Category: Writing

Simmering my Brainmeats in a Fragrant Crockpot of Creative Doubt

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My Flash Fiction from last week is enjoying a bit of success over at terribleminds.com.  So good, in fact, that I stand to win a free e-book off the back of it (yay free stuff!).  That thread is here:  Three Sentence Stories.  And it got me to thinking, which is a bad habit I have.  Because I love these little Flash Fiction challenges; I take great pleasure jumping into them with both feet no matter how difficult or ridiculous or outside of my comfort zone they may be.

If you’re going along with this post, you might want to check out my series of stories from last week, because I’m stewing over them right now.  Simmering my brainmeats in a fragrant crockpot of creative doubt.

Writing the last one — I should say the last set, since I expanded on the topic and wrote way more than I perhaps should have — was instructive, because the development of the stories was so strange to me.  With only three sentences to tell a story, I agonized for the weekend over what story I could tell, what characters I could bring to bear, what possible development and twists I could effect within such a short period.  My first story was good but fell into my typical vein of the dark and somewhat horrific account of a more or less mild-mannered somebody taking part in senseless violence.  It’s a little bit of a motif with me, I’m afraid, and I’m just not sure how effective it really is.  It wasn’t bad, but the moment I wrote it, I realized just how much of a step into an old shoe it was, which is why I decided to write another one.

So I rebooted, kept my central idea and parameters, and brought in new characters, new conflicts.  New perspective, new story, new twist.  And v2 was better, I think, though it still fell in the same dark, depraved vein of the first.  But twisting the idea in my brain felt refreshing, so I tried again.  If the first story was a cruise down a familiar highway, the second was a short detour on a quaint exit ramp for a franchise burger.  A bit different but nothing incredible.

So for the third go-round, I decided to take a hard left into the ditch.  Rather than characters, I characterized inanimate objects (more or less), let them talk and explore human emotions and ideas, and … end up at the same dark murderous place.  Hmm.  The new take on characters was like a fantastic little food truck discovered set up around the corner from my office.  Totally new and exciting food in a familiar and comforting setting.  I knew I was getting warmer.

On the fourth go-round, I struck gold.  I re-imagined the central idea once again, personified an inanimate object and used my scenario to describe a situation that happens every day.  Not an earth-shattering revelation about everyday, just a little thought experiment on what might be happening when the vending machine at the end of the hall rejects your dollar.  Somehow, it felt like gold.  An ostensibly ridiculous premise with an endearing (at least, I think so!) character whom you don’t expect, giving an unexpected perspective and staying light and upbeat.  So it was a bit out of my comfort zone, a bit funny, a bit ridiculous, and very much me.  As I was writing it, before it was finished (yeah, that quickly, even before I could finish three sentences), I could tell it was the best one.  That “magic” was happening, that crazy feeling where you feel like you’ve tapped into the magical mind-juice of the universe and your pen (okay, your keyboard) is acting as a conduit for the timeless universal stories that speak to everybody.  You know, a good writing session.

The fifth attempt felt a little forced, so I pulled the plug after that one.

So, to reflect, I wrote one story in my usual vein, a second with one foot out of the vein, a third with an eye on a different horizon, and a fourth that struck out toward that horizon and — by all accounts — seems to be resonating with folks who read it.  So now, I’ve got another prompt in front of me for the weekend, and I’m all in my own head, wondering if I need to write three junk stories before I get at the “real” one.  For that matter, I’m working on an extended short story and boy oh boy, does it feel awkward and forced.  Like I’m in touch with the central idea, and I’m enjoying the premise, but I can tell as I’m writing it that I’m not telling the story the right way.

Do I need a few crap attempts at the topic to “clear the pipes” so that I can get down to writing the story that I want to write?  If so, how far do I have to carry those stories out?  When I wrote Rejected v1, it felt like a pretty good story to me, but in retrospect I can see that it’s awfully derivative.  The current version of Powdered Chaos, at about 30% completion, already feels crap.  Do I need to carry it to is conclusion before I take another stab at it?  Or, having written about 4000 words on it already, can I legitimately realize it’s crap and start over without crashing my creative process?

