Tag: inspiration

The Itch, or Why It’s Better To Just Go Ahead and Write Something, ANYTHING

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Work was a beast today. Finals time, students are panicking, banging down my door, shoving papers in my face, “HERE GRADE THIS HASTILY SCRIBBLED TWO-MONTHS-LATE ASSIGNMENT SO I CAN PASS THE CLASS.” I debated a hundred times giving the lecture: “Had you done all your work at the appropriate time instead of, perhaps, staring gobsmacked into your cell phone when you should have been paying attention in class, then maybe you would have the grade you wanted and wouldn’t feel like the ant looking at the descending boot right now.” But that’s in vain, at this point. I’ve only been saying it for months. If they haven’t learned it from me by now, it ain’t gonna sink in today. Still, I don’t have to put the grades in until Monday. So maybe I’ll let those failing grades hang over their heads for the weekend, each of them enduring their own personal Sword of Damocles.

Anyway, I didn’t meet my writing goal today. This is not the end of the world (#writerproblems are not #realproblems) but it irked. It settled into my shoe like a microscopic bit of gravel and yanked at my mind throughout the afternoon and the evening, chewing on my thoughts like a voracious little psychic were-rabbit. Wrapped up my school day. Didn’t get your writing done. Went for another delightful trail run. There’s still writing to do. Got home, made dinner. You only wrote 500 words today. There’s still time. Made the final arrangements for tomorrow night’s soccer banquet. Only 100 more to make your bare minimum goal. You can cough up 100 words sitting on the toilet if you have to. Skyped with the wife and kids. They’d love you more if you would finish your writing. Watched a bit of TV, because goldfinger it, I deserve that. Slacker. How dare you consume media when you could be CREATING media. Shut everything down and headed for bed.

Oh, that’s cute. You think I’m going to let you sleep, knowing you only have to write 100 words to shut me up?

I could be joking, but I’m not. I feel like a total and abject failure as a writer if I have the opportunity to get it done and I don’t get it done. I feel no comparable sense of shortcoming for virtually anything else in my life. Didn’t get that stack of papers graded? They’ll keep til tomorrow. Yard didn’t get mowed today? Grass’ll still be there in the morning. Pets haven’t been fed lately? They could stand to lose a few pounds. (Let’s sidebar and establish that I don’t actually starve my pets, okay? THIS IS FACETIERY, PEOPLE. And, yeah, okay, fine, facetiery isn’t a word, but dag derg it, it should be.)

So I lay in bed for twenty minutes, eyes shut, focusing on the soothing sounds of the rumbling thunderstorm simulated by the white noise machine on the bedside table (how I ever slept in my life without one of these I will never know), completely failing to fall asleep, because the voice wouldn’t shut up. 100 words. Just 100 words. 100 words and you’d be done. If you weren’t a failure, you’d write the 100 words. Come on. You’ll feel better if you write a little bit. Just a little bit. Just 100 words. Come on. COME ON. GET UP AND WRITE. DON’T BE A B–“

So I got up. But I can’t write just 100 words, so I ended up writing 300. Then I had a good idea for something that should really happen earlier in the story, so I wrote another hundred words or so of notes to myself about what I need to go back and establish at a prior juncture. Then I remembered another couple of things I wanted to have happen at this leg of the narrative, so I doubled back and added them in as well. All told, I ended up writing about 600 words in the story, to add to the 500 I wrote before, so not only did I make my goal, I took a victory lap as well.

And what’s a victory lap deserve? Another victory lap on the blarg, because now my mind is racing and won’t shut up, and I have to spin off this mental energy somewhere. So there’s another 700 words of blarg drivel before I fall asleep.

If writing is my new addiction, I think I can live with it.

Little Victories Fuel Big Victories

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If you’re like me, a wannabe writer trying to figure out how to make the dream happen, you might be struggling to write every day. I know I did; writing the first draft of my first novel was as challenging as pulling the teeth from an enraged baboon while whistling “Happy Birthday” backwards. Sure, you start off full of chutzpah, ready to slay dragons and save the world every day, but the honeymoon only lasts so long. After a few weeks, you find yourself tasked with churning out more and more words, even though you’ve already used up your good ideas — or even though you don’ t know how to get to the good ideas.

