Category: Writing

Broken Ankle at the Finish

Pavowski3 Comments

I know, okay? I get it.

It’s become too much of a motif around here, this procrastination, this failure to complete, this inability to batten the last hatches. If writing my novel has been a marathon, I’ve snapped an ankle in the last mile. Or maybe sprained it. Or maybe I just tripped and fell and I’m only really really tired, and every scratch feels like a gash, and every shallow breath is a gasp. But that’s no excuse for not slogging myself across the line.

There isn’t much left to do. There really isn’t. I can only belabor the point so much. I can only pretend for so long that I’m stuck on an issue — this character isn’t working out so well, or that plot turn doesn’t feel quite right — before the truth bubbles to the surface like an eyeball in your soup: that I’m not stuck on an issue within the novel, I’m stuck on finishing the novel.

Because that’s all there is. This first edit has drawn on like an endless summer, and I’m bogged down just a mile from the finish line. The car’s blown a tire and there’s no phone service, and even stepping foot out into the sun has me sweat-soaked and exhausted. The prospect of knuckling up and walking it out to the finish has me dreaming of shade trees and ice-cold lemonade.

The last issue is this one character. I don’t know what to do with her, and I could conceivably go back and write her into a few more scenes or write her out of the novel completely… it honestly makes no difference to me at this point. I’m almost ready to hand the manuscript off to some beta readers (a term that never made sense to me… I mean, I guess I’d be the alpha reader, but does that really make sense? Anyway…) and just let them tell me what to do with her, but then I know it’s probably not a professional move to hand off a work with glaring, unresolved issues and expect other people to fix them for me.

But even more than I’m frustrated at my block about finishing this thing, I’m even more frustrated at the prospect of not finishing it. I didn’t come this far; I didn’t write 90,000 words and then re-write about a third of them; to give up now. I can smell the blistered pork of the hot dogs, taste the swirled sticky sugar of the cotton candy. (What? It’s totally gonna be a carnival when I finish.)  No, I’m going to finish this damn novel if I have to crawl across the line dragging two dead, broken legs behind me.

And sooner rather than later. Because I’m a little bit burned on it.

Not that that’s not glaringly obvious or anything.

*Removes cobweb from eyebrow*

WordSpawn

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It’s a little-known perk of writing that writers get to do something truly remarkable. I’m not talking about the godlike power to create empires of the mind, to breathe life into characters and to spawn images in the minds of our readers. Nor am I talking about the Herculean ability to overcome the blank, intimidating expanse of the blank page. I’m talking about a quieter power, but a greater one.

Writers get to invent words.

This is a subtle power, one that can’t and shouldn’t be waggled around like a magic wand in a seven-book epic about teenage wizards (if ever there were a metaphor). It’s a power that should be practiced with care, delicacy, and great reservation. It’s the power to change the way people think and communicate, if you use it right.

Imagine where we’d be without words like “schadenfreude?” (The Germans are really good at this.) “Kerfuffle?” “Google?” Seriously, imagine your life without Google and try to tell me that the power to create words isn’t incredible and earth-shattering.

Sure, English is chock-full of words already. Good ones, too. Great ones, even. Still, there are those times when you’re casting about for just the right word, one that perfectly encapsulates the thing you’re talking about, one that leaves no room for confusion, one that immediately creates meaning in the mind of your reader, even if they’ve never heard that word before. And the problem is, as broad and expansive as the language is, we just don’t have words for every situation. ‘Twere impossible to have a word for every situation locked and loaded in our memory at any time. Sometimes you just have to make one up.

I do this all the time, and most of the words suck. They’re good for one use only, and once used, they disappear down the gullet of memory and are never seen again. Once in a while, though, you hit on a winner: a word that’s useful, memorable, and catchy enough to merit use by others. Because communication is a two-way street… it’s no good making up an entire lexicon of new words here in my lair if nobody else sees fit to use the words, too.

But today, a breakthrough. A word that might — might — catch on.

I didn’t even make it on purpose. I was just trying to alliterate, and I accidentally created a word that’s already resonated with two readers here in my sphere. Maybe it’s resonating with you, too, and you don’t even know it.

