Tag: Commitment 2014

Good Day / Bad Day

Pavowski2 Comments

What the sharknado just happened?

I was sitting here, polishing off the last of my lunchtime Diet Coke, writing the last three hundred words of my session for today, when all of a sudden I run, full on, into a wall.  The throttle was wide open on my Formula One racecar and some inconsiderate dude has built a cinder-block wall in the middle of the track.  I was soaring through the sky looking for my next mouse to devour and some entity has clipped my wings.  I’m in the cafeteria pounding down some spaghetti and mashed potatoes and the school bully has slammed my face down into my tray.

This is me!
This is me!

This is a hard stop.  A dead-end stop.  A flat-out, no-way-around-it, you-are-fargoed stop.  One of my characters has just realized (much to my surprise) that she does not want to be there; nay, that she CANNOT stay there.  That it is not only a dereliction of duty for her to be there, but that it’s humiliating for her to do so.  She not only CAN’T stay in the story as I’m imagining it, she simply WON’T.

My Id-Writer is chewing on the walls because he saw this coming: he feels as she feels, and he knows that this is a decision that I have to let her make.  No, deeper than that, he knows that it’s not a decision at all, it’s already done.  SHE’S GONE.  She’s leaving the hero and his sham of a quest in the rearview and heading for greener pastures.  IT’S WHAT SHE NEEDS TO DO, AND IT’S WHAT SHE WILL DO.  It can’t be stopped.  There’s no way around the grand canyon which has just opened up at my feet.  I’ve got to rethink a lot of things.

I’ve hit little snags with the story along the way — little surprises, little deviations from the master plan — but this is off the map.  I don’t know how the story continues if one of the two main characters leaves the other in the lurch right now.  But it will have to somehow, because I can’t go back and rewrite the things that led up to this moment.  Not now.  THAT’S WHAT EDITING IS FOR, snarls my Id-Writer, PRESS ON THROUGH THE DARKNESS AND SEEK OUT THE LIGHT.  He who turns back is lost.

Tomorrow’s writing session will be an interesting one.  I don’t know how I’m going to get twelve hundred words in — or even nine hundred, for that matter — with this goldfinger MOUNTAIN thrown down across my path.  I really don’t think I can, and that’s deeply upsetting to me, as I’ve not yet failed to make my writing goal in almost six weeks (!) of writing.  Thank goodness the weekend is on the horizon; maybe a few days to ponder will help me to unstick this problem a little bit.

So that’s the bad day.

The good news is, my foot is feeling awesome.  For the first few days after the podiatrist it felt rock-solid, then the immediate numbness of the cortisone began to wear off and I had a bit of soreness gnawing at the edges.  Today, however, is a new day.  I had a nice three-mile run this morning (with the dumb dog in tow) during which I felt no tweaks or twinges, and continuing through the day, the only weirdness I feel in the foot is right after I ice it, and that’s gone within fifteen minutes.  So perhaps, perhaps, a return to normalcy is within sight on that front.  Goodness knows I could use a nice two-hour run to work on unsticking my story.

The Howler Monkey of Doubt

Pavowski4 Comments

It’s a widely-held aphorism amongst creative types that we tend to be our own worst critics. This is doubly true.

In the first sense, we are our own worst critics in that I am certainly not aware of anybody out there who judges my own work more harshly than I do myself.  I’ll grant, my audience is virtually nonexistent at this point, but I am constantly naggled at by a vicious little voice in the back of my mind: “That thing you just wrote is stupid!”  “You should have used more commas there!”  “You should use less commas there!”  That OTHER thing you just wrote there is stupid!”  “They’re all gonna laugh at you!”  I’d say that one of the greatest barriers to my progress on the Project has been getting that little howler monkey to shut the fargo up.  Problem is, he never shuts up.  Much like the Id-Writer, who is always screeching from the damp cellar he gets locked in, “WRITE ABOUT THIS AND ADD MORE METAPHORS AND MAYBE MAKE A COMPARISON TO JESUS OR AN INFINITELY-LEGGED OCTOPUS OR I DUNNO WRITE ABOUT COOKIES,” the best I can do to overcome the ever-present, ever-negative voice of writer’s doubt is to tune it out for a while.  That doesn’t mean it shuts up.  That means that, like the muzak in an elevator, or like the phantasmal infinitely-legged octopus floating just out of my line of sight, I tune it out and attempt to live my life. 

