It’s hard to get any consistency about my schedule these days, but the words are flowing. I’ve made it easy on myself with my daily goal: I’m only asking myself for 500 words daily, 5 days a week.
But surprise surprise, I’m finding that the “goal” is more like a “limitation”. Just this week, I’ve done:
(Mon – 475 words)
(Tue – 537 words)
(Wed – 570 words)
(Thur – 623 words)
And that’s not trying to write more, that’s just writing where the writing takes me and stopping once I find a decent stopping point. Problem is, it’s getting harder to find good stopping points, because I’m enjoying myself so much.
(Allow me to disclaim that I’m not particularly educated or bothered with the differences between turtles, tortoises, terrapins, and the like. I am sure they are all different and not interchangeable. I will nonetheless be interchanging them today. I have at least one friend who will be very upset by this.)
What is it with me and thought experiments? Last week, the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This week, Zeno’s Paradox. Maybe it’ll be my next “regular feature” that burns out after a month or so.
Zeno’s Paradox is one of my favorites, in that it seems to defy all common sense, yet when you look at the premises of the argument, it is inescapably logical.
We imagine a footrace between Achilles and a tortoise.
Since Achilles is a sporting chap, and clearly runs faster than the tortoise, he spots the tortoise a significant head start. This is only fair.
So, after Achilles runs for an indeterminate amount of time, he will have reached the point that the tortoise started from. However, in the same amount of time, the tortoise will have moved forward some smaller amount, so Achilles still has ground to make up. Again he moves forward, arriving rather quickly at the point the tortoise previously occupied, and again he finds that the turtle has crept a bit further ahead.
This process repeats for as long as you care to repeat it. Due to the fact that measurements are a human construct and therefore infinite, we will never reach a point whereat Achilles overcomes the tortoise.
It follows, then, that logically, Achilles can never overtake the tortoise.
In practice, of course, Achilles sprints right past the hapless terrapin.
I absolutely love this. It is simultaneously as self-evident as a stone and as incomprehensible as consciousness itself. Achilles, in the mind, seems paradoxically never to gain ground; in fact, the closer he comes to his goal, the farther he has to go.
I’ve noted previously around here (though I can’t be arsed to track down where at the moment) that Andre Agassi, one of my more favorite athletes (we bald guys have to stick together), has expressed a similar psychological phenomenon. He describes the end of a tennis match as a magnetic force: one that, the closer you get to it, catches you in its field and pulls you in. But like a reversed magnet, the closer you get, the harder it becomes to actually make contact.
You can get closer and closer, but you can never quite catch it.
And that’s kind of like writing, innit?
You begin with this vast tract of land in front of you: the blank page and the faraway goal of a completed story, be it 3000 words or 93000. You start to work. The finish line is way up there, but who cares? You’re making progress day by day, easily measurable progress, and you have the word counts to prove it. And you close and you close and you close and the turtle gets bigger and bigger in your vision, and one day: you finish! The story is written, the narrative arc resolved.
But the turtle has moved. You still have more work to do, in the form of re-reading, re-outlining, editing, proofreading. You’re closer than you were to start the exercise, but it took you a long time to cover all that distance, and the turtle isn’t holding still, either (and why would it, with an ink-stained, caffeine-addled word-herder on its tail?).
So you lower your head and off you go again. This time it’s not such a long road to catch the turtle — you’ve already written 90,000 words after all, what’s the big deal revising or re-ordering 30,000 of them — and before long, you’re there. A story edited, improved, fixed!
LOL I’m still ahead.
But where’s the turtle? Sonofabitch, it’s another thirty turtle-miles up the road. (Which is, I dunno, five hundred feet? What’s the ground speed of a turtle anyway?) You’ve got some beta-reads to do, now, and the receiving of notes, and probably another read of the work yourself, and then a subsequent edit…
And just like Achilles, you keep chasing the turtle, and just like the turtle, your project creeps inexorably forward, staying ahead of you by distances which are too small to be properly measured, let alone explained to anybody who isn’t a writer.
