(Tiny) King of the Beach

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I didn’t post this at the time, because with two kids running around, you become a lot less concerned with taking adorable pictures and posting them to your various social media right away for the adulation of friends, neighbors and acquaintances and more concerned with making sure that one child does not kill the other or itself while you try to close the door to use the bathroom in peace for a moment.

Still, though, despite your dubious parenting and hopeless second-child-syndroming of the second child, you do catch a good picture from time to time.

King of the Beach.
King of the Beach.

The boy has mastered at age 3 a pose that I can only hope to emulate. Maybe after I sell a few books and buy a beach house that I can just lounge around in at day’s end, I can come close to his casual indifference to the world, his satisfaction at a day’s work well done, a beach’s worth of sand castles properly kicked over, a pink bouncy ball thoroughly bopped around.

His shirt even says “Life is Good,” for the love of all that’s shameless.

So, yeah. Usually I have more to say, but sometimes it’s better to just let the picture speak for itself.

Accidentally Runspired

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I’m in such a strange place with this novel. What started off as a lighthearted sort of funny time travel jaunt has transmogrified itself, not so much like a chameleon altering the color of its skin but more like a hermit crab abandoning one shell and then another and spending not an ounce of care or compassion on its previous self. A new idea strikes, and of course it requires seismic changes to the story as it’s already written, but the glances of the story that could be are so much more appealing than the story that is. So, naturally, I’m trying to find a way to attract more lightning strikes, but seeing as I’m not particularly keen to wander out into a summer thunderstorm wrapped in a roll of tinfoil and holding aloft a handful of golf clubs, I’ve been going for runs instead.

And a funny thing has happened.

The more I embrace the changes that occur to me while the blacktop creeps past under my feet, the more the lightning strikes, and the more intensely when it does. The “notes” section of my current draft is just about long enough to form its own chapter, I’ve redesigned one of the central characters from the ground up (twice), and the inconsistencies in the world of the story from first chapters to most recent are as numerous as ants on a piece of pumpkin pie at an abandoned picnic. I get an idea for a small change to make, so I make it going forward and leave the earlier pages to fix in post, and then the situation repeats; I’m on about my fiftieth iteration of that process. Not that anybody’s counting; might as well try to count locusts in the midst of a plague.

Maybe it’s an argument for planning a novel more thoroughly before I begin, or maybe it’s a lesson in not getting too attached to what I think a story is before I get my hands into its entrails. The process remains exhausting, though writing the novel has been a lot more fun of late (we’re getting into the final third of the book, so the action is beginning to run high again).

It almost makes me nervous to keep going out for runs with the novel on my mind, because I know that the only thing that will come of that is more changes to the story, more shifts in character, more dubious inspiration that makes me want to burn the thing to the ground just so that I can rebuild it stronger from the ashes.

Which is actually becoming something of a theme in the story. Not by design, but because… well… with a time travel story, what other theme can you drift toward? If you had the power, how could you not try to constantly reinvent the world you live in? If you could go back at the flip of a switch, how could you not attempt to recreate your own reality every time something didn’t break your way?

Writing gives you that power: the power to create worlds and destroy them, then recreate them even better based off what you learned when you built it the first time around.

…Anyway. It’s not like I’m going to quit running. Or writing. Struggles or no, the fact that I’m brimming with thoughts about the novel, the fact that I had to steal twenty minutes on a Sunday to write down some notes for the book, tells me that I’m still doing the right thing. Still writing the right story, still doing a good thing.

Back to building worlds tomorrow, and smashing them to pieces.

We’re Never Ready. Do It Anyway.

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When you’re starting something new, there’s a lot of hullabaloo about picking the “right time” to do it.

“I’d love to write a novel, but I just want to have the perfect idea first.”

“I’d love to start exercising and dieting, but I’ve got a vacation coming up (or the holidays, or whatever). I’ll start afterward.”

“I’d like to have a kid someday, but things are just too busy for me at work.”