In short, just what the hell is my creative process anyway?  This is seriously bugging me, and it’s bogging down my writing hard while I’m trying to carry my momentum through this lull before I jump into editing Accidentally Inspired.

Need to figure this out.  Anybody else have anxiety like this about your drafts?  How do you attack it?  Do I just write the crap to clear the pipes or do I resist the urge to waste time on the crap and hold out for the good ideas to strike?

Nothing a Little Run Can’t Fix

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Once more onto the beach, or however that saying goes.

I dutifully took my two weeks(ish?) off from SERIOUS writing to let the mind decompress and drift back into its natural jellylike state after four months of grind, but today is the day I pick it up again and continue whipping my word-vomit into something approaching Prose Worth Reading.

As with virtually every writing or otherwise creative project I have ever undertaken, the choosing was the hardest part.  For better or worse, choose I have, and now I press on with the goal of expanding one of my recent Flash Fictions into a fuller, more developed short story.  I’m aiming for about ten thousand words, just as a ballpark sort of area I’d like to land in, but if it runs long or short that won’t upset me terribly.  I’m not sure what the real goal will be as far as what I’d like to do with this one when it’s written, but I want to try out a length in between these little lightning strikes I’m spitting out every week and another full-length heartstomper like the novel has been.  Ten thousand words seems a nice happy medium, and when I’m finished with that, it will perhaps be time to start back in on editing Accidentally Inspired.

If you’re curious (why wouldn’t you be?!) I’m going to be expanding my entry from a couple of weeks ago, Powdered Chaos.  I feel like I scratched the surface of something really interesting with that one and I think it’s worth the time to delve into that particular cave and see what squishy bits of sweetmeats I can deliver back to the colony.  What’s that?  “Sweetmeats” aren’t what I think they are?

Hold on.

Okay, a sweetmeat is, of all things, a pastry.  The word I was thinking of was “sweetbread”, which for some reason is the name for pancreas.  English is a whimsical old thing, innit?

Anyway, I’ll be delving that particular cave over the next several weeks, with a much more reasonable goal of 600 words daily.  900 was a great goal for the novel, and I may use that as a benchmark in future times of novel writing dementia, but there were more than a few days when I started wanting to chop down trees with my keyboard after word 600.  Keyboards not being a particularly effective cutting implement, that’s the kind of impulse I’d like to, y’know, steer away from.  So.  600 words, five days a week, that’s about four weeks to turn Powdered Chaos into something that’s… well, something.  This is all experimental; don’t look at me if a zombie goliath of stitched-together story bits and half-formed ideas begins roaming the countryside and devouring your livestock and KILL IT WITH FIRE.

First day (night actually) of working on this one went swimmingly.  I chalk it up to my run this morning.  No, seriously.

I decided this was the project I wanted on Thursday but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about expanding it.  Start farther out front?  Deal with multiple characters and their interaction with the thing?  Maybe continue on past the one outlined in the story?  It was a problem and I was blocked.

As I’ve mentioned before, Past Me would hit a roadblock when writing and park the car, slash the tires and hitchhike back to town, abandoning the vehicle to looters and hobos.  New Me has no truck with blocks; he drives right at them with the brights on and the horn sounding its dopplerized war cry, and if the block is still there when I get around to my writing that day, well then WE’RE BOTH GOING DOWN.  Writing tonight was a given.  The how and the what and the whatever would come to me.  So I laced up.  (Actually I strapped up because my Vibrams don’t have laces, but… yeah, “strapped up” sounds a little bit like… okay let’s just move on.)

It was a rainy morning, so I left the sprout at home.  Also because of the raininess of the morning I didn’t take my headphones with me (they are a bright shiny BIRTHDAY GIFT and I am not ready to ruin them yet even though they are life-altering and awesome and give me wings).  Imagine!  Running completely unfettered by forty pounds of toddler + stroller and undistracted by mindless thumping dubstep!  I’ve not had such a run in months and I desperately miss it.

