Tag: writing about writing

The Beer-Can Fix

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Beer Can, Marine, Waste, Moss

One of my favorite moments from Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle comes around the end of the first third of the book. The dysfunctional family, composed of an alcoholic engineer father and a tree-hugging lunatic religious mother and their four kids, inherits a relatively palatial house in Phoenix. (I’ll point out that the mother is a lunatic who happens to be religious, rather than a religious person who is, by extension, a lunatic). The house has termites, though, and before long the floors become unstable, to the point where a misplaced step results in somebody’s foot going through the floor. This proceeds until it can’t any longer, at which point the father enacts a fix which is simultaneously brilliant and idiotic. He buys a six-pack of beer. Downs one. Uses his tin snips to turn the can into a little metal tile. Then hammers the can down over the hole. This process repeats anytime the family kicks a new hole in the floor, which is often. It’s the height of pragmatism — he’s going to drink anyway, so why not use it to fix the floor — and ridiculousness — picture the lovely parquet floor pockmarked with Budweisers and PBRs.

And I have a similar favorite moment in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Dude’s hog has a problem with its steering. They know that the repair that’s needed (some sort of ionized stripping installed around the axle or whatever) will be prohibitively expensive; several hundred bucks. The narrator points out that the repair can be effected — not as a stop-gap measure, but well and truly fixed — by snipping a beer can open, cutting it to fit, and wrapping the strip around the steering bits (I don’t cars, sorry NOT SORRY). The beer can, which is oxidized (or un-oxidized or whatever) on the liquid side so as to safely contain the beer, serves as a perfect insulator that won’t break down or rust over time. But the dude isn’t about to have his brand-new motorcycle, the epitome of engineering, repaired by a lowly can of beer. He doesn’t accept that it could work. So he drives it with the janky steering until he can overpay for a “proper” repair.

Why are these moments banging against each other in my head like literary pinballs? Well, I’m nearing the end of the edit on my first novel, and I’m ironing out the last few problems. Spoiler-free, the problems are: I’ve got some characters who pull a disappearing act when they shouldn’t, and others who don’t pull a disappearing act when they should. I’d been mulling the problem for a few days when a startlingly simple solution struck me.

And then today it struck me that maybe the solution was too simple. Too pat. Too surface-level. Maybe I was patching my busted floor with a spent beer can. So I find myself wondering whether I’m fixing these last few problems “properly”. Whether, a la The Glass Castle, I’m using ridiculous if not trashy easy fixes for problems that need deep, structural focus and foundational repair. Or, whether, a la Zen, I’m overthinking things and the beer can is not only adequate, but more elegant and simple than a highfalutin ground-up rethink.

At this point it’s probably impossible for me to know. I mean, I didn’t catch this mistake on my first read-through (nor did one of my readers, actually). My wife caught it. (Thanks, wife!) So the fix probably will look equally fine to me.

There’s only one thing that’s actually clear in all of this.

Beer fixes everything.

If only I liked beer.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Balls

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The prompt for the week is “ball,” and while I usually use the prompt to re-evaluate and re-motivate myself for the week, I’m just not having the coherent thoughts needed for a post like that this morning. Maybe it’s the fact that I was up way too late last night, or maybe it’s because I’m reaching a fatigue point between work and coaching and writing and everything else. So, a little different today:

A series of different types of balls (cue the Beavis & Butthead laughs) and the way they’re like writing.

Begin!

Sports Ball (any type): The game can only be won if you keep your eye on it and move it deftly toward the goal, overcoming the defense mounted by whoever ow whatever your opposition happens to be.

The Ball, Stadion, Football, The Pitch, Grass, Game

Ball and Chain: No, not your wife (or husband!); sometimes the project gets heavy, like a weight attached to your 20’s era black-and-white striped prisoner’s leg. We have to know when to set the project aside and focus on something else to relieve us of the weight and the stress.

Caught, Prison, Chain, Metal, Fig, Ball

Snow Ball: The project rolls downhill, gathering snow and twigs and squirrels and whatever it rolls over. When it’s moving under its own weight, stay out of its way.

Idiot Ball: A tvtropes favorite of mine. The idiot ball is a metaphorical object carried by a character who is being hopelessly obtuse and overlooking something obvious that would solve the problem of the day. If you’re not careful, this can become you. Double-check yourself from time to time to make sure the problems and solutions you’ve created actually make sense.

