Tag: writer’s block

8 Writer Excuses (That Are Total B.S.)

Pavowski6 Comments

As I get closer and closer to the end of my project, it gets harder and harder to write. Like a magnet that simultaneously pulls you in and repels you, the finish line of the first draft is a daunting milestone in the life of a novel, one that looks impossibly bigger and bigger the closer you get to it: an alien obelisk growing out of the horizon of an uncharted planet that never actually seems to get any closer.

As such, it becomes easier and easier to make up excuses not to write, and those excuses become more and more reasonable-sounding.

Here are a few of them (not that I’ve used any of these myself during this project or any other, OF COURSE.) Eight, to be precise. Why eight? I don’t know. Eight is musical. Eight is my lucky number. Eight is also how many I happened to think of before I realized I was using this blog post as an excuse not to write.

So.

  1. I don’t have time. This is probably the easiest to claim and the easiest to dispel. Unless you’re one of the rarefied few doing this writing thing for a living, this is probably true on some level. (Then again, those rarefied few are long past making this excuse.) But the fact is, we all get the same 24 hours in the day, and time can be stolen in bits and snatches from any number of sources: lunch breaks, wasted time in front of the TV, hell, I’ve been known to forego an hour or so of sleep to get it done. The fact is: if it matters to you, you will find time or you will create it from the raw fabric of the universe.
  2. I’m just not inspired to write today. We tend to think that writing is a sort of magic, and on some level, it is: Where else does the average person get to play god like a writer? And on some level, some sort of inspiration is required, but not in the way we think. You need a decent (not awesome) idea, and you need the willingness to work at it, to stick your hands into the clay time and again, shaping it and molding it and firing it and destroying it to start again. That’s it. And some days, the writing does feel like the gods themselves are pushing your cursor around the page, spilling their divine wordseed through your brain and onto the page. But far more often, writing is a little bit like playing nose tackle: it’s a whole lot like getting your brains smashed in, again and again, and crawling back to take another one on the chin. To reiterate: inspiration may strike now and then, but you’re a whole lot more likely to be struck if you drape yourself in tinfoil and wander out in the storm carrying the biggest TV antenna you can find.
  3. I can’t write when I have xxxxx going on. Again, anybody could claim this at any time, really. Life happens to us all, bringing with it a stew of relationship difficulties, livelihood uncertainties, existential doubts, or, well, just name it, really. There’s always something going on that we could use as an excuse. And sometimes, to be fair, it’s a valid excuse. When your house has burned down or you’ve just lost your job, it’s maybe a good time to take some time off the writing project, because that sharknado will bleed through into your work. The thing to be wary of is allowing yourself to continue making this excuse beyond the time when it is reasonable to do so. Momentum matters, and this excuse will destroy your momentum if you let it.
  4. I’m not any good at writing. Well, pardon me for saying so, but who the hell is? Writing is a skill like any other. No budding musician picks up a guitar and starts shredding like Steve Vai. No wannabe singer just spontaneously spouts the perfect lyrics and harmonies one day while driving to work. This thing takes time, and the beginning writer is allowed — if not expected — to suck. It’s a thing to be embraced and accepted and forgotten about. We’re all toddlers that have been chucked into the deep end, and we’ll either figure out how to keep our heads above the water, or we’ll half-drown and be terrified of water for the rest of our lives.
  5. My idea isn’t going anywhere. Ideas are as wonderful and varied as the fishes of the sea; some of them have huge, smoke-belching jet engines, while others are lost puppies trembling in the thunderstorm. Some slide along under their own power for a while (but, really, THE POWER IS YOU) while others have to be dragged along by the wrist, kicking and screaming and whining every step of the way. But the fact is, if you’re not working on it (and as tempting as it is to think that thinking about it or outlining it or in any other way laying the groundwork for it counts as working on it, none of those things actually increase the idea in any way, none of them move it closer to the goal), then at best, it’s a tricked-out Bugatti sitting abandoned in a ditch. At worst, it’s a busted-out, multicolored hoopty sitting abandoned in a ditch. The constant, of course, is the ditch. Your idea won’t get out without some pushing.
  6. It’ll never sell. I’m probably unqualified to be dispensing this sort of advice, but I’ll do it anyway: if your primary concern for a story is whether or not it will sell, then maybe, I dunno, you need a new idea. What sells your story is that it’s your story, told in a way that only you can tell it. Plus — frankly — it probably won’t sell anyway. The market is a bloated jellyfish floating around on unpredictable currents; maybe your story will get snared in the tentacles and carried off to the promised land, maybe it won’t. But if you don’t love your idea, if you’re not burning to write it whether it sells or not, then the story is going to languish in the unpublishable depths, whether the jellyfish scoops it up or not.
  7. My idea isn’t original. Yeah, sorry, but this one is absolutely true. I’m one of those pessimists that feels every story has been told before, every arc has been explored, every wrench in the gears has already been thrown there, multiple times, by multiple monkeys. (See tvtropes.org if you don’t believe me.) The upside to all this is that it doesn’t matter. As I mentioned above, what sells a story — what people love about a story — is not the nuts and bolts of the story itself. That stuff should be practically invisible. What sells it is all the you-juices oozing out of all the nooks and crannies you build into the story. And that stuff only gets in there if — again — you love what you’re writing.
  8. I just don’t feel like it. Here’s where the real harsh truth sets in. Again, outside of the rarefied few, writing isn’t a job. It’s not something that people are depending on you to do, it’s not like paying your taxes or fixing that loose board in the back porch or taking the car in for an oil change. The world will keep on spinning, and you won’t go to jail or into the doghouse if you don’t write. But if you really don’t want to write — and that’s true for, I dunno, a week? A month? — then maybe — just maybe — it’s not that important to you, and maybe — just maybe — you ought to just save all of us the trouble and stop beating your head against this particular wall.