The excuses all sound decent and reasonable, and they’re never specifically wrong. If you’re going to start writing a book, you should have the best idea you can muster in mind before putting pen to paper. If you’re going to start getting fit, you should eliminate as many barriers to success as you can. If you’re going to have a kid, you want to do so at a time when you can give the child as much of your attention as possible. And so on, and so on. The problem is, you can use that excuse (and here I mean whatever excuse you may have concocted to justify the thing you’re not doing) ad nauseam, and there is always another “perfect” excuse. Sure, I have a good idea for a novel, but what if I have a better one in a month or so? Okay, I cleaned the junk food out of my kitchen, but who wants to take up running in the middle of the summer? Yeah, my job is secure, but money’s tight right now, so maybe we can think about having a kid next year.

You can always find a reason why you’re not “ready”.

President Kennedy said of going to the moon that “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing regardless of the time frame in which you do it. There is never a “perfect” time. You’re never really “ready”. And chasing after perfection is the surest way to never get anything done. If you’re waiting for the perfect opportunity, you can prepare to spend your whole life waiting.

If you have the inkling that you want to write, pick up your pen (okay, crack open your laptop), open a word document (or notepad if you must) and write something. Now. Today. Brainstorm ideas for the novel. Do a little outline or a character sketch. Write an opening scene. It won’t be perfect — hell, it may not even be good — but at least you’ll have started, and taking that first step is the only way you’re going to change your momentum.

If you want to start exercising or watching your diet, do something. Now. Today. Go for a twenty minute walk around the neighborhood. Bang out a few push-ups during the commercial break. Have an extra helping of veggies before you hork down a bunch of bread, or stay in and cook your own dinner instead of driving to McFatty’s.Your exercise may not be graceful or impressive, and your dietary choices may not be the best, but at least you’re doing something. At least you’re making the effort instead of hiding from the opportunity.

If you want to have kids, well, the clock never stops on life, right? I had my kids at the age of 31 and 34, which means I’ll be about 50 when they graduate high school and head off to college. When my wife first started talking about having kids a year or two earlier, I told myself “I wasn’t ready” to be a father. But I did the math and realized I didn’t want to be a geriatric school parent. I have a colleague who just had his first baby at the age of 46. He’s going to be over 60 by the time his kid graduates high school. He told me he and his wife were just waiting for the right time, until they suddenly realized in their 40’s that there was no right time and they were on the verge of missing their chance completely.

The point of all this is, change is hard. Momentum matters. It’s easy to sit on the couch and get fat, easy to watch movies and TV endlessly instead of chasing after a dream, easy to stay a kid forever. The human animal seeks the path of least resistance by its very nature. We have to fight against evolution, against society, against ourselves to achieve the things we want to achieve.

We’re never really “ready.”

Which is why, whatever the change is that you’re chasing, there’s only really one thing you have to be ready for. And that’s being ready to say goodbye to the old you, the old way you did things. If you’re ready to move on, you’re ready for the next thing, whether you think the time is right or not.

Just start. Do something. It won’t be perfect, it may not even be good. But you’ll never get good if you don’t start sometime. And as somebody famous once said, there is no time like the present.

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.

Running and Writing: Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together!

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It’s been a long time since I had a running post, and I wondered if I was done with them. After all, this is primarily a blog about the writing of novels and the tribulations of a writer of novels learning that he doesn’t actually know very much about the writing of novels. What does running have to do with that?

Well, a lot, actually.

I take a bit of a Dirk Gently approach to life, always trying to keep in mind the interconnectedness of all things. A hummingbird flaps its wings in Taiwan and creates a hurricane in Florida, or an angry old man sends back soup at a deli and the next thing you know, skinny jeans are going out of style and cats are scooping their own poop.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing, it’s that it’s hard. Really hard. I’ve called it a Sisyphean effort before, and that’s not hyperbole: take your eye off the work and it can backslide on you, rolling your project and your will to work on it all the way back down to the bottom of the hill you spent five months climbing. And that’s when the wind is at your back, when things are going your way and you feel really truly in touch with what you’re writing.