A thing I do a lot here at the blarg is ramble. I have a way of overstating and overthinking things, and I end up going on at length… possibly longer than is necessary. I own that. It’s a fault, but it’s fun for me, and this is my sandbox. I also love to complain, again, probably more than is necessary or healthy. And what do you get when you combine the two? A rant? Sometimes, but not always. I don’t usually rise to the level of anger characterized by a rant. A gripe? Well, a gripe is quick and small-scale. No, when I complain at length it’s like those rumbles in your stomach leading up to a really unpleasant excursion in the restroom. They go on forever and leave you feeling cranky as your innards get all twisted up in knots. The only remedy is getting it out of your system. A grumbling ramble. A “gramble.”

I recognize that this word sort of describes the thing that maybe your grandfather might do about the state of his retirement checks, or that your cranky English teacher might do about the work ethic of his young, irreverent students. As such, it’s not a particularly glamorous addition to a lexicon. But it’s a good one nonetheless, because sometimes you just need to bitch and moan about this one thing specifically, perhaps well beyond the point where the average listener feels sympathetic to you. You need to gramble.

So it’s time to start a movement. You read a blog entry from some guy going on and on about how long he had to wait in line for his driver’s license? Call him out for his gramble. You need to spout off about your boss’s idiotic cornflower blue tie and how ridiculous it makes him look? Fire up the gramble. Kids kept you awake all night and it’s all you can think about or talk about at work the next day? Ask your co-workers to pardon your gramble.

You know this is a word you need in your life. You know you’re dying to use it. Do it. Embrace the dark side, and embrace the raw creative power of language. It’s time to make this a thing. Go get your gramble on.

#gramble

MudStuck

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I was out for a run once, and it had been raining in the days before. The sun had been out for a day in between the rain and my run, so most of the ground was relatively dry; even the dirt patches had baked and packed down solid. There were still deep standing puddles here and there at low points in the road, but they were obvious and easy to avoid.

The day was gorgeous; clean spring air, soft breeze, shade from the verdant, rain-thickened trees. The kind of run that makes you feel alive and calm… you know, all that hippy-dippy crap that I usually try to write away from. I had gone a couple of miles, completed a neat loop through a well-marked part of the trail, and was about half a mile away from the trailhead and my car. I had expected to get muddy from stomping through the elements so soon after a rain, but surprisingly, I had stayed relatively clean. I relaxed into the last mile, putting on a little speed and feeling the wind on my face as I streamed along the shaded path.

KASPLORCK-CCCHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUUPP.

A mud pit, cleverly disguised as a perfectly ordinary patch of dirt, had engulfed my shoe and yanked it unsanctimoniously off my foot. Through some miracle of physics I retained my balance and didn’t pitch over on my face; then I had to hop on one foot to circle around and look at what had happened. I’d plunged my right foot into mud six inches deep, and once ensconced, the suction was great enough to remove my entire shoe. There it sat, inches below the surface of the mud, sunk in a perfectly fitted crater with mushroomed edges, slowly beginning to fill with muddy water from the surface. I bent to try and yank it out, but with only one leg underneath me I couldn’t manage enough leverage to dislodge it. There were only two options — sink my unshod foot into the mud to establish leverage to pull the shoe out, or try to worm my foot back into the shoe and unstick it that way. Both choices would leave me with a horrific muddy mess on my foot, not to mention that the shoe was already past done.

I was beyond frustrated, and after the fact, I would realize that there was not a single good reason for the frustration. I had set out for the run knowing that the trail was likely to be a muddy mess. Had I hit the mudhole at the beginning of the run, it would have fazed me not a tick. The problem was, I made it through the run nearly unscathed, clean enough to let my guard down and start imagining a future where I wouldn’t have to stumble in the door and leave my laundry to dry on the porch before I could even step foot inside the house. Timing, I suppose, is everything.

Okay, so, this is an allegory, right? The through-line of this blog is and always has been my writing project. There’s a healthy dose of side business in the flavor of my kids, running, stupid stuff I see on TV, and what-have-you, but really, it’s all about the writing, all about the book, and that’s never more true than now. I was — am — will be — this close to finishing the first edit of this book. I can see the finish line, taste the clean air on the other side, feel the grass growing softer underfoot.

And all of a sudden, a mudhole yawns open beneath my foot and swallows my shoe.

