Tag: writing about writing

Broken Ankle at the Finish

Pavowski3 Comments

I know, okay? I get it.

It’s become too much of a motif around here, this procrastination, this failure to complete, this inability to batten the last hatches. If writing my novel has been a marathon, I’ve snapped an ankle in the last mile. Or maybe sprained it. Or maybe I just tripped and fell and I’m only really really tired, and every scratch feels like a gash, and every shallow breath is a gasp. But that’s no excuse for not slogging myself across the line.

There isn’t much left to do. There really isn’t. I can only belabor the point so much. I can only pretend for so long that I’m stuck on an issue — this character isn’t working out so well, or that plot turn doesn’t feel quite right — before the truth bubbles to the surface like an eyeball in your soup: that I’m not stuck on an issue within the novel, I’m stuck on finishing the novel.

Because that’s all there is. This first edit has drawn on like an endless summer, and I’m bogged down just a mile from the finish line. The car’s blown a tire and there’s no phone service, and even stepping foot out into the sun has me sweat-soaked and exhausted. The prospect of knuckling up and walking it out to the finish has me dreaming of shade trees and ice-cold lemonade.

The last issue is this one character. I don’t know what to do with her, and I could conceivably go back and write her into a few more scenes or write her out of the novel completely… it honestly makes no difference to me at this point. I’m almost ready to hand the manuscript off to some beta readers (a term that never made sense to me… I mean, I guess I’d be the alpha reader, but does that really make sense? Anyway…) and just let them tell me what to do with her, but then I know it’s probably not a professional move to hand off a work with glaring, unresolved issues and expect other people to fix them for me.

But even more than I’m frustrated at my block about finishing this thing, I’m even more frustrated at the prospect of not finishing it. I didn’t come this far; I didn’t write 90,000 words and then re-write about a third of them; to give up now. I can smell the blistered pork of the hot dogs, taste the swirled sticky sugar of the cotton candy. (What? It’s totally gonna be a carnival when I finish.)  No, I’m going to finish this damn novel if I have to crawl across the line dragging two dead, broken legs behind me.

And sooner rather than later. Because I’m a little bit burned on it.

Not that that’s not glaringly obvious or anything.

*Removes cobweb from eyebrow*

Get Up and Go (A Gramble About Gumption)

Pavowski12 Comments

By the way, “Gramble” is just a word I made up. I wanted to keep alliterating with “G”s so I stuck one on the front of “ramble”. Don’t be afraid of my Frankenstein’s monster of a word. Its literary thirst for blood can only be satiated with ink.

Anyway. Gumption. Where does it go?

Some days the gumption is there; it burns away in your belly, it secretes its smoky certainty through your pores and fills you to the tippy top with vigor and optimism. Other days, the fire goes out, and all that’s left is the ashy residue of a bonfire, some empty beer bottles, and a few condom wrappers from where all the cool couples disappeared into the woods.

“Gumption” itself is one of those outdated words that you don’t hear much anymore, but there’s no word quite like it. We’ve got the newfangled Play-Doh lump of a word, “sticktoitiveness”, which is not so much a word as a philosophy. There’s “tenacity”, which has something to do with gumption, but isn’t the same thing. Then you can go and get all negatively-connotated and toss out “stubborn”, which, again, rubs up against gumption but doesn’t take the prize turkey home.

“Gumption” is homey and colloquial and down-to-earth. It’s a don’t-give-up mentality that somehow runs the gamut between boundless optimism and pigheaded refusal to back down. It’s a quiet, determined certainty that with hard work, anything can be achieved.

Maybe it’s one of those things that’s impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.

Gumption is a concept that has resonated with me since I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I first read it in my senior year of high school, then again in my sophomore year at college, then again in my fourth year of college, then again shortly after graduating college, then again after I graduated college again, and it’s recently been in my brain that maybe I ought to read it again. It’s a fascinating little book that’s not actually very much about Zen or motorcycle maintenance, but rather about the world at large and how you choose to view it. If you’re philosophically inclined at all, you’ll probably get some mileage out of it. One of its defining moments for me is a scene wherein the protagonist fixes his buddy’s misfiring motorcycle with an old beer can. The protagonist is pleased with his ingenuity; the buddy is flustered and ultimately unable to live with the notion that a piece of trash could fix everything that’s wrong with his bike. He’s too caught up in the idea of what the bike should look like and what fixing it should entail to realize that the chemically-treated, rust-proof surface on the inside of the can provides all the fixing his bike could ever want at a fraction of the cost and time needed for a “proper” fix.

