Tag: the howler monkey of doubt

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.

99 Problems. Or 3. We’ll Call it 3.

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In this first draft stage of my first novel, I am learning all kinds of things.  I’m like my toddler, learning to walk and to run and to chase the cats and to bang my chin off the driveway.  Some of these things are more fun than others, and some of them are things I won’t be doing in the future.  But you try them all out anyway, either on purpose or on accident, and you either learn from them or you don’t.  Reminds me of yet another Douglas Adams quote, which I recall almost daily.

You live and learn.  At any rate, you live.

I’m up against it now in the story.  At almost 75% finished, it’s down to the nitty-gritty, balls-to-the-wall, sharknado-or-get-off-the-pot bit where things have to be happening, everybody has to pull their weight,every event and every word most be working toward the same immense task of wrapping this bad boy up.  For a guy like me, who’s more verbose and relaxed than, I don’t know, brass-tacksy, it’s daunting.

Here are some problems I’m discovering as I work towards an ending.

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Holy Sharknado, it’s Really Happening

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I was writing along today, enjoying myself, working on a cute little scene between the hero and the love interest, and WriteMonkey’s little heads-up display bar ticked over.  It does this constantly, tracking word count, the time I’m writing in the current session, the time until the next save (WM can be configured to save automatically, as often even as every five seconds.  This is a feature I laughed at when I first started writing with it, but it has actually saved me a couple of times.  Not the every five seconds thing.  That’s excessive to the point of lunacy.  The automatic save thing.  Every thirty seconds has been more than sufficient.).  Nifty little program, as I’ve said before.  But today’s little tick was more significant than most, because today the progress meter ticked over to 50%.

See, way back when I started writing, I set a goal of ninety thousand words for this little endeavor I’m tarrying away at, the way a man who’s never run a step in his life might stand at the start line of the Boston Marathon and say, okay, the finish line is out there somewhere.  The way I imagine the Apollo astronauts looked up at the moon and said, “There it is.”  The way, perhaps, that my dog watches the mail truck driving by and thinks, “one day.”  At the time, it seemed lofty, massively optimistic, and even a little foolish.  A goal so distant and unattainable it might as well have been on Pluto (alas poor Pluto, we hardly knew ye).  WriteMonkey merrily and quietly accepted the leviathan goal I had set for myself and popped a happy little 8% indicator down in the corner.  Every day I write a few more words and it increases, one tick at a time. 

That was (wait, let me check) 44 days ago.  44 proper days, mind you, not 44 writing days (weekends are for not working!).  44 days!  A month and not quite a half to hit the halfway point.  I’ll save the champagne and the sparklers for a more momentous occasion, but suffice it to say, I am pretty jazzed.  Having been a runner for a little while, running metaphors spring naturally to mind; it’s like reaching the turnaround point on a long run.  It was hard work to get here, and it will be hard work to get back, but there’s nothing for it – nobody’s going to drive out here and pick my tired, dehydrated asgard up.  Mile 13.1 of a marathon: you’ve come this far, it’s nonsense to even think of not finishing now.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve written so much.  Forty-five thousand words is no small chunk of writing.  I don’t want to dump on myself too badly, but I’m a little bit surprised that I’ve done so well.  Frankly, I expected of myself a lot more waffling, a lot more excuses, a lot more days when I just didn’t feel like getting the work done, and a lot of not actually meeting my goals.  At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I know Past Me pretty well, and that guy is LAZY.  But Past Me is trying to change his ways, Present Me is holding the course, and Future Me is reaping the benefits of our sticktoitiveness.  Granted, our sticktoitiveness is creating for that guy an ever growing pile of hog slobber that he’s going to have to go wading through to find the tasty bits, but hey, that’s a problem for THAT GUY.

It’s pretty overwhelming to look at how far I’ve come and how much (or rather how LITTLE) I have left to go.  It almost makes me sad to think that I’m entering the downward slope of this thing.  To think that in 45 days (assuming I stay productive over the summer, KNOCK ON FARGOING WOOD) I could have a finished draft of this story that I never actually thought I’d get around to turning into a book … I just don’t know what to say.  It suddenly feels real in a way that it hasn’t really felt real despite all the work I’ve been putting in.

Who knew that this was something that was legitimately within my capabilities?  I sure as sharknado didn’t.  I fully expected, on a level I didn’t and haven’t and probably won’t talk about, to end up in a ditch after a few weeks, sobbing internally as I walked away from the smoldering wreckage of another failed project.  I still feel like I’m cheating fate a bit to be where I am.  I spend my writing time trying not to think about how far I’ve come and thus how far I have to fall.  If I don’t think about it so much, I can keep walking the tightrope.  If I don’t look out the window, I don’t have to think about the plane crashing into a mountain.  If I keep putting one foot in front of the other, I just might reach that finish line after all.

Forty-five thousand words to go. Suit up.