But those are the rare days.

A lot of writing (the biggest part of writing, of late) is writing when your heart isn’t in it, when you fear the work is crap, that you’re crap, that every idea you’ve ever had or will ever have is crap, and that the paper that might have been used printing out your manuscript would be better used as paper that’s actually designed for cleaning up crap. Authorial self-doubt, the fear of rejection, an inability to find the time to focus or the right circumstances to concentrate… all these can add up to make the prospect of writing as daunting as an ant deciding it wants to cut a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains. On those days, you really have to be clearheaded, you have to train your mind to block out all that negativity and self-sabotage.

Which is where the running comes in. Say what you will about the dubious benefits of prolonged cardio exercise or how bad it is for your knees (or better yet, don’t, because I will just laugh at you), but any activity that gets the blood flowing to your body proper is by its very nature going to get the blood flowing to your brain. All that fresh, hot, oxygen-laced, endorphin-riddled blood hitting the brain is like a cool breeze in the middle of a Georgia July, like stepping into a heated storefront after being out in a New York winter, like the first pop in a fresh roll of bubble wrap. It gets you focused, it gets you clear-headed, it gets you calm.

Add to that, of course, the fact that with running in particular, it’s just you and the road (or trail or track or whatever) and the low, rhythmic shuffling of your feet. If zen masters advocate focusing on the simple infinity of the “om”, then there’s a wealth of universal truth to be found in the relentless slap slap slap of your feet on the pavement. There is no better way to get some alone time with your thoughts than to lace up your sneakers and go out for a few meditative miles.

If you’re a regular reader, you might know that I’ve been struggling with a foot injury for the last year and a half that’s made it difficult for me to fully enjoy my runs. It’s been impossible for me to cover long distances or to push my pace much above a brisk jog without setting myself back something horrible. But I’m muscling through, perhaps idiotically so (especially if you ask my wife) because of one thing:

I write better on the days when I exercise than on days when I don’t. I write better on days that I run than on days when I “work out”. I’m clearer, more at peace, less stressed, less consumed with doubt. If I can start the day with that one accomplishment under my belt, it makes any other goal — from writing a few hundred words to grading a stack of horrible essays — seem that much closer to my grasping hands.

Problem is, there’s only so much you can say about running, right? I mean, sure, every run is different: the melodies of the birdsong, the low lullaby of the cars rumbling past, the poemic abuse from passing motorists weaves itself into a unique symphony every time you step out. But by the same token, of course, every run is pretty much the same: laces on, one foot in the other, tromp stomp tromp stomp, have a shower, go on with your day.

So on the one hand, I hesitate to write too much about running, because I fear it gets monotonous. Then again, I wonder if I don’t beat the writing about writing horse to death, as I fear I may have done of late.

Nevertheless, running, as I said before, is a part of my process. Which means it belongs here.

Oh, and: I went for a run yesterday. It was good. Probably go for one tomorrow. I think that one will be good, too.

Image from Avicii’s Levels music video.

The Narrative: Break It to Fix It

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So the story is struggling along like a winged pigeon. It’s limping here, stopping to investigate this pile of birdseed, fleeing for its life with halting, awkward steps, trying occasionally to fly and only crashing back to the earth.

Something’s wrong with it, but you can’t put your finger on what it is. You like your premise. Your plot is fine. Characters are not bad either. But when you put it all together, it’s sort of like trying to reassemble the bits of a broken vase. In theory they add up to one complete thing, but in practice it just isn’t happening, and never will, because whatever broke the thing in the first place warped it before it broke.

