Tag: conversations with myself

My Writing is Awful and I’m Awful

Pavowski7 Comments

Seriously, what the hell made me think this is something I could do in the first place?

What started as an exciting adventure, a fun foray into a sunlight- and flower-filled valley where things are hunky and dory and smell like candy and everything feels like soft velvet for some reason is turning to ash.  The beautiful butterflies are turning into bloodsucking bats.  The fragrant flowers are a thicket of thorny thistles.  The brilliant, redeeming sun is covered over with clouds the color of sick and despair.

This, on the day after I had a really quite lovely session of writing.  Words came easy, metaphors bloomed like so many daisies, the story was clear, and now the path is filled with bear traps.  And bears.  Who are surprisingly good at avoiding traps.

Do all writers suffer these vicious mood swings?  These vertigo-inducing changes in perspective and confidence and certainty?  I am trying hard to remember that it’s okay if the first draft sucks, that anything and everything can be changed in the edit — lead can be turned to gold, nonsensical plot turns into natural progressions, sharknado into sandwiches — but damned if the howler monkey of doubt isn’t getting the better of me today.

I’m trying to find ways to downplay this sense of dread and inadequacy.  Trying to find parallels so that I can convince myself that it’s not so bad, that tomorrow is another day and that Future Me is a capable chap who can right all the wrongs I’m putting on the page.  Like…

This might be like stage fright, where I’ve spent weeks learning lines and blocking and running scenes with my fellow actors and now on the eve of performance I look out past the footlights into the sea of waiting faces like so many piranhas with their gleaming teeth and I freeze up and forget my lines.  Except this is not stage fright.  There is no pivotal performance, no impending moment at which I must either demonstrate everything I’ve worked for or be revealed as a fraud and a charlatan (bonus points, self, for using the word “charlatan”).  No, I have as much time as it takes to get this story right before I put it out there into the world.  Hmm.  That feels better.

No, rather this is like I’m a chef who’s studied for years and years and souffle’d lots of things that get baked into souffles and fricasee’d lots of things that get fricasee’d, whatever the hell a fricasee is.  So then I make this monstrously big fricasee souffle except it’s actually made of dogsharknado because I ran out of other ingredients and this big food critic is coming into the restaurant tonight and he’s going to review my dogsharknado fricasee souffle and it’s going to be awful, really the worst thing ever, but I had to serve him SOMETHING, didn’t I?  Except, no, there is no food critic except myself, and I have time to go to the grocery store and get more ingredients instead of serving up hot fricaseed dogsharknado on a plate.  Okay, yeah, that’s better, too.

Even here, on the blarg, where there are virtually — no, scratch that — LITERALLY no requirements or standards except that I remain more or less honest and attempt to amuse myself, I am feeling overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and self-deprecation.  That last post was boring, I didn’t use enough colorful descriptions, I’m just describing things as they are, nobody’s going to care to read it, I’m even boring myself to tears.  I didn’t even post 1000 words — THIS POST ISN’T EVEN 1000 WORDS — WHERE HAVE ALL MY WORDS GONE?  Except, wait a minute, the blarg is for me and me alone, to help me deal with these roadblocks: if people who are not me read it and enjoy it, that’s just a bonus.  If I’m being truthful and letting the writer-flag fly, as it were, then the blarg is serving its purpose.  Okay, yeah, I’m actually feeling much better.

All this will be better in the morning.  It will.  The draft will be finished in two weeks.  I can do anything for two weeks.  Even, perhaps, steer this storm-shattered ship to safety (alliteration x5, bonus points whee!)

Yeah, it’s feeling much better now.

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.