Running without distractions is something I always say I’m going to do more often and never actually get around to doing much at all, but I maintain that the experience is peerless when it comes to solving problems personal and mental.  So I’m hoofing it and enjoying the quickest pace I’ve had on a run in a while and delighting in the mist on my face and now and then pondering the question of what I’m going to do when I come up against this roadblock in actually starting the thing and then I get this idea, like a midget was following right on my heels and hopped up on my back and whispered in my ear so softly I could barely hear it, “point of view.”

And I cocked my head and pondered on that, because it’s not a complete sentence after all, but when ideas drift into my head on a run they usually do it for some sort of reason and I always at least try poking at them to see if they bite back.  “Point of view?” I pondered.  No answer.  The various Me’s bouncing around in my head only answer when they feel like it, or when I’ve had a few adult beverages.  And I run and I ponder, run, ponder.  It hits me that the point of view in that story is wrong.  Not wrong like five is not the answer to two plus two, but wrong like whitewall tires on a tractor.  The thing still runs, but it ain’t optimal.

So, change it.  But to what?

Well, I won’t spoil it yet, but needless to say, the point of view has been changed, and in a way that I hope will be both surprising and satisfying.  And I got a cool 750 words in tonight without breaking a sweat, but of course that should be tempered immediately because the honeymoon is just getting started with this thing.

At any rate, lesson learned.  There has not yet been a day when I’ve had a run and not felt better about my writing at the end of it.  It’s a lesson I keep learning and somehow keep forgetting, so THIS POST should serve as a reminder to any and all Future Me’s: Next time you get blocked, or think you might get blocked, or even think you might think about the possibility that in some future eventuality you could possibly get blocked, just lace up.  (Or strap up.  No, just lace up and adjust for your needs.)  The road and your feet and the void will go to work on the problem and before you know it, you’re home and ready for a shower and a good write.

That Time I Overheard a Jerk in a Restaurant and Learned a Lesson About Writing

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It’s odd how one little detail, left out of a situation, can completely change your read on it.  Or, to cut in the opposite direction, how you can think you have a handle on what’s going on, and then you learn something new about what’s happening, and all of a sudden you feel like a horrible sharknadoheel for thinking a certain way, or maybe you feel totally vindicated.

The wife and I went to dinner while the grandparents kept the kids for the evening.  Sidenote: when I say dinner, for us that means we hit the restaurant at about 4:30.  I know, we might as well be geriatrics, but when your kid’s bedtime is at seven, you have to rethink the way you live your life.  So it’s 4:30, and we’re at dinner at a nice little pasta place we like where there’s tacky 90’s stereotypical Italian decor and they serve you way too much food so you eat leftovers for two days afterward.  Because it’s 4:30, we have the place almost to ourselves, so we get served quick and we eat quick, which is nice, because having a two-year-old has left me unable to savor a meal; all I know how to do anymore is shovel foodstuffs into my beak while my mind wanders to the sprout and whether or not he’s likely to get into mortal danger before I can swallow a half-chewed mouthful.  But the kids aren’t there so we actually get to focus on each other and the ambiance, a really rare treat.

I don’t know if it’s my inclination as a writer that makes me such a shameless eavesdropper or if I’m just a jerk, but while we’re at dinner this other couple comes in and I immediately start with the judging.  There’s nothing special to say about her, but he is a paunch-bellied, unshaven slob, and that biases me against him before he opens his mouth.  To be fair, this restaurant isn’t the swankiest of joints, so there’s no dress code, but, come on.  Call me old-fashioned, but if you’re taking your wife / girlfriend / main squeeze to a dinner that’s gonna cost more than ten bucks a plate, maybe don’t dress like you just came from a World of Warcraft marathon session in your mom’s basement?Read More »

… But He Was Still Hungry

Pavowski3 Comments

My kid is super-hot on Eric Carle’s timeless and much-adored The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  He loves the book so much that I can recite it word for word from memory without so much as a hiccup, and he can fill in the blanks when I leave words out.  (“On Monday, he ate through one…” “APPLE!”)  Fantastic bonding experience, reading with the sprout, even if it exhausts me reading the same book night after night after night (it does, but you know, welcome to parenthood).

