Tag: the howler monkey of doubt

The Speed of Write

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Everything is relative. Right?

It’s so easy to look at the body of work being produced by, oh, let’s just say anybody who has a body of work to speak of, and be intimidated. It’s so easy, as a writer, to think, “my writing is horrible. I’m horrible. Who would read this? Why should I bother? Why does it even matter?” And, from there, it’s a small hop, skip, and jump (maybe more like a trip, lurch, and fall) to quitting altogether.

And it’s not just writing, right? It could be exercising: “It’s too hard. Look at how much weight that guy is lifting / how far that girl is running / how much more flexible she is. I’ll never get there. I might as well give up.” Or knitting: “I’m awful. Look at this awful tea cozy / dog sweater / who-the-hell-knows-I’ll-just-call-it-a-scarf that I made. Who would ever want this? I’ll just buy one at the store and be less embarrassed.” Giving up is easy. Practicing, getting better, learning how to do the thing you wanted to do back on January 1st or whenever you decided to do the thing… it’s HARD. And those people who are doing it — and being successful — are just so DonDraper’ed visible, and so successful, and GOD they make it look so easy. They make it look so easy, that as hard as it is for me, I might as well quit. Right?

No. Fargo that. That’s the Howler Monkey of Doubt screeching in your ear and throwing its feces at your eyes. The monkey wants you to quit, because if you quit, then he gets to watch reruns of The Bachelor through your eyes and eat a tub of chocolate chips through your mouth and sleep the day away through your backside on your bed.

But that way madness lies. The Howler Monkey doesn’t know sharknado about hard work because it’s only concerned with taking the easy way out. The truth is, it’s pointless to compare yourself to the people writing bestselling novels, or bench-pressing small imported cars, or running marathons, or knitting afghans for the Queen. Because the person doing that incredible thing has been practicing his or her craft for countless hours to make it look that easy. You don’t see the failures. You don’t see the miles and miles of smoldering wreckage of his crashed and awful manuscripts leading up to the good ones, you don’t see the painful mornings and hours and hours of training she put in to work up to running that marathon, you don’t see the hundreds of horrible golf-club covers she made to practice up for Queen afghan-making.

The point is, we are all points on a continuum. Yes, you may suck now. I may suck now. I probably do. But if I go back and compare myself to the poor schlub who started this journey almost a year ago, I’m pretty confident that I’m at least a little better off. A little more comfortable with the virtual pen in my virtual hands. So a bestselling novel is maybe not in my immediate future; doesn’t matter a whole lot, it’s closer now than it was a year ago. So you’re not going to run a marathon next month — but last month, you couldn’t even run a mile, and now look at you. Last month you nearly put the dog’s eye out with your knitting needles, and now you almost know which end makes the scarf.

The only person worth comparing yourself to is other versions of yourself. Compare your current self to a past version of yourself and make sure you’re moving in the right direction, and if not, FIX IT. Compare your current self to a potential self and see if you like where you’re headed. If not? FIX IT.

Even the slowest marathoner is miles ahead of the guy who never gets off the couch. Even the worst writer in the world is pages and pages ahead of the girl who dreams of writing a novel but never quite gets around to it. Even the most unfortunate knitter… you get the idea.

Somehow we got the idea that if we’re going to do something, that it has to be perfect. That there’s some absolute standard out there for any given endeavor, and if we can’t reach that standard, we might as well not bother. Bollocks. The standard for personal success should be relative success. Am I writing as much, or better, or more creatively, or more comfortably, than I was a year ago? Then I’m doing all right. Am I running farther, or faster, or with less injury, than I was when I started? Then it’s all good. Am I… okay, I’ll be honest, I don’t know anything about knitting, let’s just assume I had something clever to say about the relative improvement and progression of a career in knitting, and call it a day, yeah?

Focus not on that faraway, nigh-unreachable goal that feels so intimidating. Focus on small victories, tiny relative leaps, and just keep pushing the needle.

