Tag: motivation

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.

Somebody Greased the Wheels

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The words came easy yesterday, easier than they have in weeks.  I wish I could say it’s because I feel confident in my ending, but I can’t.  I still don’t 100% know how the dharma thing is going to end.  I mean, basically, I have the chain of events, but as for the ins and outs, how the characters will react, what will become of them… it’s all up in the air like a bunch of chainsaws at the end of a suicidal juggler’s act.

That said, I had a flow going, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the beak — that’s a good way to get your face bitten off.  Nor am I one to complain about having an easy writing session, especially when I’ve really struggled lately.  To what can I attribute yesterday’s flow?

I think it’s because, here in the closing moments of the story, there’s a bit of a return to form.  The main character is back on his quest, the supporters are back in place doing what they need to do, and the villains have been more or less dealt with.  Conflicts resolved, the story can proceed happily in the way that it wants to.  It’s all that conflict that gets in the way of just letting things happen.  DAMN YOU CONFLICT.  Except, the ego-writer reminds me, conflict is the sustenance of the story, so even though I’m wrapping the story up now, that doesn’t mean I can hop off the conflict-train to hurt-town.  Incidentally, I spent the evening mulling it over and I spent this morning’s run kicking around the moment where I left off last night and suddenly the last bit of conflict came to me.  Something about the heat and the fatigue and the rivers of sweat running down my face triggered the perfect last hurrah for the story’s conflict.  Conclusion?  All writers should run.  Alternate conclusion?  Running solves every problem.  Alternate alternate conclusion?  It’s fargoing hot outside and I’m a little baked, there is no alternate alternate conclusion.

As long as I stay on track (and, against all odds and expectations, I’ve stayed perfectly on track throughout this entire process), the first draft will be done in about a dozen more writing sessions.  A dozen!  It almost seems too close to put a bow on the events of a story, too immediate to properly process.  Like a sudden cinder-block wall on the highway, it looks like I’m going to plow right into it before I can get to where I’m going.  But I think that’ll be okay.  Rather too much than too little, and god knows how much the draft will change when I get into the editing phase.

I feel like my words of late about the novel betray a sense of melancholy about finishing the book.  Well, “finishing.”  My laser-beam focus since April has been to get the first draft done, and with the achievement of that (I just scared myself a little, considering it a fait accompli) and in that sense, I am finishing.  And I do feel a bit of sadness, a bit of aimlessness, a bit of my-nemesis-is-dead-what-will-I-fight-for-now emptiness creeping in.  But I don’t think that will last.  I look back over what I’ve accomplished in the last few months and I realize that the act of writing no longer intimidates me like it once did.  I have ideas for books and plays that I am just bursting to write, the only challenge when this one is all said and done will be deciding what I set my laser sights on next.

 

85% (Stay On Target)

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It occurs to me that it’s been some time since I posted any sort of progress report on The Project.

The Project, of course, being Novel Alpha, or the reason I started this whole crazy blarg thing which is by all accounts growing faster than my toddler’s vocabulary and spiraling out of control.  As I close in on my hundredth post (seriously, this is post 86, which fargoing astounds me) it seems a good time for a status update.

The novel is at 85% as of today at about 75000 words, give or take a little.  The fact that I’ve made it this far continues to shock and awe me.  I feel like an Aboriginal Tribesman who has never heard of planes, trains, or automobiles and suddenly gets on one of those Japanese bullet trains and travels two hundred miles in like ten minutes and gets off the train saying, “I came all that way?  Impossible.”  Or, to use a metaphor that’s more immediate and familiar to me, like the thirteenth mile of a half-marathon; I’m aware that there was a lot of work involved to get to this point, but the fact that it was done and that it was all done by me is just sort of eclipsed by the lactate burning holes in my calves.Read More »

Chasing Toddlers

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I write a lot about how parenting is a pretty raw fargoing deal.  That’s because it is.  You never work so hard for so little appreciation in your life as when you’re parenting a toddler.

I’ve written about how kids are basically black holes, about how I no longer have the freedom even to move around my own house anymore, about how they made me ruin forever my cool by buying a minivan… it goes on.  It was pointed out to me by a loyal reader (*cough*totallynotmywife*cough*) that all this ragging on the parenting life makes it seem like I don’t enjoy it.  And while, sure, okay, there are certainly moments when I long for that simple childless existence again — a time when I didn’t have to live in fear of some sharp-ended plastic doohickey left by the toddler sticking up into my tender underfoot, when I could rest my hand on the coffee table and not have it come away sticky, a time when I could close the door and enjoy a nice deuce in peace — on the whole I really love it.  Being a parent just has a way of filling me with this sense of accomplishment, happiness, and… I dunno… rightness.

That being said, some moments just have a way of refining all that general goodness to a razor-sharp, crystal-clear, shot-to-the-gut point that I could almost forget the week we spent in February washing baby bedsheets EVERY DAY because he was pooping huge quantities of what looked like, but did not smell like, chicken salad.  I could almost forget the screaming fit he has every night when I leave him in bed for the night, his betrayed little toddler eyes welling with tears as I close the door on him and leave him with his nightmares (of course, he passes out two minutes later, but those two minutes really hurt the heart).

I had one of those redeeming moments yesterday.  Read More »

Running is Magic

Pavowski3 Comments

Running is nothing if not a constant dialogue with yourself about the things you never thought you’d do.

I never thought I’d take up running.

Then I never thought I’d enjoy running.

