Category: Writing

Step Back

Pavowski9 Comments

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the work. It’s so easy to forget the forest for all the trees all around you. It’s so easy to get lost in the day-to-day sharknado that pops up right in front of you and forget about the big picture.

Is it a human shortcoming?

As a writer, it’s so easy for me to be blinded to my goals on a big scale when things are going wrong in the now. I’ve struggled for the last two weeks, writing and re-writing a handful of scenes in my novel, becoming more and more myopic and less and less able to think on the large scale. I felt as though this one scene was a wrecking ball smashing the novel as a whole to rubble, that this one hangup was one crashed biker causing a monumental pileup as all the other bikers come scorching around the curve. Feet stuck in a quagmire. The whole house on fire.

But the quagmire is not so much a bottomless pit of quicksand as a little mudhole. The house isn’t on fire, it’s just the spaghetti I was overcooking. (How I managed to set spaghetti on fire in this metaphor is hardly the point.) We’re talking about a mammoth manuscript of almost a hundred thousand words, and I was allowing myself to think the whole thing was scrap metal over a troublesome patch of three thousand. But one dubious passage can no more derail the work than an untied shoelace can stop a marathon runner. Sure, it’s annoying. Sure, it must be dealt with before it’s allowed to do further damage. But it’s fixable. It’s recoverable. All that’s needed is to step back and remember what’s at stake and what’s positive about the rest of the work.

But it’s not just true as a writer. I feel this myopia as a runner. I’ve been dealing with injuries a lot lately, and it’s so, so easy to get tunnel vision over the injuries and imagine that my routine and my ability as a runner has been and will continue to be stymied by these injuries. And, sure, I’ve had a loss of fitness and definitely a loss of confidence over the setbacks. But even after taking a month off to get my feet right, I’ve been able to bounce back and start pushing my distance up again pretty quickly. It would be easy to focus on the negative, and that’s what I’ve done in recent weeks: that I’m not able to go out as fast as before or nearly as far as before. But I take a step back and it quickly becomes apparent that despite the setback, I’m bouncing back quicker than I really had any hope of doing while I was laid up.

And, no surprise, I feel it as a dad. I get overwhelmed by the sprouts, and I feel like all I’m doing is putting out fires and telling them “no” and telling them what they shouldn’t do. Before you know it, I’m in a funk because I’m exhausted from all the screaming and reprimanding and the cleaning and the slaving. But a little step back — a little shift in perspective — reminds me that they’re growing up pretty good. They love to laugh and to show off what they know. They’re both incredibly smart. And, my shortcomings as a parent notwithstanding, they seem to be fairly well-adjusted. They’re gonna be fine.

I’m a bit of a literature and film geek, and The Hobbit is somewhat front-of-mind at the moment. There’s a salient moment toward the middle of the text where Bilbo and the dwarves are lost in an evil forest; have been for weeks, doggedly following a path, not knowing how long it is or where it leads or even if they’ve made a wrong turn and are losing all their progress. Their eyes are down and it’s darkness all around them. They’re frustrated. They’re snippy. They’re turning on each other, ready to call the whole adventure off and go home. Then they have the bright idea for Bilbo to climb a tree and get some perspective on where they really stand. So he does, and his head breaks through the impenetrable canopy — the film captures this moment really beautifully — and he sees daylight for the first time in weeks. Feels the sun on his face again. Breathes clean air again. And from his new vantage point, he can see, in the not-so-distant distance, the looming peak of the Lonely Mountain, their ultimate goal, which they’ve made surprising progress toward despite their squabbling and doubt.

Birds!
Birds!

Of course, when he descends, he finds that his comrades have been captured by and are about to become dinner for a gaggle of giant talking spiders, but I think it’s safe to say that’s beside the point.

Much gets said, in this country and, heck, on this blarg, about the intrinsic value of sticktoitiveness. The usefulness, the inevitable necessity of keeping your head down and getting the work done. And there is value in that. A lot of value, even. Because if we have our heads in the clouds too often, if we spend too much time dwelling on the lofty goals and the dreams, well, then… that’s time not spent getting the work done. But nose-to-the-grindstone can’t be the only posture we exercise. As in all things, balance is key.