“You’ve been working on it for how long?” your friends ask, with confusion and maybe a bit of pity in their voices. “I thought you finished the draft months ago.”
“Yes,” you explain, straining to keep the desperation from bleeding in, “but then I found a major problem with the protagonist’s backstory on page thirty, so I had to go back and fix it, and when I fixed that, I realized I had taken away the whole motivation for the antagonist to –”
And by this point, your friends are simply nodding and smiling and backing away, the way they might with a foamy-mouthed dog. (Little do they know you’ve been subsisting on nothing but Cool Whip for the past two days because you’re eyeballs-deep in edits and can’t bring yourself to leave the house.)
And despite all the progress you’ve made, that farkarkte turtle (and yeah, I had to look up how to spell “farkarkte,” and I don’t care what you think — it’s in my personal lexicon for some reason and it bubbled to the surface like a dead fish and I love it) is still bobbing along the road ahead of you, evading reach even though it looks like it’s right there.
The fact is, if you think of a novel as the sum of its requisite parts — the draft, the editing, the revising, the crying, the drinking, the smashing of computers with hammers, the dark nights of doubt, the … well, you get the idea — then the whole equation begins to look very much like the mathematical side of Zeno’s Paradox. No matter how close you might ultimately get, you will never actually get there.
Which is why it’s a good thing we writers don’t live in a mathematical world. (Most of us, anyway. Actually, who am I kidding, MATH IS EVERYWHERE.)
We live in the delightfully creative, whimsical world where expectations exist only to be reversed, where up can be down if we bloody well feel like it. We live in the world where, paradox or not, Achilles keeps on pounding away and leaves the tortoise in the dust.
We keep on writing and we (eventually, one day, maybe, please?) cross the finish line.
WordPress informs me that my blarg is two years old today.
(That is not either of my babies.)
I guess that tracks, though it’s a little hard to believe.
I started this little experiment at the same time I decided I was going to try writing a novel. I intended it to be a space for reflecting, for puzzling out the process, for venting the pressure when I got stressed out from the process (for all I didn’t know what writing a novel would be like, I at least anticipated somewhat the stress it would bring). It’s grown from that; I’m comfortable enough now with my process that I don’t need to post so much about it to keep myself honest, and I’ve developed a taste for using it as a space to talk about other things.
Reviews, for example, have been a lot of fun to write. As have political posts, especially the closer we’ve gotten to the election this year. I still post about running every now and then, even though it drives my wife nuts (“how much,” she rightly asks, “can you really say about it??”). Then there’s the Weekly Re-Motivator posts, which have served to keep me on the straight and narrow for getting the writing done (and, judging from the comments, have also helped some of my readers out as well — which I think is fargoing awesome). And the blarg continues to be a good motivator for keeping short fiction flowing, though I’m maybe not as stringent about posting it every week like I used to be. Frankly, when I go back and look at my numbers from when I started the blarg, I don’t know how I maintained that pace at this time of year. (Actually it’s no great secret; I wasn’t coaching soccer in that first year, and soccer has turned out to be an even bigger time sink than I originally anticipated).
Some of you may even be hanging around from when the blog was once called “Pavorisms” — it didn’t become “Accidentally Inspired” until about six months ago. Hooray for arbitrary milestones! I particularly like the new title, not just because it’s been the working title of my book since before I ever wrote it, but because it pretty much represents my thoughts about my artistic process, and it has, in that way, helped me to rethink and rediscover a direction for my thoughts here. I think it’s awesome that ordinary people like me can create things that other people enjoy, so I try to keep that in mind and keep myself inspired.
So, a recap:
Since the inception of my once-writing-now-more-of-a-Life-the-Universe-and-Everything blog, I’ve accomplished:
1 full-length (90,000 word) novel, almost finished with its third edit, and about to be sent out in search of an agent.