Now, look. I’m hardly an expert, but I do have about 300,000 words in various stages of completion between my second-draft first novel, my nearly completed first-draft second novel, and almost two years’ worth of drivel here at the blarg. Whether any of it is any good is a question for people smarter than me, but I have all that while scores and scads of people out there are just dreaming of writing someday. That’s something. And I certainly didn’t get it by listening to my excuses.

Speaking of which, it’s about time I take my own advice and go work on my project.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: The Sounding Board

Pavowski3 Comments

What do you think of when you think of the writer? A few days (or maybe weeks) worth of stubble? Empty bottles of liquor clinking around the derelict typewriter as he hammers away on a hopeless draft? A dark room, leather-bound books, lots of oak? A pathological aversion to sunlight? A tendency to yammer or babble, even when nobody else is in the room?

There’s a reason writers face such stereotypes, and a primary cause for that reason is that writing is so overwhelmingly a solitary activity. After all, no matter how many people you involve in the process, it all ultimately comes down to just you and the blank page. The overwhelmingly intimidating blank page. The soul-crushing perfect white expanse. The gaping void waiting to swallow your futile effort at wordsmithy. At the end of the day, it comes down to the writer and his blind, fumbling self. Or, sometimes, his multiple, ever-arguing, ever cross-contradicting selves.

Most of the writer’s problems are problems he must solve by himself. Plot’s knotted up? Well, it’s your plot — nobody else even knows what the various bits of twine and frayed yarn you’ve snarled like a plate of stale spaghetti are attached to. Characters misbehaving? You’re the only one inside their heads, you grab the bonesaw and go hacking around til you figure it out. Theme not coming through? Well, theme is subjective, so maybe you’re off the hook there.

There’s no denying it, we’re on our own most of the time.

(Photo by Drew Coffman.)

But.

There’s a wealth of good to be gained by inviting somebody else into our lairs, though seriously, it’s probably a good idea to clean up the liquor bottles and the lunatic scribbles covering the walls first. Because as much as you understand the Rube Goldberg machine that is your broken story, you’ve been living with it for a while. You’ve become desensitized to some of its finer features, like how a hoarder isn’t bothered by the pure funky wave of cat-pee-stink lurking in the dark corners of her house. You don’t even notice the peeled wallpaper, the layer of sticky film on the linoleum, the ring around the tub.

But when you spin out the tale and talk out the problems to somebody else, all of a sudden, it’s like turning on a floodlight in a dark alley. It’s like throwing open the window on a musty study. It’s like calling the cops on a house full of drunk teenagers. All of a sudden, all the little stuff you’ve been ignoring looks stupid bad; all the unsightly bits are not only eminently visible, they become outright embarrassing.

How did I miss that?

Where did that even come from?

What, to be direct, in the fargo was I thinking?

Whether the friend (and make no mistake, if they’re listening to you prattle on about your story for any length of time beyond five seconds, this person is your friend, and one you probably owe a few adult beverages to in exchange for the favor) who’s loaned you an ear has any solutions to offer or not, you will see your work in a whole new light, simply by virtue of the act of putting it on display for somebody else to see.

You just can’t catch it all by yourself. The echo chamber between your ears makes you deaf to the nonsense you’re spitting. The smoke you’re blowing up your own butt blinds you to the blemishes in your draft. (And yeah, I realize if the smoke is going up your butt, it would have a hard time blinding you, just … I’m almost there, okay? GOD.)

I’m not even talking about a beta reader. Make no mistake, you need good beta readers. But I’m talking about long before the beta reader stage. Maybe even before you’ve finished spawning the ill-formed first draft.

You need that sounding board.

And you owe this person for listening to your drabble.

Find them and be nice to them.

(For reference, this week’s SOCS prompt was the suffix -ing. While it’s virtually impossible to write without using this little structure, I thought that for the sake of doing something to death, I’d document my usage. Also, as an English teacher, I enjoyed the exercise. I used -ing 40 times in this post. Thirty times as a participle, eight times as a gerund, and twice as part of a non-verbal word. Yeah, I’m that kind of thinker. Sigh.)

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.

Get to the Awesome (Writing Sucks)

Pavowski1 Comment

Writing is always a struggle.

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.

bilbofaint

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.

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 Last 10,000

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The novel is down to the last ten thousand words.

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.

So.

Deep breath.

Head down.

Time to write.