We’re reading the book tonight before bedtime and I have one of those HOLY SHARKNADO moments.  If you’re not familiar with the book, basically there’s a caterpillar, he’s hungry, he eats through all this food at a picnic and every night he’s still hungry.  Sort of existential in a way, actually (damn, there’s ANOTHER of those moments, okay focus).  But I’m reading through the story for the sixtieth time and it’s right about the time where he eats through four strawberries (but he was still hungry) when I realize that I AM THE CATERPILLAR.

I mean, I guess we’re all the caterpillar, aren’t we?  Chewing our way through the swollen fruits of life, gorging ourselves on the sweet meats of the vine, but at the end of the day, it’s not enough: we’re all still hungry.  But it hit me today, like an unregistered immigrant flying through a red light when I’ve got a green (not that THAT ever happened to me), that the caterpillar is ME as a writer.  I popped from my egg one day and started looking for food (writing).  I chewed through apples, pears, plums (my novel, short stories, the blarg), eating so much at times that I made myself sick on it (yep I’ve definitely been sick of writing a few times on this little excursion).  I’ve not yet turned into a beautiful butterfly: more likely I’m one of those guys that turns into a dusty, nasty moth that spirals into your porch light and fries himself before he can get a taste of the night.  But man, if this realization didn’t resonate with me.  I guess great literature does that, dunnit?  No matter what age group it’s aimed at (you YA haters can suck it, Twilight is TIMELESS [no it isn’t, please kill me]) if the writing is sound it will appeal to virtually anybody in some way.

So I’m the caterpillar.  I achieved the goal I set for myself four months ago: achieved it in less time than I budgeted for.  And achieving it has tasted sweet, sweeter than I imagined it would, though not without its bitter aftertaste.  But it’s now a week and a half later and my stomach is rumbling something fierce.  The novel was fantastic.  Delicious.  Satisfying.  But I’m still hungry.

I’ve got to find my next project.

Sure, I’m still writing daily — the blarg is keeping me honest on that front, and that’s not going to change — but the blarg is a completely different animal than churning out 900 words a day on ONE singular topic, one idea, one band of characters.  The blarg requires the attention span of a coked-up yap dog: one moment I’m peeing on the carpet, next moment I’m chasing the neighbor’s cat through the azalea bushes, next I’m snoozing on the pair of shoes you left in the corner, and then I’m running under your feet trying to trip you down the stairs.  There’s no focus, no throughline, no gravity.  Last couple of days especially, the fact that I’m not writing anything of substance is irking me, burning in the back of my brain like I’ve left the stove on before leaving on a five-day cruise.

I guess that means that the break is over.  I’d promised myself a bit of time off to decompress after finishing the first draft of the Project, figuring that if I tried any serious writing too soon I’d feel burnt-out and frustrated and stretched too thin.  At the moment I’m torn between telling myself that I need a bit more time to really spin down — a lot has happened in these last few weeks — and embracing that sucking wound in my gut that’s gasping for more words, more ideas, telling me I need to write write WRITE.  The urge to write is winning out at this point, I fear.  The question is, what will it be?

Do I jump into the draft of another novel?  I’ve got a few ideas on the burner for that and I’ve felt a couple of nibbles along the way writing the first one.  Do I try my hand at writing an extended short story, a little novella perhaps of maybe ten thousand words?  Go back to the stable where I first started this crazy gig and try my hand at another stage play or screenplay?

New resolution: By no later than Monday of next week I’ll choose a new project to work on, and set an acceptable deadline for its completion.  I’ve got two weeks left in the summer and then it’s back to the teaching grind, and I’ll want something to anchor me creatively.