1 drafted novel (about 85,000 words), which I will maybe start editing after I finish this last pass at AI … or maybe I’ll just go draft another!
A … bunch of flash fiction stories. My collection page lists about 40, but it’s woefully out of date; I want to say it’s closer to 60 or 70 by now. At about 1000 words a piece, that’s another 70,000 words. That kinda blows my mind, actually. 70 stories. To say nothing of the ones I never finished…
A total of 462 posts here at the blarg. Subtract out the 70 stories and that’s almost 400. My average used to be almost 1000 words per post, but I’ve since embraced brevity a bit more and aim for more like 500-700 on average, though my reviews tend to run longer. I’ll split the difference and call it 800, for a really rough estimate of … 320,000 words written.
Holy carp.
Holy mother of cod carp.
That doesn’t even seem possible.
Add that all up and it comes to … 565,000 words.
*Passes out*
*Comes to, woozily reads that number again*
Seriously, I think I might need to have a little lie-down. That number is destroying my mind right now. Five hundred sixty-five … thousand … words written since the inception of this blarg. Even if I’m wildly off in my average word count per post here, that’s still 500,000.
It defies logic. It defies belief. I have a full-time job. I have two kids. I have a wife who I spend a not-insignificant amount of time with, not writing. How in the everloving hell have I found the time to write — at all — let alone half a million words? I don’t know how I’ve done it, but the ink doesn’t lie.
Let it never be said that you don’t have time to do the things you want to do. Let it never be said that you don’t know how. I don’t have time to do all this writing. I have no idea what I’m doing.
I’m doing it anyway.
And I plan to keep doing it for quite some time.
If you’re out there reading, you have my thanks. Drop a comment below and let me know if you are!
Put aside questions of whether a story is “good” or not. Even the simple acts of spinning ideas together out of nothingness, giving life to characters who are mere inventions of the mind, building worlds out of the scraps of imagination, are beyond the reach of the average person. Sure, they could do it. But they don’t. Writing, it turns out, is too much like work.
Because like work, it’s taxing. We all have a battery powering the clockwork that makes our bodies tick, and the battery can only carry so much juice. Work. Exercise. Family. These things drain the battery, even when they’re enjoyable. So, too, with writing. The energy you use for writing comes at the expense of other things in your life. Reading. Working overtime. Vegging out and watching that Walking Dead marathon of a weekend.
It’s not an uncommon day that finds me taxed and tapped out. Rough night with the kids (ours have been fighting off sickness for, oh, I dunno, A MONTH). Extra reports and paperwork to fill out at work. Meetings that run long even though everything that gets talked about could easily have been sent out in an e-mail. Traffic on roads that, on an ordinary day, flow like melted butter, but when it rains out, clog up like the arteries of a sixty-year-old meatatarian. On those days (and often more than once on those days) I’ll have the moment when I say, nope. Too much. Can’t do it. Not writing today.
The thought comforts me. I reclaim that hour. I don’t have to think about my spaghetti-plate plot. My oddly malformed characters. How I’m going to possibly bring the whole thing to an ending that makes any sort of sense.
But as is its wont, reality starts creeping in at the edges. My (admittedly arbitrary) deadline isn’t going anywhere. If I don’t write, my characters will stay lost. If I don’t pick at the plot (like a kitten snagging its claws in a strand of yarn), it’s going to stay tangled. If I don’t get out and push, the story is getting no closer to its ending.
In short, just like anything else in life, if I don’t sit down and do it, it ain’t gonna do itself.
Which means that the six months I’ve sunk into this project so far are wasted. Which means that all the mental effort I’ve dropped on this project turns into smoke. Which means that the story I’ve been building pulls a Jimmy Hoffa and vanishes from the earth.
And that’s just unacceptable.