That blank page stretches out in front of you like a wasteland, cruel and without end.

Some days are better than others, but every day is hard. Not just because you have to claim your time from the jaws of your enemies with blood and fire, but because you have to keep the creative engine churning, you have to keep the cursor moving, you have to keep that word counter ticking over like the odometer on a road trip.

Now, I’m not an expert. I’ve yet to make a dime off of anything I’ve written creatively, so I can’t claim to know any better than anybody what you should do to make any money at this endeavor. But I do know that if you aren’t writing, every day, you’re handicapping yourself before the race has even begun. Momentum matters, and if you keep the ball rolling a little every day, you don’t have to kickstart it from a dead stop again. To that end, if there were one piece of advice I’d offer to anybody trying to start writing, it’s this:

You need a daily goal. A set amount of progress that you will, one way or another, put to “paper” one way or another before today turns into tomorrow. Momentum matters. Achieving this goal every day will keep you sliding forward like a glacier. You can’t set out to say you want to write eighty thousand words by November and hope to get there by focusing on the eighty thousand. It’s too big. You might as well be thinking about climbing the summit of Mount Everest when you haven’t even left base camp. It’s a good goal to have, but you’re not going to achieve it today. Or tomorrow. Or next week. And when you fail to achieve that goal, you will lose gumption, you will lose drive, you will lose the confidence that you can achieve this thing. What you need is to focus on what’s in front of you and achieve that, however big or small that goal is. What’s your daily goal? 100 words? 300? 2000? It depends on the kind of time you have available in your days (or, more correctly, the amount of time you can prise from your day’s cold, dead fingers).

I find that, on a normal workday, I can usually find about 45 minutes to write, and that tends to be enough time for about 900 words.

Now, 900 words assumes I’m able to write productively and without pauses for almost the entire time, and that’s not always the case. So my “on paper” goal per day is 600, even though I’m really trying for 900. 600, therefore, is what I want to accomplish so that I can feel I’m not neglecting my writerly duties. 900, however, makes me happy.

How does it go, writing 900 words a day?

A little something like this:

0-100 words: Man, this is hard. Why did I decide to do this, again? I’m not sure what I should be writing at all. (re-reads yesterday’s work.) Okay, maybe this can happen, or maybe this character can set this trap… I dunno, it sounds lame. But if I don’t get to work, I’m not getting my words. Whatever. Just write something.

100-300 words: Well, I guess this is happening. I’m not sure I love what’s happening, but it’s happening. Make sure to keep that character involved. Think about what this character is thinking. Where is this heading? Just keep writing.

300-500 words: Okay, I like what’s happening now, and I see where it’s heading. Maybe, though, it doesn’t make sense for this character to say this thing now, or to take this action now, but I’m not sure how else it could go. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it… fix it later.

500 words: SHARKNADO. I just realized the perfect thing that should have happened earlier to set up the thing I just realized needs to happen now. Do I go back and fix it? Press on and make a note? (This is usually where I get up and walk around for a minute to rearrange my thoughts.)

500-700 words: I’m either going back and inserting an alternate text to something I already wrote, or I’m forging ahead full-speed with today’s beats. Either way, at this moment, I’m in a state of flow, just letting the words come on their own and keeping up with the narrative as quickly as it’s unspooling in my head.I don’t even check word count during this step. It just happens.

700-900: Flow continues and the possibilities for future events are exploding like popcorn, one after another, each one showing a road to the rest of the novel that might develop into something or that might wither on the vine. There’s no telling which one is the right one, though, so I grab hold of one and ride the wave while it’s high. At some point in this range I realize that I’m almost out of time for today, so…

900-1???: I use my remaining time to find a stopping point. I used to try and finish a beat, but now I like to either stop right in the middle of one or just at the beginning of a new one. That way, when I come back to write next time, I still have fresh in my mind some semblance of where this scene is going. I don’t usually want to stop writing at this point, but by this time there are other responsibilities banging on my door, either literally or figuratively.

So that’s pretty much every day. I push through five days a week like that when I’m drafting. I aim for a blarg post about every other day or when I can manage it, but I don’t stress about the length of the posts anymore (I used to shoot for 1000 words… yeah, this post is over 1000 already, but sheesh, that’s a lot in a day).

