Tag: stream of consciousness

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Cold Storage

Pavowski4 Comments

 

When we talk about writing, we’re usually focused on the glitzy stuff. LOL JUST KIDDING, as if there’s anything glitzy about sitting in our darkened rooms, pounding feverishly on our keyboards until we collapse from exhaustion and despair.) That act of raw creation is what non-writers think about, it’s what burgeoning writers focus on, it’s indelibly the picture of what a writer does. Rightly so.

If only I could look like such a boss when I write.
If only I could look like such a boss when I write.

Sitting down to write the draft, spilling the words forth onto the page is what it’s all about. Whether it’s the unstoppable flood of a river smashing through its dam or the pained trickle of a man with a swollen prostate, the writing is what matters. Word count. Finished chapters. The flutter of ink-stained pages landing on the pile.

But it’s not the whole picture, not by far.

The first draft, magical though it may feel, results in something you wouldn’t want to bring home to meet your parents. Like a Frankenstein’s monster made of mismatched limbs or a garage-built car constructed from nothing but spare parts, the first draft is imperfect, incomplete.

What the monster needs, though, is not to get fixed right away. What the monster needs is some time in cold storage.

My wife makes a hell of a cheesecake. The process is simple: whip all the ingredients together, smash them into a mold, bake at 350. But it’s not done after it bakes, not nearly. It comes out of the oven and goes straight into the fridge to draw all the heat out of it, to actively stop that act of creation that causes all its components to chemically react. Only then — only after it’s lost all the heat of its making and had a chance for its parts to settle, compact and congeal — is it ready for the finishing touches, its layer of cream frosting, its drizzling of cherry syrup.

The time not cooking, in other words, is just as important to the finished product as the cooking itself.

So it is with writing.

You pour the raw ingredients of character and conflict into the mixing bowl and beat furiously for the first draft, then toss it into the oven of creation for a while for those conflicts to bake, boil, and bubble over. You drain yourself as a writer and channel all that energy of creation into the making of this thing. And then you throw it in the freezer.

Take it off the fire of creation. Remove the heat of your emotions for all its little parts. Give it some time alone to settle, and more importantly, give yourself time to cool off. Put those emotions about the story into storage and do your best to forget about the damn thing for a while. Only then can you come back to the story level-headed and clear-sighted enough to put the proper finishing touches on.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think we’ve still got a bit of leftover cheesecake in the fridge.

This post is part of SoCS. Head to LindaGHill‘s blog to check it out and get involved. And, yeah, I’m still taking something of a break from my standard re-motivational weekend rambles; it feels odd to write about writing when I’m not actually writing much. Regularly scheduled programming will return someday.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Cloistered In

Pavowski14 Comments

When a nun pledges her life and her various other parts to God, she goes to live in a convent. Those convents have some fairly archetypal architecture, like what you see below:

File:Cloister of the monastery Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg.jpg

This covered walk is called a “cloister”, and this particular feature of religious buildings led to the expression of something being “cloistered”, or shut in and closed off from outside influences.

We won’t be going, today, into the particular irony of a religious institution requiring its most devout believers to live such a cloistered existence, or the fact that such an idea itself comes from religious ideology.

Rather, the metaphor of the cloister. It’s an important one, a powerful one, because so many of us live cloistered lives. We wake up at the same time, drive the same roads to work, see the same people, eat the same things for dinner. Our own footsteps mark the boundaries beyond which we dare not tread.

And there’s something to be said for that. Routine is important, and not only to the writer. (Just try moving naptime up by an hour on your three-year-old, for example.) But as much as time inside the box is vital for our comfort, well-being, and peace of mind, so too is time outside the box critical to keep us from living life in a rut. I realized the other day that I have some co-workers who are almost friends (as close, I guess, as a co-worker that you only ever see during work-related functions can come to being a friend) whom I have not seen in months. The reason? Their classrooms are on the other side of the building from mine.

You can find the cloister as deep down as you care to drill. I write at pretty much the same time every day, even down to the weekends. I park in the same parking spot at work, even though we don’t have assigned parking. I run the same routes over and over when it’s runday funday. We even try to have the same meals on the same nights of the week, just to cut down on that tiresome discussion: “well, what do YOU want to eat?”

