably a complete re-write in lots of places, so the first 40,000 words were hardly carved in stone.

Still, for the moment, they’re not carved anywhere, and that’s tough to see around.

Image result for headdesk

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Awkwardity

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I’ve always been pretty awkward.

That might come as a shock, given my background in theater and my career choice as a teacher and the way I prattle on at length about any- and everything around here, but there it is.

Socially awkward. I’ve even gone so far to consider myself socially retarded. I’m often the quiet guy in the room, not because I don’t want to take part in conversations (well, sometimes), but because I just don’t know what to say. But then, what feels like a comfortable silence to me will turn into an uncomfortable silence in the room, and then I sit there thinking I should really say something, but then the words come out like cow vomit.

I think a lot of people struggle with this, but I also think I maybe have it more than most. (Then again, maybe that’s the old Dunning-Kruger effect talking — that thing that makes you overestimate your experience when you don’t have much. Americans, it turns out, suffer from Dunning-Kruger than most other nationalities.) Like, I know that some people feel awkward sometimes. There are hashtags about it. But for me, it feels like it’s all the time.

And I think that’s part of what compels me to write. Because I screw up these social interactions every day, so I get another crack at them when I create these alternate realities in my own head. And again, I think we all do that — we all play the I shoulda said THIS game — but for a writer, it’s different. When I tell a story, I get to get it right, and (hopefully!) readers get to see me get it right.

They say you should write what you know, and while I think that advice can be overly limiting (if we kept to it, we’d never have science fiction), it’s also pretty impossible to avoid. All writers, I think, write themselves into their stories. And in looking at the stories I’ve written, the characters I’ve spent the most time with… well, it’s safe to say that they’re pretty socially awkward like me.

First novel: A struggling writer battles through his self-doubt with the help of a muse. His only real friend is the one who is financially obligated to spend time with him. Hmm!

Second novel: A girl who is socially segregated because of the role that’s been selected for her by the community. She doesn’t have friends because she will, for all intents and purposed, be “killed” when she comes of age, and everybody knows it. Hmm, hmm!

Third novel: A kid born to superhero parents has no superpowers, but falls in with the superheroes anyway — so that he can learn to exploit them. He trusts none of his “classmates,” and in return they ridicule and fear him. Hmm, hmm, hmm!

So authors write themselves into their stories; this is a trope we’re all familiar with, and I certainly seem to be doing it. But is it a thing we can avoid? Well, with novel #2, the protagonist I described was not actually the protagonist for 80% of the first draft; she was a supporting character who I realized was a lot more compelling than the protagonist I was trying to write. That person was popular, and fit in effortlessly with his social group and with somebody beyond it — and he rang hollow to me for most of the writing. So it can be done, but not without its pitfalls.

Pitfalls. If there’s an apt metaphor for the writing process, it’s a field littered with pitfalls. Because as you build this story for your characters (the ones who are totally yourself), you have to place pitfalls in their path, try to trip them up at every step. But you have to watch out for your own pitfalls, the gaps and the traps that threaten to snag you in the midst of your process. It’s a delicate dance.

And dancing is something we awkward types don’t really do so much.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.