900 words might seem like not very much to you. Or maybe it seems so lofty as to be insurmountable. Point is, it’s been a sweet spot for me: It’s a challenge to get there, but not so daunting that I have to struggle every day to make it. But it’s not so easy that I can do it without any effort at all. It’s significant enough to give me a pick-me-up when I meet the milestone, but not so significant that I feel I can’t make it. Pick a goal that stretches you a little bit, but one that you can realistically reach from where you are. Little victories fuel big victories.

I’ll admit I’m feeling somewhat at sea with my current story. There are loose ends all over the place, I’m still getting a feel for the characters, and I’m not even 100% sure where I want the story to go. But what I do know is, I’ll be writing about 900 words a day every day for the next few months. If I can keep to that schedule, then long about September, I’ll have my second novel drafted.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Climb the Trope Ladder

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I fell into a TVtropes rabbit hole today.

If you’re a writer, and you don’t know about TVtropes.org yet, you should.

I don’t know if there’s a better resource for teaching you that there really and truly is nothing original left in the world for artists to create. A wholly humbling browsing experience. Yet, by the same token, it’s encouraging to click through its wealth of pages to see all the stories that use the same old tired tricks and do just fine.

If you haven’t seen TVtropes yet, it works like this:

You land there for whatever reason. Maybe a fellow writer or critically-minded movie buff refers you to it. Maybe you’re looking for the name of that one guy who was in that one movie and you stumble upon the site. Maybe somebody who secretly hates you and wants to destroy your productivity sends you a link.

You click around a little bit, maybe trying the “random trope” or “random text” functions to have the site spoon up a tasty helping of trope-centric technobabble to your face. Want to write your story with a hero who unwittingly unleashes even greater evil upon the world? There’s a trope for that. How about the twist where a loved one is left dead for the hero to find? Yeah, it’s been done. Maybe you want to see a bunch of examples of the ways heroes have sacrificed themselves in stories. TVTropes has you covered. Whatever your device, whatever the circumstance, whatever unique idea you think you have, it’s been done before and TVtropes has it on record.

Hours later, you’ve got twenty-four browser tabs open compiling all the different sins of all the movies and books you love and all of the tropes with cool names like Toxic Phlebotinum and you forgot to eat lunch and they turned the lights off in the building and you’re wondering, finally, how you can weave all these things into your next story.

The cycle will repeat as long as you leave even one tab open. One thing leads you to the next, and then the next, until you’re miles deep in the forest and everything looks the same. The only way out is for the power to fail on your computer, and even then, you have to have the resolve not to click on that bright, shiny “restore tabs” button when you get booted back up, lest you find yourself falling once more into the black hole…

In all seriousness, while the site sounds like it’s a great way to depress yourself at the prospect of seeing exactly how much and how often a certain device has been done (to death), it’s fascinating nonetheless to see all the different permutations of plot and character which can be perfectly successful. In addition, I’m not sure if there’s a better tool for thinking of ways to carry on a stuck project; simply look up a beloved story, identify some of its defining tropes, explore those tropes, and then bend them to your will.

What felt like endless, zombie-like wandering through the dark alleyways of the site has filled my head with all kinds of ways to expand my current story.

I think that means I can qualify all that mindless clicking as research.

So, I’m off to do more studying…

You’re a Genius All The Time

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Much as I love to ramble on when it’s time for Stream of Consciousness Saturday, I think I’m going to let brevity get the better of my wit today. (As if that were a fair fight!)

I’ve spent the week dunking my toe back into the ocean of drafting delights this week, and whoo, it’s overwhelming. Drafting is awesome, but drafting is also awful. As such, I’ve been peeking around the internet to find things and stuff to keep me motivated and rolling forward, because, as I think I may have mentioned before around here once or twice, momentum matters. As is always the case when you go trawling the internet, you find a few gems and a lot of space trash, but in particular I found one site that’s chock-full of fantastic little tidbits for writers especially, but for everybody, when you get down to it. Lists like this one from Neil Gaiman, or this one from Kurt Vonnegut are delightful and straightforward.

But there’s something raw and enchanting about the magic brain bullets Jack Kerouac squeezed off in a list of 30 points entitled “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”, in all its disjointed shorthand and ungrammatical gutpunchery.