It takes effort to break out of the cloister. We’re so closeted in with our routines, with what’s normal and easy, that we resist doing anything else. Our cloisters are climate-controlled, with blackout curtains and indoor plumbing. If we don’t make the effort to leave them behind now and then, they can and will swallow us whole.

So, how will you break out of your cloister this week? This month? This year? (Don’t wait to make a New Year’s Resolution — start today.)

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image above is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cloister_of_the_monastery_Unser_Lieben_Frauen_Magdeburg.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Strange Seasoning

Pavowski9 Comments

We’re coming into one of the strangest times of the year for the writer: the Holidays.

The dreaded Holidays bring with them a legitimate army of distractions, obstructions, and pitfalls for the writer. Between a total disruption of the work schedule, extra obligations to spend time with the family you aren’t seeing regularly, and oh yeah, let’s not forget, here in America there are at least two massive debilitating food comas on the horizon. Time to write is hard enough to come by when things are normal, but things are hardly normal at this time of year.

Which is why I find it particularly sadistic to put a writer’s torture device like NaNoWriMo smack in the middle of it… but that’s a rant for another day. (I’m not doing NaNo this year, nor do I have plans to ever do it. I have better things to do with my time than subject myself to the slings and arrows of attempting to write an entire half of a novel [50,000 words do not a novel make] in the least writer-friendly part of the year. Further, if you need NaNo to finally motivate you to write that novel you’ve been thinking about writing, then maybe — maybe! — writing isn’t your thing. But there I go digressing.)

On a writer’s website I frequent, an aspiring writer, who seemed in true distress, asked the question in a state of near hysteria: with meals to cook, shopping to do, family to visit, kids to take care of, etc… how do you find the time to write through this time?

Well.

I may be a hopeless optimist, and I may be a tireless (or tiresome, depending on your point of view) motivator — I really do make myself sick sometimes with all the rah-rah-rah and YOU CAN DO IT speeches around here — but one thing I’m also guilty of is a bit of a blunt streak. Okay, maybe less of a streak and more of a huge angry puckered blunt scar. I don’t like to mince words, and most of the time, a harsh dose of the truth is a lot more helpful. (This gets me in a lot of trouble with my wife and, well, people in general, but at 35, I am who I am.)

So I responded the only way I could think to: The same way you make time any other time of the year. Sure, you’ve got Holiday Things clamoring for your attention to the left and to the right, like a swarm of needy toddlers who have just learned that you will actually come running the moment they say “daddy”. And yeah, maybe you’re more obligated to devote time to these Things than usual. But the way you take time to write now is the same way you take time at any other point in the year.

You prioritize. You set values on the things that matter to you and you allocate time accordingly. Maybe this is the year where instead of waking up at 3 AM to go Black Friday shopping, you sleep in until 6 instead, and get up to write while the rest of the family is fighting for their lives in the mad crush of humanity trying to get to the Tickle Me Elmos of this year. Maybe instead of sitting around watching the Lions lose on Turkey Day (a favorite national pastime) you sneak off to jot down a few words. Maybe you don’t have to cook EVERY SINGLE DISH for your family’s dinner, and with the time you free up, you can escape to your study (or your car, or your bathroom, or your wherever) to get some words on the page. You might upset a few people when you bust up their traditions, but you’ll stay on target for your WIP.

Or maybe you multitask and pull double duty. Wake up even earlier to do your writing before the family wakes up, or stay up late to pound the page after they fall asleep. Keep the laptop on the kitchen counter while you’re cooking and season your draft while you season the mashed potatoes. Jot notes on characters and plot points in your favorite organizational writer’s app while you’re waiting in line to shop at 4 AM. Granted, you do this, and you’ll certainly have some consequences: sleep deprivation and overly salty mashed potatoes at the very least.

Or a lunatic altered personality that grins vacuously at a computer while stirring a bowl full of, apparently, WHOLE UNCUT VEGETABLES. Who could be that happy? Who could use a computer at all in the kitchen without destroying it immediately with splattered sauce and flying crumbs?

Or, and here’s the really crazy part where we entertain notions that maybe we don’t want to, you don’t.

It’s tempting to think that with the time off you could or even should get tons of extra work in on your writing. But you don’t have to.

