Category: Writing

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Categories Are Crap

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I’m not NaNoWriMo-ing, as I’ve said before, but I do have a thick skull full of dubious writing tidbits for those of you out there scrambling to make your 50k. (What are you, at 10k today, pushing for 12? Maybe a bit further along to buy yourself a breathless, red-eyed day off over the weekend? You poor souls.)

Today’s rumination: categories are crap.

Let’s be clear: your work is going to be categorized, and it should be categorized. Eventually. Categories matter: without them, we’re never going to be able to get our works into the hands of as many readers as we’d like to. But (and here’s where my novice chops are going to show, maybe) I don’t think categories matter until it’s almost time to publish. Because categories are for readers and editors and publishers, so they know where to put and where to find and how to push your book.

But for you? The author neck-deep in a 50k slog that needs to be completed in three weeks? (Or in the midst of a 100k slog that you’d like to complete this year, more conservatively.) You can give a big middle finger to categories.

“Oh, I’m writing an urban sci-fi horror YA cyberpunk thriller.”

No, you’re not. You’re writing a story about some kids with computers that spawn monsters who drag their souls into the dark web and sell them for Bitcoins. (Copyrighted!)

“Me? I’m writing an alternate-historical period piece romance / spy novel.”

Negative. You’re writing a love story between secret agents in a made-up setting where you can make up any rules you want.

But what’s the difference? I hear you cry. Why not pick my category now, so I know how to write it the piece as it grows?

In this humble writer’s opinion, putting a category on your work is like putting up a fence in your yard. On the one hand, it makes it real easy to see where your property ends, or where you need to put on shoes lest you step in a pile of dogsharknado. On the other hand, it makes it real easy to see where your property ends, or where you need to put on shoes lest you step in a pile of dogsharknado. Putting a category on your work means that you’re saying, this stuff belongs in my story, and this other stuff does not. It means, these sorts of things can happen in my story. It means, I’m going for this specific feel in my story.

Which, again, is great … for later drafts. Later drafts are the time to think about audience, about marketing, about where your story fits. But to think about this stuff during the first draft, or even the first round of edits, is suicide. To use the fence metaphor, you’re marking out clearly defined areas where your story can and cannot go.

But why would you do that during the first draft?

The first draft is hard enough without arbitrary lines criss-crossing the landscape telling you you can’t go here. The first draft is a brutal hike through overgrown jungle with a machete, it’s a solitary sojourn through unforgiving desert.  Boundaries are a great way to bog down, and if you’re NaNo-ing, you can ill afford to get bogged down. (To be fair, even if you’re not NaNo-ing, getting bogged down in your work sucks — lose your momentum and you lose your motivation to continue.)

The first draft is a baby bird learning to fly — it needs all the clear space it can get to figure itself out. Your story needs the space — you need the space — to breathe, to try new things, to make a hard left and run the story into a ditch, to cut back right and drive it through a building. You make that harder on yourself if you’re locked into categories, into preconceived notions of what your story can and can’t be before you’ve even written it.

Stories are living things that change as they grow. I started my just-finished draft of a novel thinking I wanted to write a YA sci-fi coming-of-age piece, and I ended up writing something a lot more like a survivalist cyber-horror fate-vs.-free-will story, if any of those things are actually things. One way or another, I’m a lot happier with the story I wrote than the story I was trying to write. Further, I noticed that every time I got stuck in the novel, it’s because I was trying to force the story or the characters to do something out of character. I can’t have this happen in a YA novel, I thought, but when I let go of that constraint and just let it happen anyway, the story moved along just fine.

Don’t get me wrong. That first draft is a mess. It needs tons of work, and the time will come when I will refine it down and decide what neat little boxes it fits into. But if I’d gotten hung up on the categories, I don’t know if I could even have finished it.

Your story wants to be something.

You have to accept the fact that maybe you don’t entirely know what that is yet.

But, just like a teenage daughter, if you try to force it to be something it isn’t, it’s going to rebel and bring home a guy with a mohawk.