Now it’s time to get some sleep so that I can go back to work on my slightly-less-than-awful novel.

This post is part of SoCS.

Too Much Think

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There comes a point all things significant in my life wherein I find myself thinking way too much. I thought too much about marrying my wife, about buying our first house, about having kids… and I am definitely thinking too much about the edit of my novel.

I started out, if anything, not thinking enough. Not really wanting to tackle the tough choices, not really wanting to rejigger the narrative, not really willing to tear out the skeleton of the thing to make the changes that are necessary. But it grew on me, and I started to realize that not only are there tough choices to make, but that I often needed to take the harder of the two paths for fixing the problems in the story. And I started hunting down the problems in the narrative like  Indiana Jones seeking golden idols in the depths of Mayan temples. Each new problem solved gave rise to another, bigger conflict I could fix. Each prospective fix, not necessarily right for this situation, took on new significance, grew wings and started looking for problems to apply itself to. And then, a little stymied after a hectic work week, I threw myself at the edit again yesterday and spotted a white whale just lazing about below the surface of the waves on the horizon. A prize so massive, catching her and bringing her in could alter the trajectory of the narrative like a moonshot. It was a job too big for a single day, so I put it on the EPOS and marinated on it overnight.

And I realized something. Drafts of a story are like prototypes before a product launch. None of them is perfect, but each one gets polished to a point where it at least looks and functions more or less as intended. There may still be bugs on the inside, but to an outside observer, it looks like a complete thing. And my edit of this story resembles not so much a prototype as a cluttered workshop after a hurricane and a flash flood. The narrative is in pieces. Loose ends like frayed wires are protruding out of the armholes, eye sockets, fingertips. Entire limbs of the story are disjointedly stuck on with duct tape while other vestigial bits are still cluttering the margins like piles of unswept sawdust.

I’ve been so focused on fixing every little problem along the way that I never bothered to stop, clean up, and see if the thing as a whole is still working as intended. There’s been so much thought about making this little thing fit into its niche that I’m not paying attention to the fact that I’ve stitched an alligator arm onto a panda bear torso. I fear that there’s been so little big picture focus that I’ve created a Frankenstein’s Monster doomed to self-destruct in a boiling froth of unresolved plots and half-baked new characters. In short: I fear that I’ve somehow managed to make this second draft worse than the first.

But you know what? Maybe it is, and maybe that’s okay. If nothing else, it’s time to stop making huge conceptual changes, clean up the dust and debris, and see if this thing can even stand on its own two feet. The first draft did. It was shaky, but it stood up. This second draft? I honestly have no idea. I think it will, but I haven’t tested it properly with a read-through to see.

So it’s time to stop thinking so much. Time to stop trying to fix everything and start making sure that the fixes I’ve made already actually work. Which means no more breaking the story into pieces. No more new characters. No DELETING existing characters. No more rearranging story elements. I need less chainsaw, more chisel. Less dynamite, more sander. Time to sweep up the workshop, put the tools away, and just sit and have another good look at this thing I’ve built. Get a second opinion. Take a bird’s-eye view of the whole scenario.

And then, you know, with fresh perspective, maybe it’ll be time to lop its arms off.

Finish Line Full of Magnets

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I’m not a big fan of biographies, but I read Andre Agassi’s autobio a few years ago. Some fantastic stories about how much pain he was secretly suffering through the last years of his career. Some insane tales of a father who made him hit something like five thousand tennis balls every day (if you hit a million tennis balls in a year, you can’t help but become the best in the world!). But for some reason, the thing that most stuck out for me was his take on winning a match.

I noodled around with tennis a little bit, and even an idiot like me can grasp the wisdom of what he had to say. I’m butchering his words, but he likened winning a match to a magnet: You’re in the match, and then you catch a little bit of a break and all of a sudden you can’t lose. The closer you get to the finish, the more it pulls you along. But, just like a magnet, the closer you get, the more it resists you, the more it pushes you away, until you’re right at the brink of winning and you can’t conceive of any possible way to get there.

