Tag: writing about writing

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Mental Contractions

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I love a good metaphor ’round these parts, and the SoCS prompt this week plays right into it.

I’ve likened writing to a lot of things in the past. Hiking through a dense, all-engulfing jungle. Dragging yourself through a brutal desert. Rebuilding a car from its component parts.

But my favorites are the visceral ones, the ones with lots of fluids involved. The messy ones. The human ones. Hacking a malformed creature to bits and building a new monstrosity from the leftover gore. Slicing off redundant flesh, vestigial limbs. Draining the narrative of its thick, murky, purple-prosed blood and refilling it with clear, slippery, quick-flowing prose.

Or giving birth.

See, some writers are like insects or even trees or flowers; dropping eggs every so often or scattering spores and seeds around willy-nilly, giving birth to one narrative after another, writing regularly every day, staying productive even as their everyday lives swirl around them in a tornado of accomplishment and fulfillment.

But some of us are mammals. We can’t procreate all the time; we have to incubate, to grow the thing in utero until it’s fully-formed and ready to spring forth into the world. The work is done internally, gestating in the mind, sprouting limbs in secret, growing lungs safe from the light of day. Over months — sometimes even years — the thing takes shape. It kicks and squirms and twists, banging at the writer’s insides like a blind rhinoceros. It becomes all the writer can think about. It becomes as much a part of the writer as her own heart and brain.

And then — when the time is right (I actually wrote “write” when I meant to write “right”, which tells you how sunk I am in the metaphor) — contractions.

The body begins to reject the mostly-formed critter forcefully, urgently. In the space of a couple of hours, every system that worked to protect the young one and keep it safe reverses gears. The incubation is over: now the thing must come out or one of them may die. And come out it does. Amid screams of torturous pain, the expulsion of blood and a host of other unmentionable fluids, and an unending flurry of pushes which seem unproductive, the thing slowly slithers its way into the light.

There are writers like that. We incubate the ideas in the mind, insulating them from the light of day until they burst forth, uncontrollably and with great vigor, scattering the inkblood and amniotic word fluid across the previously perfect blank page.

And we expel this little miracle onto the table/page, where it flops around, taking its first breaths and spreading its wings (or whatever) for the first time.

And it’s … well, it’s imperfect. But it’s a thing we’ve created, and so in a way, it is perfect. And we’ll spend the coming months if not years nurturing it, feeding it, teaching it to walk and talk and influence the minds of the weak.

I’ve lost track of whether I’m talking about a story or a baby.

What are you? An incubator or a spreader-of-spores, a populator?

(And usually I include a picture, but I just can’t bring myself to post a picture of a mother in childbirth. Having witnessed it firsthand — kind of [my kids were born by Caesarean] — well. I just won’t do that to you.)

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.

We Must Be Crazy

Pavowski2 Comments

It struck me this morning, watching my breath rise in wispy, ghostlike puffs as I was wrapped in a long-sleeved insulated shirt and a vibrant insulated hoodie (I call this color please-don’t-hit-me-with-your-car-orange), to say nothing of the track pants, thick gloves, and knit cap.

You have to be a little bit crazy to do this.

Sport, Moon, Moon Phase, Mood, Run, Silhouette, Runners

Even a casual runner like myself will have to deal with a lot in the pursuit of a bit of exercise. Here in Atlanta, that includes some truly punishing hills just about anywhere you try to go, not to mention wickedly schizophrenic weather (it was 72 degrees on Christmas day, and in the upcoming five days we’ll go from 20 degrees to 60 and back again if the weather outlets are to be believed). But wherever you do this running thing, many struggles are the same. If you run in the cities or the suburbs, there’s traffic to dodge. If you run in the country or on trails, you’ve got ticks and snakes and mosquitoes and spiderwebs to avoid.

Today it’s cold weather, and while I know that calling 22 degrees “cold” earns a snort and a snigger from some of you folks up north, it’s about as cold as the bones of this fragile Georgian can stand. I’ve got almost a dozen pieces of cold-weather gear for running, and none of it seems to put me in any sort of comfort zone. Fleece-lined gloves. Moisture-wicking hats. Shirts in all thicknesses and weights. I permutate the system, layer up, and try to adjust for the slightest fluctuation in temperature, wind, and precipitation, but it’s impossible to get it right. When I start out, the cold slices through all that and chills the bones, but once the engine gets running, suddenly I’m sweltering in all these layers and running around with the jacket undone, the sleeves rolled up, the gloves in a pocket.