Don’t let your story bring home a guy with a mohawk.

Let your story be the guy with the mohawk.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Collecting Fireflies

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I’m flolloping around in the doldrums of the wake of finishing my first draft.

There’s depression here. An aimless, impotent feeling. I’ve gone from working tirelessly on a singular project day in and day out to … well, not. To working on side projects, to taking a little time to refocus and rethink your goals for the next few months, and I’ve felt a little lost.

It’s a lull, to be sure; a haze as transient as the weather. Still, it sucks at the feet like a bog, a slow inevitable creep of inertia. I sit back wondering if I’ll be able to make myself do it again, if I can make myself go through another six month draft, another three month edit, a brand new project, a rehashing of an old one. And I don’t know! I really wonder if I have any more good ideas in me, any more stories waiting to be told, or if I’m deluding myself that the ones currently in the telling are worth the time I’ve spent on them. Maybe every idea has a bit of validity, but by the same token, every candle in the darkness gives off a little light. The hope, of course, is that I’m not a candle in the darkness, but a raging forest fire, or at least a cozy little bonfire around which some lucky individuals might sometime warm their hands and their hearts.

But these times of respite are important for the body, mind and soul. Because as I find myself not exhausting myself on a capital “P” Project, I find there’s a little more time in my day for thought, for aimless and okay-to-be-aimless writing, for reflection, for the cultivating of new ideas, for the reviewing of old ones.

I keep a little Evernote file for potential future story ideas. (If you’re not using some sort of brain-dump software like Evernote, you should be.) Some of them are just a couple of words, some are great sprawling paragraphs. Any time an idea strikes me (and ideas striking are about like neutrinos striking screens deep below the earth — they happen millions of times a second, but only incredibly rarely does matter actually contact matter and cause a reaction) I jot it down.

Well, today came one of those lightning flashes, so I reached for the old bottle. And while I was stuffing this particular lighting strike into the jar, I took a peek in there. And there were over a dozen little fireflies buzzing around in there, dinging off the walls; some with the reckless lunatic energy, some as massive and indomitable as barges.

So I feel a little bit better about the lull I’m in. It’ll pass soon enough, and it’ll be time to get back to work, catching more fireflies, stuffing them into my jar, selecting some for release back into the wild.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Strange Seasoning

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We’re coming into one of the strangest times of the year for the writer: the Holidays.

The dreaded Holidays bring with them a legitimate army of distractions, obstructions, and pitfalls for the writer. Between a total disruption of the work schedule, extra obligations to spend time with the family you aren’t seeing regularly, and oh yeah, let’s not forget, here in America there are at least two massive debilitating food comas on the horizon. Time to write is hard enough to come by when things are normal, but things are hardly normal at this time of year.

Which is why I find it particularly sadistic to put a writer’s torture device like NaNoWriMo smack in the middle of it… but that’s a rant for another day. (I’m not doing NaNo this year, nor do I have plans to ever do it. I have better things to do with my time than subject myself to the slings and arrows of attempting to write an entire half of a novel [50,000 words do not a novel make] in the least writer-friendly part of the year. Further, if you need NaNo to finally motivate you to write that novel you’ve been thinking about writing, then maybe — maybe! — writing isn’t your thing. But there I go digressing.)

On a writer’s website I frequent, an aspiring writer, who seemed in true distress, asked the question in a state of near hysteria: with meals to cook, shopping to do, family to visit, kids to take care of, etc… how do you find the time to write through this time?

Well.

I may be a hopeless optimist, and I may be a tireless (or tiresome, depending on your point of view) motivator — I really do make myself sick sometimes with all the rah-rah-rah and YOU CAN DO IT speeches around here — but one thing I’m also guilty of is a bit of a blunt streak. Okay, maybe less of a streak and more of a huge angry puckered blunt scar. I don’t like to mince words, and most of the time, a harsh dose of the truth is a lot more helpful. (This gets me in a lot of trouble with my wife and, well, people in general, but at 35, I am who I am.)