This is not me telling you to make like Elsa and let your writing go over the holidays. Momentum matters, and you’re gonna be turkey-drunk enough to have plenty of trouble getting back in the rhythm when the world returns to normal. By all means, write when you can. But the world isn’t going to stop spinning, and your novel won’t collapse, and your writing hand won’t wither to an ashen husk if you take a little time off.

Writing can be something like a second job, and we need time off from any job if we want to not lose our minds.

And let’s be honest: during these strange days, we lose our minds enough to begin with.

LOOK AT ME ENDING NOT JUST A SENTENCE BUT A WHOLE BLARG POST WITH A PREPOSITION

ENGLISH TEACHERS DON’T CARE WHEE

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Finish Lines

Pavowski3 Comments

I’m very close to the end of my 2nd book.

When I was close to the end of my first book, I recalled something I read in Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open: that the end of a big match is like a magnet, both pulling you in and repelling you at the same time. The closer you get to the end of the project, the more your momentum builds, but the less you actually want to cross the finish line. Like a magnet, spinning off its poles until it doesn’t know which way to turn.

So, here, at the end of my second novel, I guess the muddled feeling in my head is to be expected. This week I’m writing the climax of the book, and while that’s incredibly energizing and the energy has me completing my daily writing goal in about thirty minutes, it’s also pretty terrifying. Because when I finish the draft, the only thing looming for me is the Edit.

And the edit is a fearsome beast, indeed.

Editing this thing will be a monster, because I’ve made so many changes along the way that the project probably looks like a plateful of soggy scrambled eggs in the rear view mirror. The list of fixes to make will be longer than a five-hour drive to the beach, to be sure. But I know that’s coming.

What I didn’t see coming — what was surprisingly and delightfully unexpected — was the series of things I’ve learned from writing this draft, as opposed to my first. My first novel was largely plotted out before I ever started writing it. This one… well, let’s say that it was about 10% plotted and it’s 90% off-the-cuff. I’m not a good planner to begin with, but this has been an exercise in embracing the whim of the moment and charging fearlessly into the dark.

Well, I can’t say fearlessly. Every step has been filled with doubt like the Kool-Aid man is filled with creepy Kool-Aid blood, but that hasn’t stopped me from hurling myself into the unknown. There have been a ton of missteps along the way. Lots of dead ends, lots of pitfalls, lots of bottomless cliffs disguised as comfy places to rest. But I think that there may be some sparkling gems hidden in the shrapnel of my passage. There just may be enough salvageable junk to build a functional story out of.

What’s the takeaway? Well, I guess in fairness, I can’t quite rightly say yet — I’ll check back in a couple weeks when the project is well and truly finished. (Or rather, when this leg of the project is well and truly finished.) But having one draft in the bag has taught me enough that any future writing project will be just about equal parts expected and unexpected.

Best you can hope for is to buckle up and enjoy the ride.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Neat Little Boxes

Pavowski2 Comments

The blarg has been populated overmuch lately with thoughts of death and of passing, and this is the last post on the subject, I promise. Happier topics are on the horizon.

But in the meantime, I have to reflect on the subject of burials. As much as I understand and appreciate the power and the lure of tradition and ceremony, I just don’t understand it. I never have, and I don’t know that I ever will.

There is something strange — I’ll even say, for me, unnatural — about making all this fuss over a dearly departed loved one’s body, draining it of its fluids and preserving it, saying these lovely things over it, reflecting on the life lived, and then carrying said loved one up the side of a hill to leave them in the ground.

Shakespeare once said, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “…We are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.”

Moby said, “We are all made of stars.”

The things that make us up — the energy, the atoms, the dark unknowable forces of creation, whatever — move out of phase with our bodies as we die and return to the chaos that spawned us. Burial maybe slows that process down a little bit, but in the end, we all turn to dust. I don’t understand the point in putting it off by putting a body in a neat little box.

We are humans. We are more than the skin we inhabit. We deserve more than a six foot by three foot plot in the ground when we meet our end.

When I go, I want to be scattered over the ocean or over a mountaintop or maybe in the coffee of a bunch of pretentious coffee snobs.

…This doesn’t particularly jive with my theme of writing motivationals. Or maybe it does. But I think maybe mostly it doesn’t.

Ho hum. Regular programming will return next week.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.