Ballroom dance: Sometimes the narrative needs to be as graceful as one: every step measured, every gesture flawless. Of course, the opposite is also true:

Latin, Dance, Tango, Ballroom, Dancing Couple

Wrecking Ball: Sometimes the narrative needs some devastation. Hop on the wrecking ball and smash it through some walls, knock down some central constructs, destroy what you thought your story was all about. Then rebuild it better than before.

Ball of Yarn: It seems like a good idea to have tons of different storylines woven together into an un-tangle-able knot of overlapping conflicts. But too much of a good thing quickly becomes a bad thing. The central conflict of a story has to be straightforward, though not necessarily simple. Less ball-of-yarn, more frayed sweater. Tugging on that loose thread should lead us inexorably toward the end of the story.

Wool, Yarn, Balls, Hobbies, Craft, Knitting, Needlework

Ball Lightning: one of those things which doesn’t seem like it should exist, and maybe/probably it doesn’t. This is a ball of pure condensed energy that falls to earth, rolls around unpredictably, then blows the fargo up, effecting some degree of burn damage and electrical disturbance and, you know, death. Sounds like a good template for a character.

I’m tapped out on this one, which disappoints me a little. So I turn to my readers. What other literary balls (huh huh, huh huh) am I leaving out?

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.

Zeno’s Literary Paradox

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(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!

turtle-1149009_960_720
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.

 

Accidentally Inspired is Two Years Old!

Pavowski8 Comments

WordPress informs me that my blarg is two years old today.

Baby, Crown, Birthday, Cute, Child, Blue Eyes, Girl

(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!

 

 

 

The Weekly Re-Motivator: The Writer’s Diet

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Pizza, Lunch, Meal, Food, Baked, Italian, Sliced

I remember a time when I was in college, when money was tight, that I literally ate nothing but pizza for about four or five days. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. I was working at a Papa John’s doing delivery at the time, and there was always extra pizza left over at the end of the night which we’d take home. It was a college student’s dream (free food, say no more), and it almost ruined me for pizza.

Let’s clarify: I love pizza. Maybe it’s the simplicity, maybe it’s the grease, maybe it’s the geometric perfection of a perfectly-crafted pie. Time was when I could eat an entire pie by myself, but (probably for the better) those days are long past.

So to have nothing but pizza for almost a week is one of those things that maybe sounds like a good idea before you actually try it, like a juice cleanse, or a trip to the beach with your two sub-preschool-aged kids. The beginning is fine, maybe even fun. But before long the monotony sets in, then the actual physical discomfort, and before very much time passes at all, you realize what a terrible decision you’ve actually made, but there’s no way out.

By the end of the week, I felt ill, with terrible whanging headaches. I didn’t feel like getting out of the house at all; I had to force myself out of bed for class and work. My friends said I looked terrible. I believed it. I had put on three or four pounds gorging myself on pizza just because it was there and it was free. Needless to say, when my paycheck came in, I rushed to the grocery store to pick up a more equitable spread of staples for the college student (Ramen noodles, cereal, peanut butter and jelly … you know, the healthy basics).

Short of the actual physical difficulties you can cause yourself eating basically nothing but bread and cheese for days on end, the boredom and monotony are even worse. We humans may be creatures of habit, but as has been said before, variety is the spice of life. Until they start selling Soylent Green, our physiology dictates that we need a varied diet. You can’t get everything you need from just one source.

So what’s all that got to do with writing?

Pretty much everything, actually.

The monochromatic writer is as boring (and possibly as hazardous to your health) as an all-pizza diet. The writer owes it to himself to consume a varied diet of literature, as well as to serve up a spread that satisfies a bunch of different tastes. Both in the form (novels, short stories, plays, poetry, or even blogs) and in the substance (the genres, the types of characters, the tone and timbre of the stories).

To focus only on novels is to neglect the elegant brevity of the short story. To write only poetry robs one of the nuance of a finely crafted dialogue.

And if you only read in your genre, you’re sealing up the door of your own echo chamber. It’s much more interesting than reading horror over and over again to read science fiction, explore mysteries, go galloping through YA or coming-of-age stories, and weave into your own writing the little gravelly bits that stick to your brain from those other stories.

Or, you know, you could just eat pizza all the time.

Just don’t come running to me with your blockage issues.

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.