Point is, the easy road is to become so lost in what you’re doing that you forget about the big picture. And if you lose sight of the big picture, then giving up doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. But giving up is a big deal. It’s the biggest of deals. Because when you give up, you essentially set fire to all the time and all the effort that you put into getting as far as you got. And if there’s one thing we don’t get back in this life, it’s time.

So whatever you’re working on — your novel, your schoolwork, your health, your parenting — remind yourself that, every now and then, it’s okay — necessary, even — to take that step back. Take that breath of fresh air. See and appreciate the forest despite all the freaking trees.

The work is important, but it’s no good if you don’t know where the winds are blowing the boat.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

The Doldrums

Pavowski5 Comments

It’s no secret I’ve struggled with the editing of this novel. The highs are stratospheric and the lows are Death Valley-esque.

But I’m in the midst of an issue that I am unsure of the cure for. I feel rather like I’ve set off on the Oregon Trail, but I didn’t pack nearly enough provisions and all I can do is watch my livestock and then my family wither and die in the wilderness. (You have died of dysentery.)

I had the “brilliant” idea a few weeks back to add a new character to the story. He’d bring balance to the force, I thought, and provide some growth for certain characters while getting in the way of others. He’d plug up plot holes and give me a path to a much cleaner resolution than the one I wrote the first time around. In short, he’d fix my problems.

Now, I’m about a week into trying to shoehorn him into this thing and… oh, man, I just don’t know. On the one hand, I feel he certainly has the potential to do all the things I wanted him to do, but in his current form he’s doing them about as well as a guy with no hands can read braille. Which is to say, all he can really do is lean into the story and mash his face against it. It’s torturous work trying to make him interface with the existing plot and characters in any meaningful way that doesn’t feel totally artificial and tacked-on. It’s mentally exhausting pondering the ways to make all the things that have to happen happen (untangle that, grammar checkers), and much like a hapless tracker in a driving snow, I keep retracing my steps. I’ve rewritten one series of two pages four times now, and it’s impossible for me to tell which version is any better than the others. You add to that the fact that every little change I make here means other dangly bits and loose ends elsewhere in the story have to be busted apart and rejiggered, and the whole mess has devolved into one great giant gumption trap, to borrow a term from Robert Pirsig (from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

To nutshell and paraphrase, a gumption trap is a small problem that trips you up in a big way, then pretends to be bigger than it is to make itself seem unsolvable. The example I recall from the book was rounding off a screw on an engine compartment panel, thus effectively sealing the panel shut. Not only do you have the problem of unscrewing a screw with no head, but you can’t even begin to think about how to solve the problem that you were trying to get into the engine compartment for in the first place until you can deal with the tiny screw. It swells so large that it fills your vision, and you lose all sense not only of any possible solution to the problem itself, but also of your entire ability to achieve the thing that the problem got in the way of in the first place. You can spend hours staring at a gumption trap, pondering and scheming and hypothesizing, and end up no closer to solving it than the moment after it sprang itself. Yep, that pretty much encapsulates my feeling on the novel right now. A broken motorcycle whose engine I can’t even look at.

So the edit is a problem. But what’s doubly troubling is that I can’t even measure the progress I’m making. For every step forward, I have to take about three steps back. But then I can steal the good ideas I had for this other idea and divert them to this other other idea to make it work better, so I mentally copy and paste a little and gain back a step or two. But then that idea breaks down and I feel the urge to undo what I’ve done, and that brings me back to the original thing which I then also subsequently want to undo, so I write it again. On an internal level, I know that there’s “work” being done here, but it’s impossible to quantify it. Some days I add to the word count of the original. Some days I subtract. Today all I’ve been able to do is stare at the page while the characters swirl around my head and shout obscenities at me about how useless it is to have them swirling around my head all day. They want to fix their problems. I want to fix their problems. Problem is that for those problems to get fixed, ultimately the road leads through me, and I feel about as qualified to sort out any narrative snarls as a seal is to help you with your math homework, which is to say, not at all, unless that homework involves a bunch of fish and barking, which my story does not. GET OUT OF HERE, IMAGINARY SEAL. YOU’RE NOT HELPING.