Still, all the writing advice in the world tells you to keep writing even when the writing sucks, so you keep writing dutifully, pounding your face against the keys in the vain hopes that it won’t suck so bad the next time you come back to it, but each time it’s like you slip a little further down the well, you take another step into the unlit basement, you drift a little closer to the waterfall. Meanwhile you’re doubting yourself. The things you’re writing just don’t feel right, even above and beyond the standard-issue writerly self-doubt that affects all who practice the pen. If you’re writing crap, maybe you are crap, and maybe you should stop writing this really crappy crap and get back to the crap you could be doing that might not be total crap by the time you’re finished with it.

But then, a thought occurs to you, like a lone ray of sunshine piercing through a veil of clouds, or like a ping on the sonar detector you thought was dead when you crash-landed on the alien planet. The story isn’t broken, struggling toward its inevitable awful ending on legs that can barely carry it under the weight of its own suckitude. The story isn’t diseased, shambling forward with shaky, poxy steps while a fever of words burns it from the inside out. The story hasn’t died already, drawing flies to feast on its inkblood oozing out through the plot holes left by your incompetence.

It’s nothing so all-encompassing, so fatal as all that. No, there’s just that one thing wrong with it.

And that one thing is poisoning your entire story.

Maybe your protagonist rescued a bunny from hungry wolves in the first act, and that bunny has turned out to be a real pain in the narrative neck since your hero now has to haul it around to meetings and clean up after it. (I read that rabbit pee can actually corrode aluminum. What a jerk of an animal.) Maybe the plot twist you planted for later in the book is about as unexpected as a jab in the opening round of a boxing match, or a hot day in a Georgia summer.

Problem is, you’ve written the story so far with this one thing in mind, and now you see the thing for the insidious venom that it is, you see it scarring the veins of your precious story, burning the heart out with its slow acid drip. To press on, allowing the poison to remain, is madness; it’ll keep corroding the work, no matter how much you’re now aware of it. To double back, try to excise the poison and correct the damage is just as unthinkable: you can’t throw away the work you’ve done, the time you’ve spent, to begin the Sisyphean task of a massive edit before you’ve even finished a draft. What to do?

Cut off the diseased limb.

Writing the first draft is a combat landing. You parachute in with guns blazing, find a bit of cover and pray to god you can make the rendezvous before your head gets taken off by the shrapnel of an exploding real life obligation. You don’t get to go back and say, no, sorry, I borked the landing, let me get back on the plane and try again. The only way out is through. Got a problematic element? Damn the cannons and ditch the damn thing, then pick up your rifle and wade back into combat. Agonizing over the decision will get you shot, or worse, get you killed: you’ll bog down in the existential doubt over your work, and before you know it you just can’t make yourself pick up the pen today, or tomorrow for that matter, and gosh golly the weekend is coming up, and then you’re dead in the ditch with the thousands upon thousands of other would-be writers who just couldn’t do it because of this or that or the other.

The good news is that if you can survive the incursion — if you can finish a draft — you get as many chances as you like to go back and fix it. Make it less crappy. Take out the bits about boring business meetings and toss in more unicorn deathmatches instead. But you’ll never make it through the draft if your heart isn’t in it. Sure, when you get to the end, your draft might look like a civil war armory after a heavy shelling. It might be dripping with blood and bits of brain, it might be hanging together with the flimsiest of threads, it might be written on chicken bones rattling around in a voodoo medicine bag. But if you can finish it, you can fix it later. You have to pull a rotten tooth to put in an implant. You have to break the fractured bone again to set it properly. You have to break your story to fix it, shatter it into a million pieces and then start looking for the super glue when it’s all said and done.

So, what’s it going to be? Suck it up, tie a tourniquet around the poisoned arm and hack it off at the elbow so you can keep slaughtering zombies with your machete hand (Yeah, I’m mixing my metaphors pretty badly, but THERE’S NO STOPPING NOW)? Or throw your hands up, sit back and die while the poison eats you alive?

Tonight I made the decision to erase one of my three main characters from the story completely. Gone like he never existed. He was dead weight, slowing the story down instead of catapulting it forward, and he’s been poisoning the story since the first day I wrote his name down.

What’s poisoning your story? And how are you going to fix it?