In the second sense, we are our own worst critics in that we are TERRIBLE JUDGES OF OUR OWN WORK.  Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for other creative types; I imagine it’s easy for a Stephen King, for example, to discern whether the pages he’s written today are utter tripe or not. Personally, I have no idea.  I wrote 1300 words today, and haberdashery, I think they’re pretty good.  There are parts in there that suck, but I enjoyed them while I was writing them.  Some of the metaphors in there are pretty darn clever, I think, but who knows, maybe you’d read them and find them inane.  I really have no idea.  I just vomit up my word-slurry (slurry has been my word of the week) and hope that when I finish writing it, I can edit it up into something that will eventually pass as entertaining and not awful to the masses.  (Let’s be optimistic, right?)

It’s a weird place, being a writer.  I sit here, banging my fingers against this poor defenseless keyboard which has never done me any wrong (the tablet keyboard is another story, I want to murder the built-in tablet keyboard in the face), pouring the better part of an hour most days into telling a story (which I’m not sure is any good) to an audience (which I’m not sure I will even have) in a way that will hopefully be funny and poignant (which I’m not even sure I’m capable of).  It’s a quagmire of uncertainty, a web of doubt, a forest of what-ifs. And it’s daunting as haberdashery.  On the daily, I am daunted.  Always, always, always, the howler monkey of self-doubt chitters away at me.  It flings its tiny little balls of doubt-poop at the wall, it leaves the peels of its doubt-bananas on the floor for me to slip on (doubt bananas?  Really?  YES.)  Whatever form it takes, the message is the same. 

You’re not good enough.  Quit.  Writing is hard.  It would be so easy to quit.  Just quit.  QUIT.

image

No thank you, howler monkey of doubt.  Not today.

Take the Long Way Home (some writing advice to my future self)

Pavowski4 Comments

I just finished the first act of Accidentally Inspired.

This was a surprise to me.  I hadn’t been writing it with a 3-act structure in mind, though certainly I’m aware that stories tend to read well when there’s a structure like that in place (problem is introduced in the first act, characters bang their heads against the problem in the second act, problem is resolved in the third act).  Nonetheless, I’ve never been much of a planner.  In storytelling, I like to learn who the characters are, decide what the central problem is, and then simply write the characters and let them figure it out.

In retrospect, this might be why I’ve burned myself out on writing in the past.  Because as much as any character worth his salt can surely find his way to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it helps if there’s a trail of breadcrumbs, a map, or ANY SEMBLANCE OF ANYTHING TELLING YOU YOU’RE MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.  Up until the current project — and I mean that as literally as I possibly can mean it, as in I took action against this problem TODAY following my Project writing session — here’s how I write.

Step 1: The idea strikes.

Step 2: A few days / weeks / months pass in which the idea putters around my head like a hobo looking for change.  If the idea is a good one, it will grow, drawing my focus and attention to it like protoplanets gathered matter in the infant solar system.  If it sucks, it withers and dies like every tomato plant I have ever tried to grow.

Step 3: I start to write.  Notice there is no “planning” step.  I simply pick a moment at the beginning of the story and begin to write it.

Step 4: In a flurry of energy and excitement, I write several scenes / pages, typically about five to ten pages or so, and maybe I even take a few character notes (not PLOT notes, you know, things that would help me to tell the story and make sure things stay interesting, but CHARACTER notes, so that I know exactly what kind of patent leather shoes to put on the ANTZhole lawyer character when he arrives at the end of the first act because THESE ARE THINGS THAT MATTER).  Then I get distracted with something; let’s say that it’s painting a bathroom or replacing some light fixtures and definitely not watching Seinfeld reruns.

Step 5: The idea falls from the pockets of my mind like a discarded candy wrapper, to lie forgotten in the ditches of my memory for a couple years, until it reoccurs to me out of nowhere (probably while I’m, again, patching some drywall, and definitely not watching the Lord of the Rings films again), at which point I think, oh yeah, I started writing that idea a while back, I wonder if I still have my notes on it somewhere?

Step 6: While looking for the notes on the original idea, I have an idea for another idea, and the process begins again, cycling back on itself into infinity.  This can occur once every few months or every few years.

So, how can I be sure that it’s FOR REALZ this time and not just an extended step 4?

I’m glad I asked.  For one, and I really can’t pinpoint the exact reason for it now more than at any other time, but I simply want to make it happen.  There’s more drive there and, frankly, I don’t want to question it too much, I just want to ride it like the strong wind that it is.  For another, as I mentioned above, I’ve taken some proactive steps to make sure I don’t bog down.  Like salting the roads before an ice storm (and I live in Atlanta, so enjoy the stupidity and futility of that simile), this will keep my sharknado from spinning out of control.