Now, one day off doesn’t wreck the project. One writing session missed doesn’t put the story in the ditch. But one day all too easily turns into two. Two becomes three. Then it’s a week. Then a month. Momentum matters, and even after a year and a half of steady writing, the lure of falling back into a non-writing sloth dangles there, just at the edge of vision.
Can’t have it.
So, here in the closing days of the project, when fatigue is at an overwhelming high and I’m really ready to throw off the heavy mantle that is spewing out the first draft and be done with it, even on those days when I really feel like I simply just can’t anymore, I return to the page and I bang out a few more words.
And that’s why I think writing is just a little bit like magic. Because those first few words each day are work, make no mistake. And though sometimes it feels like it takes all of me to do it, there’s a satisfaction in it. The universe balances itself. As I exhaust my battery, using up its reserves on this creative endeavor, so too do I fill the reservoir. Even if the work never comes to publication, I get back something that I can’t even really articulate. And that’s the magic. It fills you up as it wears you down. As you give to the writing, the writing gives back to you.
It’s sort of like a religion, that way.
Come to think of it, writing needs a church where you could make proper offerings for blessings from the gods of prose. Burnt offerings of unpublished manuscripts. A donations plate for brilliant scraps of dialogue. Sunday school lessons in pacing and tone-setting.
A human sacrifice to atone for all the writing sins ever committed, including this particular blarg post.
Too much? Maybe too much.
Point is, writing sometimes sucks, but it’s always awesome.
Some days you have to push through the suck to get to the awesome.
It’s a bizarre feeling. If my first novel was written in a flurry of inspiration, stolen minutes and creeping inevitability, this novel has been written via a series of well-placed skull strikes against the keyboard. Or maybe not so well-placed. The narrative of this one hasn’t flowed as well as the first. The path was never so clear. The words more reluctant. The voice, nonexistent.
Still, I’m almost there, and the proverbial light is shining at the proverbial end of the proverbial tunnel. It ain’t far off now, which means I’m too close to even think about packing it all in. I should be done within the month, which is startlingly enough true to the (unofficial) deadline I set for myself back in … whenever the fargo I began writing it. It seems so long ago now as to be hardly worth pondering, but I want to say it was maybe February? March?
It’s taken longer than the first novel, pushing out this newest squalling bundle of joy, but that’s because I realized that the breakneck pace I set back then (1200 words a day was my goal) was a bit too much for other areas of my life to bear. I backed the daily requirement back to 600 (though I really do aim for 900 most days), which has of course made the project stretch out, but has also given me more time to assess as I go.
And I’m not sure if that’s been a good thing or not. With the first novel I plowed ahead full force, writing the story as it occurred to me, hardly pausing for breath or to check my bearings at all as I scrambled for the finish. With this project, I’m constantly evaluating how things are going, second-guessing my decisions, agonizing over each new turn. As a result, the thing has been reshaped so many times along the way it’s as if I started off building a replica of the Iron Throne and ended up with a misshapen ashtray made from discarded banana peels. And then sat on it. Eww slimy.
It’s gonna require major rewrites. Months of work. And I can’t help wondering if by taking my time a little bit more I hamstrung myself by allowing things to settle. If instead of spinning the whole tale out like a blown glass bottle, the thing is hardening and solidifying fit to break when I start to apply pressure to it.
But those are concerns for future me.
Now that I can see the end, I can feel that restless energy seeping in, that urge to push for the finish.
For the moment, it’s time to focus on those last 10,000 words, and the feeling over the last few days is that they’re going to go fast. I can feel the frenetic pacing from my first novel creeping in. I can feel myself reaching for Chekhov’s Guns that weren’t written yet, weapons that materialize under my fingers as the story demands them. The time will come when I can go back and invent the methods of their inception. Right now, the story is full steam ahead, and if a character needs a robotic limb in order to break out of their holographic jail cell, then by god, that character has what she needs. The details will come later, for now it’s time to find an ending for this thing, even if that means steering its smoldering wreckage into the side of a mountain.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 