In short: there’s a character in this piece. A character I like a lot. A character who’s critical to the early stages of the story but not quite so critical to the end. And due to that duality, some poor notetaking, and, I’ll admit it, a pretty glaring oversight, this character has turned into the Gordian Knot of the book. The problem? In one scene she’s there, helping to drive events and throwing down obstacles of her own; the next, she’s not. She’s simply gone. Like I totally forgot to write any sort of resolution, or anything even close to resembling a resolution for her.

And I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do. I made it through the whole muddy trek of this edit — even undertaking some fairly major changes to the story — without getting particularly dirty. Nothing I couldn’t hose off with a stout drink and a hot shower. But I don’t know how to fix this, and I can’t picture a future in which it’s fixed. Back up and write her out of the narrative completely? I fear the story will collapse in on itself like a matchstick house, and I’ll have to rebuild it piece by painstaking piece. Forge ahead and cram her back into the final third? The can of sardines will burst, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get all those tiny, stinky fish back into the tin.

I don’t see a way to fix this without diving in and getting myself covered head to toe with the inkstains of major narrative surgery. And I was so close.

There’s a third option, of course, just as there was a third option with my mudbound shoe. Leave it, and hobble home in my socks. Just forget about it and hope that my readers do the same. (Not likely.) Or, pile this and all the other little nitpicky problems the story has sprouted into a neat little pyre and nuke the whole mess from orbit. Leave no survivors. Take it back to the blank space.

Okay, so there’s really not a third option.

So if the blog has been a little sparse lately (and let’s face it, it has been), this is why. I’m stuck.

That’s not an excuse. I’ll find a way around. I didn’t come this far to shamble home with my shoe left in the mud. But it’s a problem I need to solve before I can really feel comfortable in my writing again.

The Speed of Write

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Everything is relative. Right?

It’s so easy to look at the body of work being produced by, oh, let’s just say anybody who has a body of work to speak of, and be intimidated. It’s so easy, as a writer, to think, “my writing is horrible. I’m horrible. Who would read this? Why should I bother? Why does it even matter?” And, from there, it’s a small hop, skip, and jump (maybe more like a trip, lurch, and fall) to quitting altogether.

And it’s not just writing, right? It could be exercising: “It’s too hard. Look at how much weight that guy is lifting / how far that girl is running / how much more flexible she is. I’ll never get there. I might as well give up.” Or knitting: “I’m awful. Look at this awful tea cozy / dog sweater / who-the-hell-knows-I’ll-just-call-it-a-scarf that I made. Who would ever want this? I’ll just buy one at the store and be less embarrassed.” Giving up is easy. Practicing, getting better, learning how to do the thing you wanted to do back on January 1st or whenever you decided to do the thing… it’s HARD. And those people who are doing it — and being successful — are just so DonDraper’ed visible, and so successful, and GOD they make it look so easy. They make it look so easy, that as hard as it is for me, I might as well quit. Right?

No. Fargo that. That’s the Howler Monkey of Doubt screeching in your ear and throwing its feces at your eyes. The monkey wants you to quit, because if you quit, then he gets to watch reruns of The Bachelor through your eyes and eat a tub of chocolate chips through your mouth and sleep the day away through your backside on your bed.

But that way madness lies. The Howler Monkey doesn’t know sharknado about hard work because it’s only concerned with taking the easy way out. The truth is, it’s pointless to compare yourself to the people writing bestselling novels, or bench-pressing small imported cars, or running marathons, or knitting afghans for the Queen. Because the person doing that incredible thing has been practicing his or her craft for countless hours to make it look that easy. You don’t see the failures. You don’t see the miles and miles of smoldering wreckage of his crashed and awful manuscripts leading up to the good ones, you don’t see the painful mornings and hours and hours of training she put in to work up to running that marathon, you don’t see the hundreds of horrible golf-club covers she made to practice up for Queen afghan-making.

The point is, we are all points on a continuum. Yes, you may suck now. I may suck now. I probably do. But if I go back and compare myself to the poor schlub who started this journey almost a year ago, I’m pretty confident that I’m at least a little better off. A little more comfortable with the virtual pen in my virtual hands. So a bestselling novel is maybe not in my immediate future; doesn’t matter a whole lot, it’s closer now than it was a year ago. So you’re not going to run a marathon next month — but last month, you couldn’t even run a mile, and now look at you. Last month you nearly put the dog’s eye out with your knitting needles, and now you almost know which end makes the scarf.