So I’ve outlined some high points for the story to follow.  Not a rock-solid outline — technically I already have that in the form of the stage play, though in a lot of ways that’s out the window if it’s anything other than a ROUGH outline — but rather some tentpole moments, as my kung-fu master Chuck Wendig would call them (if Douglas Adams is my spirit guide, Chuck is my ANTZ-kicking bearded ninja guru, perching on treetops and dispensing wisdom and beatdowns with one hand tied).  For the moment, it’s a scribbled series of notes: this happens, then that happens, at some point these characters need to make this happen, try to bring this situation about.  It’s what I see in the distance for now, and it’s by those shining points of light that I will steer through the darkness.

But.  (There’s always a butt.)

Translating this story from play to novel has taught me a few things.  First of all, the dialogue is easy, it’s the descriptions that are hard for me.  Being that there is virtually all of the former and none of the latter in stage plays, it’s easy to see why I gravitated to those (and, likely, still will in the future).  Second, stories are living things.

I set out to tell the story of the play in novel form, and it was like tossing a sea monkey on steroids into the ocean.  That thing swelled up and expanded and started growing all sorts of spider appendages and lizard tails and buzzard beaks and IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES.  As I write the characters, I keep learning new things about them, they keep doing things that surprise me, and as a result, the story is taking odd turns I never expected.  And therein lies the lesson I learned from my work today.

Are you listening, future me?  REMEMBER THIS MOMENT, because you learned something today, and if you forget it, Past Me is going to reach up through space and time and punch you right in the nads.  You hear me?  RIGHT IN THE NADS.  It’ll hurt me as much as it hurts you, but sometimes you have to send a fargoing message.

TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME.  Sure, plot the path.  Figure out how you’re going to get from where you are now to the end you imagine.  But don’t be afraid to blaze a new trail, to take a turn down a side street and see what secrets are hidden off the main drag.  Maybe the end you end up with is better than the end you thought you wanted.  (Whose end?)

Following that advice has led me, as I mentioned back at the top of this post, to the end of the first act of this novel.  The characters are all stuck, they’re all in trouble, they’re all in doubt.  They’re at the edge of a cliff, and it’s hard for any of them to see the way out.  (BUT THE ID-WRITER SEES ALL).  It’s a moment that never existed in the staged version of the story, caused by a character who existed only as a throwaway joke in the staged version, and yet it fits so perfectly (at least in my mind at the moment) that I don’t see how the story could unfold any other way.

For now.

So they’re stuck.  Tomorrow the second act begins, and it’s time to start digging them out.

OR IS IT?

*evil laughter echoes*

*sounds of struggle*

Sorry about that.  We’ve really got to get a handle on that guy.

Late Night Write

Pavowski2 Comments

Getting the writing done a little bit later than I’d rather.  But such is life.  I still have yet to miss a day or a deadline, and that’s something.  In fact, I sat down to write tonight at 9pm telling myself, “just get the 900 words and sack out,” and my ink-crazed id-writer half kept me going all the way to 1400 words, where my clearer-thinking half realized that if the rest of us didn’t get together and stop him soon, he might keep us up and writing all night, so we tagged him with the tranq gun (yeah, there’s a tranq gun in my head for when my other mes get out of hand, what do YOU use??) and he’s taking a little nappy-nap now.  And YES, it’s considered to be late at night at 10:30, I’m the parent of a toddler and THIS IS MY LIFE.

Spring Break is halfway over — actually more than halfway, now that today’s at an end — and that’s sad.

Two things from today.

First of all, I had my first post-podiatrist run on my not-actually-shattered foot, now infused with cortisone, AKA liquefied unicorn horn, AKA jumpin’ jamba juice, AKA I-don’t-know-what-pain-is-anymore happy medicine.  Seriously, in my first contiguous three-mile run in over a month, I felt not a tweak of pain or discomfort or “wrongness” in the heel, and nothing since.  Not only was there no pain, but I found myself running faster and easier than I have in months.  I kept going faster than I wanted to and reminding myself to slow down, which, for a runner, is sort of like asking your torturers to give you a few more lashes and really take their time with the thumbscrews.  The run over, I iced it and stretched the foot, per doctor’s orders, and for today at least, it’s holding up fine.

