Tag: motivation

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.

Not By Any Other Name

Pavowski4 Comments

For so long I struggled with a question of identity. Actually, struggle is the wrong word, because I wasn’t thinking about the issue at all, but by virtue of not thinking about the issue, I was missing out.

Okay, that’s vague as hell. Let me try again. Self-perception is a big deal. Not so much in thinking of yourself as a big deal (although I guess that’s maybe not a bad thing now and then), but I mean just the way you think of yourself in general. The way you define yourself matters.

Sounds obvious, right? But it’s the simple truths that are the most powerful. For a long, long time, I thought of myself in a really negative way. Not actively — I didn’t sit around thinking to myself: “I’m a loser, I’m never going to amount to anything, I might as well just not try.” But that perception was lurking in the back of my mind nonetheless. I hadn’t amounted to anything, so I didn’t know that I ever would amount to anything. I had aspirations, but I had no confidence that I could achieve them, so I didn’t bother even thinking of myself as being on that track.

Case in point: Writing. I always wanted to write, but the idea of actually writing a book felt so insurmountable I just took it for granted that I could never get it done. Without really thinking about it, then, I named myself not-a-writer. By the same token, I could define myself by virtually any yardstick you could think of. Not-an-astronaut. Not-a-millionaire. Not a super-genius. But there’s only so much you can learn about a thing by determining what it isn’t, and that goes for yourself, too.

So, a little over a year ago, I decided to try something different. I told myself, you’re going to try being a writer. And so I started thinking of myself as a writer. And lo and behold, I suddenly found myself more committed than ever to writing well and productively and regularly. Well, that was pretty cool, so I started thinking of myself as other things, just to see what effect it would have on me. I never thought of myself as much of a dad, but now and then lately I remind myself, you’re a dad now, and I find myself being just a little more conscientious with my kids.

I’m willing to bet that this works with almost anything, because as good as we are at fooling ourselves about life in a direction that hurts us (I’ve got plenty of time for that project, or a few extra cookies won’t hurt), we can fool ourselves in a positive direction, too.

So, this post is to remind myself that I’m a writer. And a runner. And a dad and a husband. And a teacher. And a thinker. And a goofball and a nerd and a reader and a slew of other things. Positive things.

The names we give ourselves, I think, become the names we make for ourselves. So pick good ones.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

You’re a Genius All The Time

Pavowski3 Comments

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.

Word Wars: A New Hope

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I’ve been in a writing funk for, gosh, let’s just go ahead and call it three months.

I’d been beating my head against the wall of the edit of my novel and… it’s just so exhausting. Reading the pages over and over again. Checking for continuity. Evaluating the language. Fixing this. Tweaking that. Blasting holes in the drywall and going back in with a blowtorch to re-weld the pipes. The most tedious and thankless of work.

Yeah, WORK. Who ever thought this writing thing would be WORK? It turned into such an ungainly mass of WORK that just like real work, I was hiding from it, finding excuses not to do it, stretching it out, and basically procrastinating myself into a corner, and teaching myself to hate it at the same time. Seriously, if I didn’t love it so dearly, I could almost say I hated the project right now.

But it’s out of my hands now. I’ve passed it on to a few beta readers and I have feelers out for a few more, so now it’s time to cut the cord and let that one fly away (birds have cords, right?). I started thinking about the other novel ideas I had kicking around in my head from a few months back. I stopped stressing about the details of the “finished” work. I began thinking about what sort of deadline I could impose upon myself for a new project; how many words a day I could write, how many months it might take. I started dreaming up characters and themes and plots and motifs and a hundred other little things I want to include in the next story. I cobbled together some notes and a ghost of an outline in Evernote (god I love Evernote, it’s like a personal assistant I don’t have to pay or buy lunch for).

And then last night, the craziest thing happened. I cracked the seal on a brand new word document, breathed in the heady aroma of that blank page, and started writing. Originally I only planned to get a couple hundred words down — just the introduction of a character and a place — but before I knew it I was back in top drafting form, slinging words with abandon, hastily leaving notes to myself, swearing at myself in the margins, in short having a ball of a time. Within just forty five minutes, I’d penned a thousand words, and it had felt as effortless as falling off a toaster. This, I reminded myself, is what it’s supposed to feel like. This is why writing is awesome. Creating people, giving life to worlds, unearthing plot devices from the raw soil of my cerebellum… ahh yeah, that’s the stuff.

The months of ennui fell away like a cobra’s skin. Underneath was the churning engine of creation that so wrapped me up and carried me away at about this time, one year ago. Still purring like a kitten, still snarling like a junkyard dog to chew up some words and spit out some copy. I felt glorious; I felt renewed. I guess this is the start of the next chapter.

When I started my blog last year hand in hand with my novel project, I had a simple system for organizing posts. Everything I posted about the novel here on the blarg last year, I tagged “the project” and/or “commitment 2014”. I had promised myself that I’d get the first draft written before 2014 was out, and I fargoing did it despite my own expectations that I wouldn’t. I’m on Twitter now, so I guess it’s only right that I start the tradition anew.

#TheProject lives.

#Commitment2015 is here.

Fasten your seat belts and hide your children.