Triply troubling is the fact that I can feel the morass of this thing sucking at my boots as I try to wade across it. With each step, I feel a bit more gunk collecting on my undersoles, a bit more narrative dead weight hanging like an albatross about my neck. Momentum matters, as I’ve pointed out before, and my momentum on this thing feels like it’s barely crawling forward, if it’s moving at all.

In short, I’m stuck in the doldrums with this thing, and there is not a breeze in sight to catch my drooping sails and propel my scurvy-ridden crew out of this mess any time soon. To complicate matters further, for some reason my running playlist keeps throwing at me the song that’s inspired the next novel I plan to write, which makes me want to think about that story instead of this one. I know that that way madness lies, because the moment I take my focus away from the current project, it’s going to start to sour in the sun and I might never return to rejuvenate it.

No, this is no time to abandon the Project, or turn my back on it even for a moment, no matter how much its quagmire is pulling me down. Solutions will present themselves. Once I can solve the project of this shoehorn character, I suspect that the rest of the edit will look like a field of candy corn by the end. Of course, that simile only works if you like candy corn. Anyway… I’m working on it. I’m blarging more about it. That always seems to help knock the ol’ cobwebs loose. And I’m trying not to think too hard about it, because like any gumption trap, the more you bang your head against the thing the less capable of fixing it you become, until all you want to do is throw the whole contraption in the fire, and that’s a thing I don’t want to feel compelled to do. Because if presented with the opportunity, the Id-Writer may just snap his chains, jump the fence, and do exactly that.

I have to remind myself to breathe and to keep writing. Eyes on the prize and all that tripe. It’s still first stages. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just keep writing. Keep working. I’m at home in the me that is on this adventure.

BREATHE.

There’s Productivity, and then there’s Productivity

Pavowski8 Comments

Momentum matters.

The things you’ve been doing are the things you are going to keep doing until you make a concerted effort to stop doing them. The things you haven’t been doing are the things you will continue to not do until you force yourself to do them.

That being said, I am having doubts lately as to the quality of the things I’m doing in regards to my writing.

I’m guest-posting at LindaGHill’s blog, which is kind of a cool thing … not entirely unlike giving a fifteen-year-old the keys to a… god, I was going to say a Lamborghini but that’s not the hotness in cars anymore, is it? (God, it sucks getting older. Did you know that Friends is now showing reruns on Nick at Nite?) Anyway, I made a post there introducing myself and I mentioned all the writing I’ve gotten done this year and it got me thinking.

Because for all this capital-W “Writing” I’ve been doing this year, I’ve done more than my fair share of drooling nonsense onto the virtual pages of this blarg. At a rough estimate, I’ve probably got almost half as many words again here on the blarg as I’ve committed to the novel. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — word count on the novel has slowed necessarily from almost 1200 words daily to about 100 (I’m editing, so some in, some out), and I can probably say that my active time working on the novel has declined from roughly an hour daily to more like thirty or forty-five minutes (editing feels so much more mentally taxing than drafting). I could be way off, but it feels like I’m not working on it nearly as much as when I was drafting. Meanwhile, the word vomit I’ve done here on the blarg has remained more or less constant.

Which is okay. I’m not complaining, because even when I’m not working on the novel, I’m kicking ideas around in my head, thinking about how changes would play out, about passages that need moving and restructuring, and dreaming up ways to break the story even more than I already have (and currently, it’s in more pieces than the wineglass I dropped the other night… not that that particular incident is in any way related to my novel, I promise).

But there’s the rub. Can I qualify “thinking time” as “working” with my novel? Can I justify a day wherein I didn’t actually sit down in front of my manuscript at all? If I wrote a blarg post on a day that I didn’t Write, was I still productive?

I want to say yes, because I’ve thought from the beginning that this blarg was as much an active piece of my Writing as a distraction from it: equal parts sharpening stone and shunting circuit (heh heh… shunt). From the beginning I’ve used my drivel in this space to puzzle through problems with characters, plot holes, scenarios and obstacles, and in a fair few of those situations I’ve actually found some new inspiration just from talking to myself for a while. But I’d be lying if I said that this page didn’t serve the equally important function of distracting me from The Project. Blarging about tv shows or books or shiny new things or toddlers or running or whatever else is front-of-mind on a given day is the pressure release valve on my overtaxed water heater. It’s low-stakes (if not no-stakes) relaxed musing that takes me away from the self-imposed pressure to produce quality work for the novel.