What’s not holding up fine, on the other hand, are my lungs, for two reasons.  First, I’m out of shape.  Not running consistently since basically December has reduced my conditioning to (for me) pitiful levels, and I cut the run short today as much out of an inability to breathe enough as out of caution not to overwork the heel.  Second, spring seems to have sprung here in Georgia, and if you’ve ever been in Georgia in the merry merry months of springtime, you know that the trees are mating, and their yellow, uh, genetic legacy just lays like a blanket over EVERYTHING.  We had an honest-to-goodness deluge of rain at the beginning of the week, and in the two days since, the pollen has piled up enough that our blue car is now blue-under-a-fine-misting-of-vomit-yellow.  The breeze stirs and you see it swirling like a desert sandstorm.  The trees rustle and it comes cascading down like the yellow snowfall of your nightmares.  When it rains again, the rivers and streams will look like streams of snot.  So me, I go out for my first run in a week, and as much as it’s a nice day out, I’m breathing in these coarse particulates by the metric sharknado-ton.  Oh, but I’m not breathing so much as gasping for my life, so I don’t even have the benefit of the filtration system in the nose, no, it’s all going straight down the gullet and powdering the inside of my lungs.  I feel confident that if you could shine a blacklight into my trachea, my entire respiratory system would fluoresce with this gunk.

So I’m hacking up what looks like powdered yellow-cake uranium, but I had a good run, so that’s awesome.  And I got my writing done for today, and that’s awesome too.

I wish there was more cleverness to be had in this post, but the id-writer is snoring so hard over there with that dart in his neck that he woke the neighbor’s dog up.  Nothing but drool and night terrors for that guy.  What a mess.

4 Questions & an update

PavowskiLeave a comment

Two Blargs in one day?  Shenanigans.

Actually I wrote 90% of the one about my feet last night so I can’t really claim it as today’s work.

SO: today’s blarg.

It’s Day 2 of Spring Break (the weekend doesn’t count – that was a day off anyway!) and it’s been pretty productive so far.  I had feared that it would be difficult to maintain momentum with my daily routine getting bashed up (write for thirty minutes or so on my lunch break, finish it up and blarg in an hour or so at home), but it’s been okay.  I got my Project writing done last night thanks to a bit of time granted to me by my dear wife, and today’s words came out courtesy of the sprout’s solid 2-hour nap.  And I’ll get some more blarging in besides.

And!

A favorite passage from today’s writing!  I fell off the ball with these, partially because it’s hard fargoing work carving out time for all the writing I’m trying to fit in, and partially because a lot of what I’ve been pushing out lately hasn’t been particularly … what’s the word… artful?  It’s good but it needs polish.  Not done cooking.

This bit, I think, is fairly sound.

Accidentally Inspired was, when I wrote it as a stageplay, a bit autobiographical, and now expanding it as a novel, yeah, it’s still autobiographical.  I think this bit was me pulling right from the heart today.

     “Sooner or later, you dig deep enough, you’ll hit the Bottom.” The capital B was evident – again, the gods’ phones have no difficulty translating intricacies of inflection and emphasis. It just sounds like static or wind noise on human phones. “And when you hit the Bottom, one of two things will happen. One: he’ll figure out that he doesn’t really want to be in that hole — not really — and then you can start to climb out again. Or two: the Bottom will cave in, and you will find yourself somewhere else entirely.”
“What do we do if that happens?”
Exasperation crackled through the ethereal wireless connection. “You figure it out, Thalia. Gods, are you a grown woman or not?”

 

WordPress has me at almost 40 followers now.  Pretty cool.  Part of that is community, and thanks to the content of what I’m posting here, many of the people seeing my brain-droppings (RIP George Carlin) are a part of a pretty significant writer’s community.  Collaboration is always a good thing, so I thought I’d acknowledge that some of those writing blogs out there have helped me and inspired me and given me some ideas along the way when I’ve been stuck.  So thanks.

In poking around on the WordPress reader, I came across this little tidbit posted by one of the first members to check out my blog and give me a follow, Jodie Llewelyn.  It made me think for a minute, and what I think about I usually end up writing about, so here you are.  Four little questions to tickle a writer’s brain.

1. Why did you start writing?
2. What do you love the most about writing?
3. What goals are you working towards, right now?
4. What advice do you have for other writers who may be struggling with a lack of inspiration, right now?

Here, then, is how I answer.

1. Why did you start writing?
I wrote my first creative stuff, real genuine doing-this-for-my-own-dark-and-slimy-writer’s-heart after playing a video game, of all things. It had such a great (to me, at the time) story that I felt compelled to write a similar story without the video game construct. God, it was awful.  (The game, if you’re curious and go way back, was Final Fantasy 2.  I wish I could say it was the much better and much more widely acclaimed Final Fantasy 3, but that one wasn’t out yet.  I’m sure it played a role, too.)