The only person worth comparing yourself to is other versions of yourself. Compare your current self to a past version of yourself and make sure you’re moving in the right direction, and if not, FIX IT. Compare your current self to a potential self and see if you like where you’re headed. If not? FIX IT.

Even the slowest marathoner is miles ahead of the guy who never gets off the couch. Even the worst writer in the world is pages and pages ahead of the girl who dreams of writing a novel but never quite gets around to it. Even the most unfortunate knitter… you get the idea.

Somehow we got the idea that if we’re going to do something, that it has to be perfect. That there’s some absolute standard out there for any given endeavor, and if we can’t reach that standard, we might as well not bother. Bollocks. The standard for personal success should be relative success. Am I writing as much, or better, or more creatively, or more comfortably, than I was a year ago? Then I’m doing all right. Am I running farther, or faster, or with less injury, than I was when I started? Then it’s all good. Am I… okay, I’ll be honest, I don’t know anything about knitting, let’s just assume I had something clever to say about the relative improvement and progression of a career in knitting, and call it a day, yeah?

Focus not on that faraway, nigh-unreachable goal that feels so intimidating. Focus on small victories, tiny relative leaps, and just keep pushing the needle.

Now it’s time to get some sleep so that I can go back to work on my slightly-less-than-awful novel.

This post is part of SoCS.

Dreams Don’t Mean Things

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So I had a dream the other night in which I was playing pickup football (because I totally do that) at a friend’s party (because I totally go to those). Usually I don’t remember much about my dreams, but for some reason this one stuck with me after I woke up. Now, I don’t put a lot of stock in dream symbolism, aside from obvious metaphors (oh, you were fighting with a seven-headed bear-monster with the body of Chuck E. Cheese? That means you have a struggle to overcome in your life). I do, however, think that the brain works on its issues buried beneath the surface (or even slathered all over the surface like butter on a stack of pancakes) through dreams, which is why I think that dreams are some of those situations where THINGS MEAN THINGS.

Anyway, in the dream, it’s just a couple of guys noodling around tossing a pigskin, but then the scene shifts a little in that funny way that dreams do (one moment I’m licking cupcake batter off a giant spatula and the next I’ve got my arms and legs wrapped around the leathery neck of an alligator and somehow this makes perfect sense). Suddenly it’s like the warm-up game before a for real Georgia game. UGA being my alma mater, this isn’t particularly strange. Then, for whatever reason, I look up into the stands and notice a friend of mine. Somehow, amidst all the hubbub before the game, she looks down at the field and sees me, too.

With that, the pickup game is over and the proper game is about to start, so I head up into the stands and manage to track her down. She’s sitting with an old, grumpy, obese woman in a wheelchair and a friend of hers from work and the theater group they founded. (This friend, who is a touch over five feet in real life, somehow towers a foot over me when we are standing shoulder-to-shoulder in this dream.) So we chit and we chat, about life, none of which came back with me from the dream. The old woman, it turns out, is dying of cancer and griping about a time in her life when 40 degrees was warm (she apparently can’t feel any warmth at all now and is always cold, thus all the blankets covering her up in the wheelchair).

And as is often the case with dreams, there’s no narrative. The conversation doesn’t go anywhere, nothing really happens, and that’s pretty much where it ends… next thing I remember is the plaintive wails of my not-quite-1-year-old irritating me into wakefulness.

Now, the thing that resonates is this friend of mine. This is a friend who’s always sort of existed in my periphery. We went to rival high schools but met through theater events and competitions. We went to college together, but never shared any classes. We both still live in the Atlanta metro area, but not really close enough to ever get together. I’m sorry to say that she’s one of those legions of people who I only really keep up with on facebook, which is a shame, but as any parent knows, trying to keep up social relationships outside of home and work can be like trying to pull a starved, insane badger off your face… much easier said than done.

Do things mean things? The last time I had a dream about this friend, I ended up getting in touch with her and getting involved in her local theater group, which was among the funnest experiences of my adult life.

Oh, and I forgot to mention one other thing. She works — or at least, worked — at a small publishing company here in Atlanta. Which means that this dream is probably my subconscious way of telling myself that it’s time to stop flerping around and get my novel into the hands of somebody who can do something about it. But casually. You know. Like at a pickup football game.