The whole list is excellent, but in particular, I really like this piece of self-motivational pie:

#29: You’re a Genius all the time.

I’m going to paraphrase Bill Murray’s character from Ghostbusters 2 and say that that is the kind of thing I need to hear every day, that kind of uplifting, you’re-right-even-when-the-world-thinks-you’re-wrong certainty. Maybe I wouldn’t be such an idiot. So I’m going to print that off and affix it to my laptop, or maybe I’ll stick it in the sole of my shoe, or maybe I’ll tattoo it backwards across my forehead, just so that I can remind myself in the morning when I’m feeling not so much particularly like a genius.

Did I say genius? I meant Genius. Capital G. Real deal. No games. Just Genius. All the time.

Anyway, there’s your wisdom for the day. You’re a Genius all the time. So if nothing else, you’ve got that going for you.

Which is nice.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Why I Love/Hate My First Chapter

Pavowski5 Comments

Beginnings are the worst.

Just ask the guys muscling for position at the starting line of a race; all elbows and hip checks and ankles getting stomped on. Ask the folks dragging themselves out of bed for a pre-dawn workout, fighting against the gravitational pull of the singularity created by a warm bed. Ask the authors, staring at the terrible white expanse of the blank first page.

The beginning of any endeavor is the worst, because each step is a battle. Every inch of ground is an inch that must be won not only from the enemy (your competitors, the weights you’ll lift, the miles you’ll run, the white space you’ll reclaim in ink) but also from your own momentum — momentum that wants to let you slide to the back of the pack, stay in bed, watch TV… do ANYTHING but fight that fight.

So it goes with writing.

I’ve just started a second novel, and MAN is it tempting not to do it. As much as I’m excited about the prospect of a new project, I know that for the few months of fun in drafting I’ll have the long slog of a better part of a year or more in edits ahead. Then, there’s the story itself. I don’t know for entirely sure where it’s going yet. I’ve got some moments and ideas mapped, but it’s still a lump of clay. It needs shaping. The result is that each foray into this new world feels a bit like a fish flopping around on a riverbank: There’s water just over there, just at the edge of vision, and if I can just get there, if I can just find the flow, everything will be okay. Problem is, a fish is designed for swimming, slicing through the water, carving liquid paths in currents and bubbles… the movement comes out as herky-jerky twitching on land, and I can’t even tell if it’s moving me closer to my goal or not.

I’m also pretty sure I’m terrible at writing beginnings anyway. Every word that goes on the page feels like needless exposition; clunky, unnecessary, and obtrusive, like riding an elephant to work. Any attempt at action takes a hard left with an explanation of who this person is, what the place looks like, why it’s even going on… end result? The 3000 words or so I’ve written so far feel positively glacial. My sneaking suspicion is that it’s crap, and I should probably pack this thing in, cut my losses, and do something more productive with my time.

But.

Much as the drafting is frustrating, it is freeing: the first draft is not constrained by the need to be perfect or even good. It doesn’t even have to hang together; it can have unformed limbs, elbows that bend the wrong way, or a vestigial tail. All that crap — the characters that randomly appear and disappear throughout the narrative, the note that you forgot to plant earlier in the story, the the gobs and gobs of exposition that feels like so many monster trucks spinning their wheels, spraying mud all over the walls — can be fixed when the narrative surgery begins, in the edit.

The draft is raw, bleeding genesis, messy and gory, staining the earth red in its wake. (Give me Genesis!)

The draft is rainbows spewing from the netherparts of unicorns, coloring the sky with a riot of sound and fury. It’s a newborn eagle spreading its wings for the first time after its mother boots it out of the nest: nervous at first, stumbling over its own tangle of talons and beak, but then — then! — the wind catches its wings and it soars. The story creates its own momentum and, once tilted over the edge, it rolls and tumbles and picks up crumbs and absorbs stray cats and it barrels down the hill, absorbing everything in its path.

At least, that’s how I think it will be. I’ve only done this once before, after all. But having done it once, the inertia is that much easier to break; the fear of failure is that much easier to overcome.

The first draft is awesome.

The first draft is awful.

The starting is the hardest part, but the good news is, as long as you keep your momentum up, you only have to start once.