And the summer. God.

When you’re a not-in-the-best-shape-of-your-life dude like me, there’s only so many layers of clothing you’re comfortable removing, even if you run in the wee hours of the morning. Then the temperature creeps up into the nineties and every step feels like stepping forward into warm Jello, the air positively gelatinous with humidity. The clothes smell of sweat even after coming through the wash. Even your feet perspire.

Then there are the injuries, and a runner without injuries is like a politician without a closet full of skeletons. The past two years, I’ve fought off nagging injuries in the calves, heels, and ankles of both feet. My wife gets horrible blisters and knee issues and, through running, discovered she actually had a broken bone in her spine (probably from gymnastics earlier in life, but unearthed by running).

Point is, running, as a whole, tends toward the unpleasant. For the most part, it isn’t a lot of fun.

Yet, pounding the pavement in the relative stillness of the early morning, watching those puffs of misty breath rise and scatter before my face, feeling the cold leaking into the soles of my feet, the tips of my fingers, the bulb of my nose, it hit me.

Despite all that the run sucked (and it did suck: I was slower than I’ve been in weeks, I felt short of breath, and my left heel was acting up again), I was still undeniably enjoying myself. I was glad I’d hauled myself out of bed, despite not having to work today. The run felt right, like an old Def Leppard t-shirt from high school or your memory-foam pillow at the end of a particularly long day.

I guess it’s not surprising that I’ve embraced such a masochistic form of exercise: you have to be maybe more than a little bit crazy to decide in your thirties that you want to be a writer, and start committing hours every day toward what most people think of as a pipe dream. Putting down your words and thoughts and the bizarre worlds that exist in your mind for others to see. Thinking about stories and narratives and conflicts and subplots when you could just as easily veg out and watch a House marathon on the weekends (man, I miss that show). Choosing that mental torture when I could just as easily not seems as indicative as anything that there’s something wrong with me.

Writer, Shadow, Man

Running and writing, two great forms of torture that taste great together!

Is this a universal truth — that the things you love cause you pain and discomfort like this? Frankly, it’s kind of bullshit. I wish I enjoyed other forms of exercise, or even better, that I didn’t care about exercise at all, but I just can’t. Nothing else floats my boat. And writing … well, maybe all this will come to nothing, but I decided two years ago that not trying was no longer acceptable, so come hell or hot Atlanta summers (which are practically synonymous, but whatever), I’m going to keep going.

We must be crazy to choose this running life, this writing life.

But upon further reflection, we’d be even crazier not to.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: The Fickle Finger of Fate

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We are all touched.

The fickle finger of fate bestows on us through random chance a series of affinities, of likes and dislikes, of urges, of callings. I’m going to wager that, if you’re reading this, you’re called in some way to write, to tell stories. And that’s magical.

Michelangelo, Abstract, Boy, Child, Adult, Background

Not everybody has such a calling. Most people don’t. Everybody thinks they can write a novel, or a screenplay, or a memoir about their “amazing” life, but they can’t. Or, more importantly, they won’t. Writing is a lot of work, after all, and pretty thankless work at that (and that’s coming from a high school English teacher … I’m an authority on thankless work). And without the spark, without the calling, without the need in your bones to work at your writing, to learn how to tell a story, to sit in front of the screen for hours and days and months on end, writing becomes as impossible as flying a manned mission to Jupiter.

The calling makes it sufferable. The calling makes it possible to grind out the time in solitude, knowing that writing is not just something we do to pass the time; it’s an investment, if not in future windfalls and book deals and legions of adoring fans, then in the self. The writer is at peace when he writes; perhaps not outwardly (because some writers certainly do suffer with their product, and I’m no exception), but some small piece of the writer’s soul is only quiet when he practices his craft. Some ever-screaming facet of the self will only cease its torment when it’s given rein and allowed to stretch its legs once in a while.