So I responded the only way I could think to: The same way you make time any other time of the year. Sure, you’ve got Holiday Things clamoring for your attention to the left and to the right, like a swarm of needy toddlers who have just learned that you will actually come running the moment they say “daddy”. And yeah, maybe you’re more obligated to devote time to these Things than usual. But the way you take time to write now is the same way you take time at any other point in the year.

You prioritize. You set values on the things that matter to you and you allocate time accordingly. Maybe this is the year where instead of waking up at 3 AM to go Black Friday shopping, you sleep in until 6 instead, and get up to write while the rest of the family is fighting for their lives in the mad crush of humanity trying to get to the Tickle Me Elmos of this year. Maybe instead of sitting around watching the Lions lose on Turkey Day (a favorite national pastime) you sneak off to jot down a few words. Maybe you don’t have to cook EVERY SINGLE DISH for your family’s dinner, and with the time you free up, you can escape to your study (or your car, or your bathroom, or your wherever) to get some words on the page. You might upset a few people when you bust up their traditions, but you’ll stay on target for your WIP.

Or maybe you multitask and pull double duty. Wake up even earlier to do your writing before the family wakes up, or stay up late to pound the page after they fall asleep. Keep the laptop on the kitchen counter while you’re cooking and season your draft while you season the mashed potatoes. Jot notes on characters and plot points in your favorite organizational writer’s app while you’re waiting in line to shop at 4 AM. Granted, you do this, and you’ll certainly have some consequences: sleep deprivation and overly salty mashed potatoes at the very least.

Or a lunatic altered personality that grins vacuously at a computer while stirring a bowl full of, apparently, WHOLE UNCUT VEGETABLES. Who could be that happy? Who could use a computer at all in the kitchen without destroying it immediately with splattered sauce and flying crumbs?

Or, and here’s the really crazy part where we entertain notions that maybe we don’t want to, you don’t.

It’s tempting to think that with the time off you could or even should get tons of extra work in on your writing. But you don’t have to.

This is not me telling you to make like Elsa and let your writing go over the holidays. Momentum matters, and you’re gonna be turkey-drunk enough to have plenty of trouble getting back in the rhythm when the world returns to normal. By all means, write when you can. But the world isn’t going to stop spinning, and your novel won’t collapse, and your writing hand won’t wither to an ashen husk if you take a little time off.

Writing can be something like a second job, and we need time off from any job if we want to not lose our minds.

And let’s be honest: during these strange days, we lose our minds enough to begin with.

LOOK AT ME ENDING NOT JUST A SENTENCE BUT A WHOLE BLARG POST WITH A PREPOSITION

ENGLISH TEACHERS DON’T CARE WHEE

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: The Butcher’s Shop of Edits

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So, you’ve got a draft in the bag and you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, this feels good. No, this feels awesome. I wrote a BOOK. I deserve a cookie.

And you do, maybe. But there’s a danger in that line of thinking, and the danger is in thinking you’re in any way done.

It’s easy to do. Typing the conclusion to your story has a lovely ringing finality to it, especially if you’re particularly dramatic (like me) and brazenly type an all-caps middle-finger-to-the-tribulations-of-the-draft “The End”. And certainly the draft tires you out like a machete-hacking slog through vine-tangled jungle. The problem is that when you hack through the jungle like that, you leave a path of carnage behind you, all broken stalks and fallen branches and trampled flora. Sure, you left a path. One with wrong turns, with dead ends, one that doubles back on itself like a stuffed bear hunting woozles.

And if you wanna do anything with that story, you’ve gotta fix that thing up.

Time to shift metaphors.

(OMG a metaphor post. I LOVE A METAPHOR POST. METAPHORS BE WITH YOU. OMG STAR WARS IS OUT SO SOON OMG.)

Sorry.

The draft, magnificent as it may be, is untamed, untanned, raw, like a side of beef fresh from the slaughterhouse. It can one day become a dazzling array of savory filet mignon, perfectly marbled ribeyes, staggering sirloins and lip-smacking ribs, but you can’t just toss the thing on the fire and expect it to come out delicious.