Things, as I may have mentioned before, don’t always have to mean things. Sometimes a bit of wisdom about tennis is just a bit of wisdom about tennis. Then again, I’m an English teacher by trade, which means I can draw meaning from the swirls of foam in toddler vomit. So off I go generalizing:

Finishing this first edit is like winning a tennis match. I struggled mightily for months to find a foothold. I thought my ideas were terrible, my draft was terrible, the plans I had for fixing it were actually breaking it. (I still harbor doubts, but it’s getting a little late for that.) Then — and I couldn’t pinpoint the moment for the life of me — something changed, and I gained in confidence, and I found the work coming easier and easier. It flowed like so much blood from a severed artery.

And then I realized how close I was to the end.

Not the end. The first edit is only the first step in a journey that will no doubt leave me footsore and sweaty, bloody and probably a little disoriented. But the end of a pretty important step. A step at the end of which I am going to unfetter my little creation and let it flap out into the wild, presumably into the maws of several prowling beasts.

I’m going to let people read it. Other people, outside of the insulated, well-padded room I built for myself in my brain, are going to read this story, meet my characters, and start sticking pointy things in their soft bits. And that’s a highly encouraging thing, because I need some serious feedback if I want to make sure the story works. But it’s also a terrifying thing. Like, it might turn out that the story is as compelling as a pile of gerbil turds. Maybe the characters are as likable as Maleficent, you know, before they flipped it and told the story from her side.

Maybe, in short, I’ve spent the past nine months writing, and I’d have been better off doing, I dunno, ANYTHING else. Collecting stamps. Growing a garden. Learning to crochet.

And what felt like a magnet pulling me toward the finish line now feels like a magnet pushing me away from it. I’m terrified to finish, so I’m hiding from the work. It’s easy. There’s no shortage of excuses and reasons to keep me from working on it. But I think the sad, simple fact is that I’m terrified of turning it over and letting it out of my little cage.

But I guess I have to let it go eventually. Cut the cord. Empty the nest.

I’ll probably be done with the edit in a couple of weeks. And that’s awesome.

But terrifying.

But mostly awesome.

But still terrifying.

…But awesome.

The EPOS (Editing Pile of… we’ll say Stuff)

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Let’s get one thing clear: I know nothing about editing a book.  I know a few things about editing short-form writing in general, but when it comes to making a 300-page behemoth readable for the masses, I’m a blind bull in a china shop.  Made of glass.  The shop, not the bull.

Apparently there are lots of ways to do it.  Some read through the thing in record pace to get a sense of the story as a whole then begin fixing bits in the order of direness.  Some slog their way from front to back, chipping away at the glacier as they go.  Others, I dunno, tear the manuscript to pieces and burn it in effigy, inhaling the vapors to enter a trance state that allows them to craft the distilled story.  I’ve never been much of a planner, so as is my wont, I’m sort of making it up as I go.  Regardless of approach, I feel like there’s one thing most authors have in common as they edit.

The EPOS.

Educational Platitudes of Smartness?

Entropic Poignard of Sagacity?

Electrified Prod of Smackface?

As awesome as those sound, for me, it’s the Editing Pile of Sharknado.

Let me reiterate.  I can speak for myself, but I have a feeling this struggle is universal among writerly types.  Here’s how it works for me:

I read the draft.  As I read, I try to read the text with an impartial mind, assessing the elements on their intrinsic value rather than on my own sentimental attachment to them.  As I read, things jump out at me.  Unclear character development.  Missing plot points.  References to things I forgot to include the first time around.  Some mistakes can be fixed on the spot: typos, obviously awkward prose, egregious instances of wheelieing.  Everything else gets a note and goes on the Pile.