Problem is, we don’t want to believe the calling. It’s all too easy to think I shouldn’t be doing this, or this is a waste of my time, or somebody else could do this so much better than me. And the subproblem is that on some level, those doubts are true. There are probably more immediately productive things we could be doing. It may, in fact, be a waste of our time. There are almost certainly others doing what we’re doing better than we’re doing it. That’s how the Howler Monkey of Doubt works — it takes something that’s true in one way and screeches at us until we believe it’s true in all ways.

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But the fact is, we should be doing this. There are seven billion people in the world, and they need to hear our stories — that’s why we invented language, after all. This isn’t a waste of our time — on the contrary, writing makes us better people. We learn more thoroughly what we truly think about things, we exorcise the demons of doubt and exercise our grey matter. And, sure, okay, somebody else might be better at doing what we do than we are — but that’s true for all disciplines, and it only changes if we work at what we do.

The truth is that the world needs storytellers, even if we think it’s saturated with them. If we have stories to tell, the world has audiences waiting to hear them — my crappy little middle-of-nowhere blog is a perfect example. Here I do nothing but blather on about whatever’s in my head, and somehow I’ve attracted almost 400 followers, and I even have some who read my work (and I even laugh at calling it “work”) almost every day. This makes me confident that when my novel is finished, though the likelihood is that it will land with a whimper rather than a mushroom cloud, it will find readers. It’ll find fans. The story I’m telling is the perfect one for somebody out there; for somebody, it’s exactly the story they need to hear.

Fate’s fickle finger touches us all differently. (Yeah, that sounded wrong.)

To embrace what the finger gives us (did it again) is to embrace who we are.

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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.

It’s ALMOST Time

Pavowski1 Comment

So a weird thing happened.

I was sitting here, working on the novel (you know, that thing I NEVER talk about), and it struck me. I’ve enjoyed the work over the last few days. Really enjoyed it. Story’s pretty good. Like the dialogue. Love the plot. It’s starting to feel pretty close to finished.

So on a lark (literally, I mounted a lark) I googled literary agents in Atlanta.

I’ve done this once before, years ago when I wrote a play that I thought was good. It filled me with faceless dread and mindless terror then, because I knew (or maybe only feared, it was impossible to tell) that the work was … I won’t say bad, but it certainly wasn’t everything it could be. I googled and then I cowered in fear and self-doubt, and I never submitted anything.

But now, I’ve put in the time. I’ve slaved over this book. It feels ready. So I googled for agents, and it didn’t fill me with terror.

It filled me with purpose.

I think the book is ready. I think I’m ready.

I'm Ready

Well, almost ready. Another ninety pages to edit.

But then I’m ready.

So … uh … how the balls do I find a good agent?

Glimpses of Non-Suckitude

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I was beginning to get a little fatigued with this latest edit. Cleaning up the junk language, tightening up all the moments, trimming out the unnecessary. It felt like most of what I had written was crap; that it all needed serious work before it could be “ready”.

But I reached a few passages today that absolutely crackle with life and energy. Passages that had me laughing to myself while I sat in my darkened room reading jokes I myself had written, even though I already knew all the punchlines. Passages possessed of a sort of self-evident, unconcerned eloquent beauty, the like of which I would not attribute to myself. Passages that make me think maybe I’m not so bad at this writing thing after all.

This novel (and this blog for that matter) is keenly interested in the question of inspiration: where it comes from, how useful it is, what it can do for you when you have it. And by and large, I have come to believe that inspiration is just a bunch of baloney sandwiches. You either work or you don’t, but some days are better than others.

Still.

As I read my own work of the last year and a half, it’s encouraging — and kind of awesome — to see those flashes of inspiration peeking out through the cracks.

I like to liken (like to liken, tee hee) writing to a long, arduous slog through vine-darkened jungle, or to a hopeless trek in a desert. And it damn sure feels that way a lot of days. But every now and then, light penetrates the canopy and wakes up the critters on the jungle floor, and the rare flowers open their petals to the light. Here and there, water bubbles up to shape an oasis amid the scorching sands.

For now, though, it’s back into the caves.