Maybe it calls for the hatchet.

Separate the poor dear into its component parts. Look at how this part connects to that part, then level the axe and hack it away. Dice the monster up into bits, first torso-sized, then leg-sized, then hand-sized, then bite-sized, ready for stewing. Examine each bit for disease and rot, weed out the tainted, and package up the rest for market.

Perhaps the knife.

A more delicate approach, but a more elegant one. Your story is riddled with extra fat, extra gristle, and before it’s fit for consumption, it needs trimming. So you go to work. Shave off a bit of overdone character development here, open up a gash in some disarticulated plot points there. Maybe a thin gash all through that one vein of a ridiculous MacGuffin you planted to let the rancid blood out. You slice, you shape, you shave, and send the leaner, comelier carcass on down the line while repackaging the trimmings to send to the dog food factory of your future projects.

Or maybe the Rocky treatment is more your style.

You’ve got some seriously pent-up rage from your trip through that disastrous first draft. The story came out hard and angry, like a kidney stone on methadone, a tight-wound spur of bone and tendon and agony. It needs tenderizing, and you’ve got a prize fight coming up. Time to tape up your knuckles and take out your aggression on the story’s knotted bits. Overly preachy villain? Bam, a gutshot to take his wind out. Malformed plot-lines? Skrak, a wicked cross that scatters their teeth across the stain-resistant cement. Mushy middle? Wap-wap-wap-wap, a flurry of undercuts to punish the soft flesh, and the bowels turn to water and the poison gushes out. You punish the knotted, sinewy flesh to a smooth, melt-in-your-mouth buttery consistency, which serves the double function of icing your knuckles and venting the anger and hurt and frustration you’re nursing from the draft.

(Funny sidenote: run a google image search for “Rocky punching meat” and you will find the above image, again and again, in varying color washes, resolutions, and sizes, like a bizarro Sylvester Stallone stained-glass mosaic, as if it were a painting from the 1300’s.)

Whatever tool you choose, the thing to remember is that the draft, as incredible as it may be (and it is incredible; for god’s sakes, you wrote a fargoing book, how many can claim that?), is not a finished thing. It’s a step along a path, the first few miles of a marathon, a pit stop at the moon on your way out to Mars. Whatever tool you use to get on with the fixing, you must wield it fearlessly, recklessly, even brutally.

Which is not to say you shouldn’t stop and take a moment to appreciate the draft, as imperfect as it may be. Do that. Put the pen down and appreciate for a moment the story you’ve built for the thing of beauty it is. Some of its imperfections will serve to make it perfect. Most of them will not. Stand back, have a drink, and bask in the magnificence of those imperfections.

Then put the story on the block and start lopping those imperfections off.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Antsy

Pavowski4 Comments

It’s strange, having completed a draft and floating in this weird in-between phase. After months of having a daily writing goal, to suddenly be without one feels alien, like suddenly sprouting a third arm I’ve no idea what to do with. The time freed up is significant, to be sure, but more than the time, I’m distracted by the very lack of guidance. My brain is doing laps like a caffeinated hamster fleeing for its life from imaginary cats.

So I had to write something.

And I ended up coming here and writing nothing. I feel incredibly off kilter and at sea, having finished this latest draft. Like my creative energies have waned past a point that they cannot regenerate. Like I don’t know if I can go through all that again, even for the sake of editing this latest work.

Deep breath.

I don’t currently have any deadlines, and that’s okay.

I am allowed to be idle for a little while in between project phases. This restless feeling is probably normal, and probably necessary.

The world will not tumble off its axis, nor my head off my shoulders, because I didn’t write anything substantial today.

My draft, and indeed my brain, need this time for the dust to settle so that I can see where things lie with clear eyes before I come back with the editorial sledgehammers and wrecking bars to tear it all to pieces again.

But in the meantime, man. What am I going to do? I hear good things about knitting. Maybe I should learn to knit.