But is it productive?

On the one hand, I’m of a similar mind on writing as I am on running. Some runners who run exceptionally long distances or blistering fast paces refer to practice runs without a specific distance or pace goal as “junk miles”: miles that you get in just because you need to, because your training plan calls for them. But even when I was running more than 20 miles a week I couldn’t think of my runs that way. Every day I get out there feels like a victory, even if I’m hobbled and can only run a quarter of a mile from the house before I limp back. Every run is a good run. Likewise, every word written is a good word, even if it’s a horrible word, like “moist”. Every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every detour into excessively long lists to pad my word count sharpens the knife that little bit more. It’s all practice. Every step on the path teaches me how to step properly in the future, and every misstep reminds me to watch out for wonky rocks and tangling roots.

Then again, there’s the inescapable truth that time spent writing on the blarg is time not spent working on the novel, and time not spent working on the novel feels a little bit like wasted time. I waited long enough in my life to even leave the station on this little excursion; it feels sacrilegious to put it off any more than I have to.

Often at the end of one of these rambles, I come to find out that I really felt a certain way about the issue in question, I simply didn’t know it before I put it in words. That’s not the case here. I really enjoy the writing I do on the blarg–I’m even proud of it at times–but it’s a poor substitute for working on the novel. Then again, the unemotional side of my brain says, better junk writing than no writing at all. All that considered, there’s no denying that I do feel a sort of accomplishment after writing anything including a pointless blarg rumination, even if that something is just a rant about baby poop.

If anything, then, I guess it comes down to two kinds of productivity. Productive productivity (genuinely gets something done that needs doing) and Hedonistic productivity (feels productive but isn’t, or gets something done that doesn’t necessarily need doing). I used to read a lot of articles on Lifehacker, which is a sort of mecca for all things productivity- and efficiency-related, and there is a tendency for some of the techniques and products discussed over there to be more about cleverness than actual usefulness, placing them squarely in the latter category: the Hedonistically productive. There comes a point where the things we do become more about feeling clever, good, productive, or useful than actually being clever, good, productive, or useful. I think this blarg toes the line. One way or another, though, it’s hard to picture my writing process without the blarg, so I guess I’m stuck with it.

And so are you, if you’ve stuck with me this far.

The Thunderdome of Ideas

Pavowski7 Comments

How do you make sense of the ideas that occur to you?

I’m talking here about stories, lyrics, visions, hell, even blarg ideas. They come from somewhere, and whether that source is some external stimulus like a news story or a fantastic article or a brilliant film or a gripping novel, they all end up getting filtered through the mire of neurons and synapses inside your skull. Which means that from the time an idea first strikes, it gets tossed into the Thunderdome that’s raging inside your head at any given moment.

Maybe I should step away from the second person (pardon me, second person) and stick to the first (oh, hi, me). It’s a Thunderdome in my head. Many ideas enter. Few survive to be acted upon.

Seriously. It’s a wonder I can get anything done. I’m as scatterbrained as they come, so when a new idea strikes for me, it’s thrown into the arena with the other millions of things I’m thinking about, which include, but are not limited to:

  • My kids and whether I’ve remembered to feed them / change their diapers / change their clothes / clean up their messes / set a good example for them / actually know where they are at the moment / OH GOD WHERE ARE THE KIDS
  • The dollars and cents flowing through all the metaphorical holes in my metaphorical pockets (because money isn’t real anymore you know, it’s all just ones and zeros on some bank program and okay this is not a conspiracy theory blog) and all the stress associated with that.
  • The fact that it’s winter, and in the four winters we’ve weathered in this house, we’ve had pipes freeze and burst in the walls twice despite our best efforts, so does winter number five mean that nightmare is coming around again…
  • The kids have been quiet for a while, WHAT IS MY TODDLER DOING
  • The scent of burning that’s coming from somewhere and I can’t isolate it… is it the neighbors burning leaves? A car burning oil? The wires in the walls spontaneously combusting and preparing to burn the house down?
  • The theme song from Thomas the Tank Engine just keeps bouncing around in there for no good reason; it certainly isn’t helping me to focus. (Sidenote: “shunt” is a fun word that sounds dirty but isn’t–meaning to shove aside or divert–try using it at parties!)
  • How the balls did my kid dump an entire two pounds of dog food into the water bowl without me hearing it?