So my little story (I think ultimately it came out to be 100 pages of chicken scratch, or maybe about twenty thousand words or so were I to really do anything serious with it, like type it out, which I never did, because what do you want from me, I was a teenager, and a dumb one at that) was crap, but it showed me that anybody — but anybody — even dumb ol’ me, could write a story.  It wouldn’t necessarily be good, but it could be done.  By that rationale, I mean, they’ll let anybody drive.  But I noticed, after I wrote it, that there were bits of it that I didn’t like.  That didn’t work.  So I edited it, by hand, in that crappy little spiral notebook, and continued to do nothing with it.  I just retooled it a little here and a little there, until I got tired of it and forgot about it.  I think of it fondly now, not because it was good or because I may return to it (not ever going to happen in this world or the next), but because it’s a pinpoint of cosmic get-your-head-on-straight guidance.  A beacon in the dark of doubt and misgivings that swallow up, I think, many a writer, not least of all me.  If a dumbANTZ (I really have to get some better gouda for the a- word) fourteen year old can punch out a twenty-thousand word little fantasy story, how can my thirty-something-year-old self, with his nearly infinitely grander life experience, measurelessly improved vocabulary, and unfathomably deeper ability to overstate and belabor a point FAIL at writing a complete novel?  It’d be an insult to that pimply-faced fourteen year old.  And I won’t do that to you, Past Me.  You had it rough, back then.

2. What do you love the most about writing?
The raw, maker-and-breaker-of-universes feeling. And the release of psychic tension. I said psychic when I meant to say intellectual, but I’m sticking to it, because I am the maker-and-breaker-of-universes and surely the maker-and-breaker-of-universes says what he means and means what he says.

But honestly, I’m not an Alpha guy.  I don’t know if Alpha guys (or gals) even have the inclination to be writers.  I could be wrong.  But there it is.  I’m not afraid of people – far from it.  I just prefer to let other folks take the lead most of the time.

But.

Give me some fake people?  Let me tell a story, let me decide the conflicts, the combats, the pitfalls and the possibilities?  Ooh, brother, it’s on like Donkey Kong.

So yeah, then there’s the intellectual tension.  In the last month, I’ve found that I feel clearer of mind, quicker of tongue, and in general a little happier.  Given the fact that my running is in the ditch and I have no other physiological cause to chalk all this up to, I can only imagine that the writing is playing the primary role.  I think the main project is great for focusing my mind and keeping me lasered in on what I’m trying to do, and my blarg is doing a bloody brilliant job of siphoning off the ancillary thoughts, clearing out the clogged mental pipes and generally just burning out the gunk that the average day’s crap pumps into my brainholes.

3. What goals are you working towards, right now?
Finishing — really finishing — like, for serious, really and truly nail-in-the-coffin finishing — my first novel. Also, developing some ideas for future novels so that I won’t have what happened last time I finished a creative project — I stood around for a while, thinking “what now”, couldn’t think of anything, and quit — happen again. The construction of that sentence is correct, and again, maker-and-breaker-I-do-what-I-want.

I’m not sure I ever felt better in my life about myself as a human than after I finished, really finished, the stage play of Accidentally Inspired and saw it to a full production.  Except maybe for the birth of my son.  Yeah, usually sappiness has no place here but I’m a relatively new dad and about to be one again, what can you do.  (Obligatory – my wedding day was pretty great, too, but heck, anybody can get married.)  It slipped away from me then because I lacked direction and didn’t know what to do next, once that was finished.  A mistake I don’t plan to run into again.  Between the blarg (where I vent what’s in my brain on the regular, and which is quickly becoming a repository of little novel seedlings vis-a-vis my growing collection of flash fictions) and the spin-off ideas that creep in there when I overhear snippets of conversation or just, I don’t know, where do ideas come from?  They come, and I write them down now (something that, again, I have neglected for far too long), and I’m saving them until they’re ready.  I’m not actively thinking about them, but even when I’m working on AI, I can feel them back there, bubbling away in the dark.

4. What advice do you have for other writers who may be struggling with a lack of inspiration, right now?

This is one I really feel entirely unqualified to answer, because I’m just bouncing back onto the horse myself after getting thrown off it, what, seven or eight years ago?  (God, kill me.)  But in my short experience at capital-W Writing, here’s what’s working so far:

Write off topic or read. Writing about something unrelated to your focal project has, for me, a way of unstopping the pipes and burning out the gunk. Reading — whether it’s good lit or bad — fills my head with all kinds of ideas — new storylines, phrases, voices, characters, conflict structures, paces, artful misspellings, the list goes on — that, after a while, I can’t wait to bring back and experiment with over in my shallow end of the pool.

 

 

 

 

So there you have it.  A few thoughts on writing from your resident Pav.  Maybe it’ll help you out, maybe not.  At any rate, it helped me, and that’s the point of all this, so consider me selfish, and turn the lights out when you leave.  I do my best thinking in the dark.