At the beginning, the pile was just a few comments, a couple of harmless observations about the dubious state of the draft, a few gentle admonitions to a Future Me about some bits of the draft that need rewriting.  But like all monstrous things, what started off small and innocuous began an exponential growth curve and now seems to be doubling in size every couple of days.  The more errors I spot within the draft, the easier it becomes to spot errors within the draft.  The more I identify elements which need fixing, the more readily I seem to find elements to fix.  As a result, I’ve been working on the edit for about, oh, a month or so now, I’m about 130 pages in, and the pile has grown into a heap and a tower and now seems as immense as Babel stretching toward the heavens.

The EPOS looms and sways; it reaches skyward and some days seems to eclipse the sun.  It’s full of all sorts of advice and admonition: “present this bit earlier”, “expand upon this moment”, “is this necessary?”, “rewrite this whole f&*(!)#$ passage”.  Some can be fixed in a matter of minutes, some will take hours.  It grows by the day, and it seems as if it’s approaching a critical mass, whereupon it will begin to attract further Stuff to itself and begin sucking up random bits of prose from entirely other parts of the story, perhaps from the blarg here, maybe from textbooks in the area… it may eventually start swallowing the pets as they wander too close.

Some days it feels as if the EPOS is growing faster than I even wrote the novel in the first place, like it’s got a mind of its own and seeks to destroy me through the sheer accumulation of my seemingly endless string of inadequacies.  I feel myself working in its shadow, the cool embrace of its inevitability clammy and close around my shoulders as I work at the imperfect mass of my draft with the panic of a surgeon whose patient is dying of a sucking chest wound.  It’s overwhelming and terrifying and oppressive and it’s getting bigger every day.  In fact, the other day the thought flitted through my mind that the EPOS was so big, so insurmountable, that I might never get around to addressing everything I put into it.  That the work that needs to be done for this draft to be decent is work that’s beyond my capability.  That perhaps, as I’ve thought so many times as I’ve walked this path to writerdom, the prudent thing is to face the facts, accept that the time I’ve put in is time wasted, cut my losses and go home with my tail between my legs.

But then I stop, because I recognize that voice.  It’s not my voice, it’s the Howler Monkey of Doubt.  And the Howler has some fancy new digs: a tower of Sharknado hundreds of feet high, which affords him a crazy vantage point on the depth of my plight and gives him lots of ammunition for taking potshots at my self-esteem and my sense of accomplishment.  But he’s terrified, as well he should be, because he’s only hoping that I’ll forget something crucial.  The tower isn’t built on the ground.  The foundation of the EPOS isn’t the level of the earth, it didn’t start from ground zero.  No, the tower’s roots are gnarled and knotted at the summit of the once-insurmountable mountain that I climbed in the first place to even get the draft written.  Of course it blocks out the sun — I’m basically soaring at the level of the sun in the first place, just by virtue of how far I’ve come.  The tower is high, but next to the mountain I’ve already climbed, it’s an out-of-order escalator leading to the second story at the mall, and if I let that stop me, then I’m no better than those poor lost souls chubbing it up at the food court.

I feel as if I may have mixed my metaphors again.

The point is, the EPOS is massive.  It’s daunting.  But not nearly so daunting as the original idea of writing ninety thousand words from scratch, not nearly so daunting as weaving this story, flawed as it may be, from the raw silk threads spiraling around in my cortex.  Sure, it’ll get worse before it gets better.  I think it was JFK that said something about doing hard things because they’re hard.  Maybe there’s wisdom in that.  Maybe, with that in mind, I’ll feel a little less bad about all the sharknado I add to the pile tomorrow.

Simmering my Brainmeats in a Fragrant Crockpot of Creative Doubt

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My Flash Fiction from last week is enjoying a bit of success over at terribleminds.com.  So good, in fact, that I stand to win a free e-book off the back of it (yay free stuff!).  That thread is here:  Three Sentence Stories.  And it got me to thinking, which is a bad habit I have.  Because I love these little Flash Fiction challenges; I take great pleasure jumping into them with both feet no matter how difficult or ridiculous or outside of my comfort zone they may be.