I never thought I’d run in a race.  (Pay money to run?  Run with other people?  Do I look like a fool?)

Then I never thought I’d run multiple races in a year.

I never thought I’d run more than three or four miles at a stretch.

Then I never thought I’d run more than six.  Or eight.  Or ten.  Or thirteen.

Oh, that’s half of a marathon.  I never thought I’d run a half marathon.

I never thought I could appreciate any activity completed outdoors in the summer in the deep south.

Or in the winter for that matter.

I never thought I’d look forward to getting up while most of the world is asleep to “exercise”.

I never thought I’d ever be grumpy about not going for a run.

I never thought I’d ever have anything to say about running that was worth writing down.  (Okay, that’s probably still debatable.)

I could go on, but that’s probably enough for the moment.  Anyway, I say all that to say this.  Running is magic.

I don’t say that lightly.  Writing is magical.  My son is magical.  My wife is magical.  (No, seriously.  She once cast a spell on me and it WORKED.  She also convinced me that getting married was a good idea, so clearly she has magical powers of persuasion.)  But that’s about where the magic ends in my life.  Just for the record, I set the bar pretty high when it comes to declaring things magical.  A decent magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat or tell you what card he forced you to pick.  Real magic is when a piece of lead turns into a piece of gold right before your unblinking eyes.  Real magic is when something that WASN’T suddenly IS.  Real magic is when the work and the time you put into something gets magnified and transmogrified and turned into rainbows and kittens and sunshine and all the good things.

Writing?  Magical.  I feel smarter every day that I write, and given the esteem that I hold my intelligence in (again, I will reference my wife), that’s a pretty big deal.  But in addition to getting my story down in literal, tangible words that another human could read, consider, and then (hopefully) enjoy, it’s filling me with a sense of purpose and accomplishment and a sort of general sense of being a little bit awesome.  My son?  Magical.  I put in a fun weekend in Florida and a few sleepless nights and I’m rewarded with a TINY FARGOING HUMAN that’s basically me on a thirty-year delay.  Incredible.  My wife?  Magical.  I know of no other person on earth who would put up with and call me on the stupid things that I do and still allow me to have happy fun times with her.  (She might kill me tonight for writing that.  That would be less magical.)

Running, to return to the point, requires a bit more explanation.  I’ve sunk a metric sharknadoload of time (not to be confused with the imperial sharknadoload) into running, and what have I got to show?  I lost some weight.  I “feel” healthier.  The endorphins that follow an individual run are nice.  But that seems like a balanced equation; there’s no magic there.

No, the magic of running is not like the magic of a rainbow suddenly appearing.  It’s more like the magic of a sculpture emerging from a raw hunk of marble under the practiced hands of Michaelangelo.  (He made sculptures, right?  I don’t know Art.)  You work at it, and you work at it, and you chip away day after day after day, knowing that there’s something good under those layers of stone and sweat and tears and exhaustion, and then one day it just appears.  Like Batman out of the dark.  He was there all along, saving your asgard, looking out for you, protecting your city and your whole way of life, but he only just now revealed himself to you because you only just now stopped to look.

Running gives you patience.  Not right away.  When you first dip your toes in the shallow end of the pool, you barely have the patience to slog it out for twenty minutes.  But you can’t embark on a thirteen mile run, or a twenty-six mile run, or a fifty mile run without the patience not to get bored, not to get distracted, not to quit halfway through because you just can’t stand the tedium for another minute.  Running teaches you to accept the tedium of the long miles and, eventually, to appreciate it.

Running gives you resilience.  It hurts.  It’s exhausting.  Especially at first.  But the more you do it, the less it hurts, the less it exhausts you, and finally you realize that running wasn’t the problem, the old you was the problem.  The more you learn to get up off the mat when running knocks you down (and running WILL knock you down), the easier it gets to keep standing up for another helping.

Running gives you confidence.  You start small.  If I can run for a minute, maybe I can run for two.  If I can run for two, maybe I can run for three.  If I can run for a half-mile, maaaaybe I can run an entire mile.  And then you get there.  Sooner than you think.  And what was once impossible becomes routine, and you start getting crazy with confidence.  If I can run fivemiles, maybe I can run ten.  If I can run a half-marathon, maybe I can write a fargoing book.

Sidenote: it’s foolish and stupid that half-marathons are called half-marathons.  You have a 5k, then a 10k, and those sound awesome.  Then there’s a half-marathon, which sounds like, “well, that’s nice I suppose, but why not a whole marathon?”  To which runners who have just accomplished their first run at that distance might, rightly so, kick you in the sack.  And yeah, I know, some people call them Pikermis, and that’s nice and all, but nobody knows how to pronounce Pikermi and it sounds a little ridiculous besides.  Call it a Salvador or something, or surely there is some other Greek city with a nice name we could appropriate.

Finally, Running gives you a sense of community.  I don’t know if I could name a social situation I’ve been in where the collective vibe was more uplifting than at any race I’ve attended.  Runners support one another, because we’re not running against one another, we’re running with one another.  And if you’ve never raced, then at the very least you know the deep-seated connection you have with every other runner you pass on the road.  Whether you wave or not, whether they wave or not, you see each other, and you know that they know, and they know that you know, and both of you are going through it together.  Through what?  Through it all.

Why am I still writing this?  I’m going for a run.  (Okay, fine, I’m going for a run in the morning.  I just… god.  Why you gotta ruin it?)

(EDIT:  My wife would like for me to point out that there is in fact nothing magical about blisters.)