And that’s just the past, say, thirty seconds.

So any idea I’m trying to have, whether related to my current novel or any other prospective novel I may ever conceivably get around to writing if I ever finish this one, has to step into the steel cage death match with these other thoughts if it wants to win my focus long enough to be pondered, let alone written down and saved for later. And these other thoughts take no prisoners. They have nailbats and rusty crowbars and spiked shoes. That Thomas theme song carries around a friggin’ garrote in its pocket and will dispatch an interloping idea without batting an eye.

Somehow… somehow… some ideas make it through the riot of distractions and make it into the novel. I’m working on weaving in a particularly good one that occurred to me a few weeks ago while I was writing a blarg post about how I was stuck for ideas about how to improve my draft. Did it arise out of need? Was it the strongest of a series of weak, malformed conceptions of various other plot points I could have used instead, and the strongest survived? Or did it blunder through, catching the toddlers during a nap and catching that Thomas theme song looking the other way long enough to escape into daylight?

I have no idea where the ideas come from or how they get processed. I feel like if I did I’d be a tremendously better writer, and I could therefore avoid unnecessary and cumbersome adverbs in my prose, like “tremendously,” to choose a particularly egregious offender completely at random. Also egregious offenders: “particularly,” “completely,” and “egregious” (not an adverb but still offensive).

See, the idea to sidetrack into all that nonsense about adverbs came from somewhere, I decided it was a good detour to make and I made it. Somebody (even if that somebody is me) sent that message, and somebody (probably me) received it and acted on it.

Where does that impulse come from?

Is that my authorial text-transcending through-line? Is it an undercurrent of subconscious thematic tendency? Or did whoever’s pulling the strings in my writerly Thunderdome take pity on the adverb idea and give it a set of poison-tipped spiked brass knuckles to help it in the fight?

I fear this is one of those unknowable things that philosophers might struggle with through the ages, though they’d perhaps do it more eloquently than with Thunderdomes and brass knuckles. And they’d certainly steer clear of Thomas the Tank Engine and any associated theme songs.

This post is part of SoCS. This week’s prompt was the diabolical homonym quartet of “sense / scents / cents / sent”, a series of words which basically describes why anybody learning English as a second language might end up banging his head against a wall. Because I’m a fool for pain, I used them all.

Shunt.

This One’s a Bleeder

Pavowski2 Comments

To continue my metaphor of narrative surgery, I’ve been working on the edit a good bit the past couple nights, with a few thousand words added in and a lot of trimming and tweaking in the neighboring scenes. But I hit my first really rough patch, and the patient nearly bled out while I watched.

See, there was this one really good scene leading into another really good scene, and the problem with the two was (is) that there’s a character present in the one who I forgot about when I wrote the other. Upon reflection and review, it makes perfect sense for said character not to be present in scene 2, though I rather like her contributions to scene 1. So, one way or another, the appendix must be removed and I have to explain how I removed it. Her. Gah, metaphors.

So I spent my editing time tonight writing a brief intermediary scene wherein the protagonist clumsily gets rid of her. And man… I just think it’s crap. I mean, it does what it needs to do (patching the continuity hole of having her magically disappear from one scene to the next) but it feels so obvious and heavy-handed in the narrative sense of I just needed to get rid of this character that I fear it will break continuity anyway.

Thus, the new scene, created to bridge a gap between two existing scenes and resolve another item precariously perched on the Editing Pile of Stuff now becomes its very own item on the Pile.

I’m tempering my all-consuming self-abuse and the growing screams of the Howler Monkey of Doubt with the knowledge that it’s okay if it’s not perfect at this stage; it can always be polished and refined in later edits. The important thing for now is to make sure that all the musculature is in place and functioning properly; the skin grafts and, you know, general make-it-look-a-little-less-Frankenstein’s-monster-ish-ness can come later.

But man, that’s one raggedy-looking patch job. Almost like I had a grizzled, musclebound soldier on my table with a horrifically injured arm, and I replaced it with a prosthetic molded from a five-year-old girl. Sure, they’re the same parts, but they damn sure don’t match.

Ugh. Have I mentioned that editing sucks so very much worse than drafting?