If you’re going along with this post, you might want to check out my series of stories from last week, because I’m stewing over them right now.  Simmering my brainmeats in a fragrant crockpot of creative doubt.

Writing the last one — I should say the last set, since I expanded on the topic and wrote way more than I perhaps should have — was instructive, because the development of the stories was so strange to me.  With only three sentences to tell a story, I agonized for the weekend over what story I could tell, what characters I could bring to bear, what possible development and twists I could effect within such a short period.  My first story was good but fell into my typical vein of the dark and somewhat horrific account of a more or less mild-mannered somebody taking part in senseless violence.  It’s a little bit of a motif with me, I’m afraid, and I’m just not sure how effective it really is.  It wasn’t bad, but the moment I wrote it, I realized just how much of a step into an old shoe it was, which is why I decided to write another one.

So I rebooted, kept my central idea and parameters, and brought in new characters, new conflicts.  New perspective, new story, new twist.  And v2 was better, I think, though it still fell in the same dark, depraved vein of the first.  But twisting the idea in my brain felt refreshing, so I tried again.  If the first story was a cruise down a familiar highway, the second was a short detour on a quaint exit ramp for a franchise burger.  A bit different but nothing incredible.

So for the third go-round, I decided to take a hard left into the ditch.  Rather than characters, I characterized inanimate objects (more or less), let them talk and explore human emotions and ideas, and … end up at the same dark murderous place.  Hmm.  The new take on characters was like a fantastic little food truck discovered set up around the corner from my office.  Totally new and exciting food in a familiar and comforting setting.  I knew I was getting warmer.

On the fourth go-round, I struck gold.  I re-imagined the central idea once again, personified an inanimate object and used my scenario to describe a situation that happens every day.  Not an earth-shattering revelation about everyday, just a little thought experiment on what might be happening when the vending machine at the end of the hall rejects your dollar.  Somehow, it felt like gold.  An ostensibly ridiculous premise with an endearing (at least, I think so!) character whom you don’t expect, giving an unexpected perspective and staying light and upbeat.  So it was a bit out of my comfort zone, a bit funny, a bit ridiculous, and very much me.  As I was writing it, before it was finished (yeah, that quickly, even before I could finish three sentences), I could tell it was the best one.  That “magic” was happening, that crazy feeling where you feel like you’ve tapped into the magical mind-juice of the universe and your pen (okay, your keyboard) is acting as a conduit for the timeless universal stories that speak to everybody.  You know, a good writing session.

The fifth attempt felt a little forced, so I pulled the plug after that one.

So, to reflect, I wrote one story in my usual vein, a second with one foot out of the vein, a third with an eye on a different horizon, and a fourth that struck out toward that horizon and — by all accounts — seems to be resonating with folks who read it.  So now, I’ve got another prompt in front of me for the weekend, and I’m all in my own head, wondering if I need to write three junk stories before I get at the “real” one.  For that matter, I’m working on an extended short story and boy oh boy, does it feel awkward and forced.  Like I’m in touch with the central idea, and I’m enjoying the premise, but I can tell as I’m writing it that I’m not telling the story the right way.

Do I need a few crap attempts at the topic to “clear the pipes” so that I can get down to writing the story that I want to write?  If so, how far do I have to carry those stories out?  When I wrote Rejected v1, it felt like a pretty good story to me, but in retrospect I can see that it’s awfully derivative.  The current version of Powdered Chaos, at about 30% completion, already feels crap.  Do I need to carry it to is conclusion before I take another stab at it?  Or, having written about 4000 words on it already, can I legitimately realize it’s crap and start over without crashing my creative process?

In short, just what the hell is my creative process anyway?  This is seriously bugging me, and it’s bogging down my writing hard while I’m trying to carry my momentum through this lull before I jump into editing Accidentally Inspired.

Need to figure this out.  Anybody else have anxiety like this about your drafts?  How do you attack it?  Do I just write the crap to clear the pipes or do I resist the urge to waste time on the crap and hold out for the good ideas to strike?