Routine and Breaking With It

Pavowski12 Comments

This post is part of SoCS: http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1214/

The theme for the week is “getting away, or getting out.”  As usual with these stream of consciousness posts, I won’t be doing any editing or fixorating after this post is finished, so it may be a bit unpolished, which I guess is the point.

In the four (now five, yikes) months since I’ve been “seriously writing,” I’ve come to notice a few things about, well, writing.  Specifically, that while rituals are important, they can also be limiting.  What I mean by that is, there’s this box.  And you always hear that it’s important to think outside the box, or whatever, and that’s true.  The box can hold you back.  But that sells the box short, really, because the box can also be comforting, like an old sweatshirt you slip into on the first cold days of Autumn or like a glass of wine before bed.

Case in point, when school was in session, I wrote in virtually the same way every day.  I’d steal a solid thirty minutes on my lunch break to work on my novel, using that time to block out any other distractions.  Really focused work.  Looking back, now, I can identify the work that I completed in that way not just by the timestamps but also by the way it’s written.  Word choice, sentence structure, ratio of dialogue to prose… my work completed by the routine has a certain feel to it that my work outside of routine doesn’t have.  Not to say it’s better; there are certainly merits to the work I completed outside of routine.  But the routine was the box, and I came to depend on it, so much so that in the last month of the Project I found myself mentally blocked, in no small part I fear because I didn’t have my routine to mentally prepare myself.

Now I love routine, but this experience with my first draft has shown me that you can’t always count on routines, so one thing I want to work on in my next project is shaking things up a bit and breaking at least some of my dependence on routine.

It shouldn’t shock me the effect routine has on my writing; it’s the same with my running.  When I was just getting started running, I did all my runs at the mall.  Well, as I increased my ability to run faster and farther, I started to become aware of hitting a wall with my runs at the mall.  After all, it was the same loop, the same hills, over and over and over.  So I started to branch out, to run different routes all around my neighborhood and, as I pushed my distance still farther, around town, and I noticed my pace and my endurance increasing all the more.  Breaking the routine allowed me to make bigger gains faster than if I’d kept doing the same thing over and over.  With new hills and new turns I was challenging myself in different ways, and that helped make me into a better runner.

It puts me in mind of those ads for P90X and Insanity that were big over the last couple of years, the central tenet of which was “muscle confusion.”  Here was a program designed to keep you from getting into the box in the first place.  The focus of these workouts was to exercise in a different way every single day to keep the body and the muscles from recognizing a pattern and getting lazy.  I never tried the workouts myself, but the reasoning seems sound enough.

So the box helps — routine helps — but more and more I think it’s going to be important that I work to get away from routines, get away from what’s comfortable and easy, and force myself to step off the reservation, out of the box, and go tumbling down a cliffside every now and then.  That’s my writing as well as my running and my cross training.  Hell, the fact that I’m cross training at all now — something I haven’t done in two years of running — is a step in that direction.

But I’m not trashing the box.  Just like there is no good without bad, no light without dark, neither can there be invention and experimentation without the norm to return to occasionally, even regularly.

It begs the question, then: what’s “out of the box” in terms of writing?  Off the top of my head, it means straying from some of these habits and tendencies.  Overuse of fancy say-nothing words like “particularly”.  Preoccupation with sounding clever or intelligent.  Fear of the simple statement.  Gravitating toward dark subject matter in short fiction.  Trying too hard to avoid dialogue tags.

For that matter, how can I get out of the box with running?  It’s harder than ever at the moment to break with routine since the sprout joins me for most of my runs, and that means the stroller, and that means I’m very limited in where I can go.  But here are some ideas.  More speedwork and/or interval sessions.  Running without music more.  Varying the dips and twists and turns in my route as much as possible.  Making sure to drive to a more interesting location for a run every couple weeks or so.

In short, routine can be helpful, but it can also be a crutch, and if you don’t escape the routine every now and then, then like a mouse in a cage, you will become trapped by it.

Am I overthinking routine?  How else can you push the boundaries while still getting the most out of a routine?  And do I overstate or understate the value of getting away from it?