Anyway, I love the idea of gumption — that inevitable, inescapable quality within the self that just knows how to buckle down and get sharknado done — but I’m faced with a terrible truth lately. Mine is gone.

Like, a few months ago, I had it. I knew right where it was. In the left lobe of my brain, next to the wrenches and the repository of dangling participles. But now it’s gone. Misplaced? Stolen? Dried up?

I’m reminded of an Aerosmith lyric: “My get-up-and-go must have got up and went.”

Seriously. I’m behind on the novel. I wanted to finish the first edit by the end of January, and now it’s trailing off into March and I’m always “just a few weeks away.” I’m behind on grading papers at work and have been since… well… January. Even my posts on the blarg have been fewer and farther between since… ahem… January.

What happened in January?

I have no idea, but whatever it was ran my gumption right out of town. But, see, that doesn’t make sense. Because gumption is a part of who you are. Right? It can no more leave you than your wits, or your good looks, or… maybe these are bad examples.

The point is, my gumption is missing lately. If you’ve seen it, please tell it I would very much appreciate it if it would return home. I have a lot of work to get done. And a lot of get-ups that need to get going.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

To Extremes

Pavowski3 Comments

This week’s prompt is “an emotion and its opposite.” Now, the obvious one is love/hate, and that would be an easy one to explore. As a writer, I swing back and forth between loving and hating my work like the tides. Hell, I swing back and forth between loving and hating the craft. But love/hate is obvious.

No, the dichotomy that seems most apt to me is confidence/doubt. These two phases, like the peaks and troughs of a ray of ultraviolet light, alternate with alarming alacrity (triple alliteration bonus, whee).

One minute, I feel at home in the me who is on this adventure. I know what I’m doing. I’m staying smart, looking sharp, making good decisions. Every new bit of text is a good one. Every cut makes perfect sense. Every edit improves the whole. There is no shaking me off the course I’m on as I work inexorably toward writing the best inaugural novel that’s ever been written.

Then the light goes out, and I remember that I’m miles deep in an unfamiliar jungle with the dark rustle of foreboding creatures of the night on all sides of me. That bit of dialogue I thought was scorchingly clever the first time around seems a bit hackneyed upon further review. The character arc I’ve worked so hard to create feels like a flamingo on roller skates; all awkward angles and feathers crashing everywhere. The cut that felt so necessary when I made it now looks like a gaping wound, and the patient is bleeding out.

Then I stop working for a while, and by the time I come back to the novel, I feel like I could drive nails with my forehead again.

Do any other writers suffer from the same up-and-down, hot-and-cold, bulletproof-then-made-of-glass feeling? Do all of them? I have a hard time believing that my sentiments on writing are unique, but by the same token, not every writer can be so schizophrenic.

In fairness, though, the ride is pretty fun. There’s something to be said for riding the roller coaster til you throw up the oversized cotton candy you just horked down while you were waiting in line. Then wiping the pink fizz from your lips and lining up for another turn. Some might call that crazy.

No, that would be me. I’d call that crazy. I’m too old for that sharknado. But the writing, okay. I can handle the swings of that ride.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Stakes and the Blarg

Pavowski3 Comments

Boy, oh boy, do I love a good stake. Charred crust, pink and bloody in the middle, melt-in-your-mouth flavor, rancid farts for the rest of the night…

What? Oh. STAKES.

Woo! Vampire hunters and silver crosses and garlic and…

Huh? Ugh. Okay, fine. Just stakes.

I guess there’s a lot to be said about stakes in writing, but today I’ve got the stakes of writing on the brain. Not least of which because I’m passively reading a book called The Right to Write by Julia Cameron. (“Passive” reading is my pleasant euphemism for “book-I’m-reading-on-the-toilet.”) And… well, for starters, I don’t think I’m this book’s target audience. Each chapter is essentially its own workshop and meditation on some aspect of the writing process, and much of it is the kind of rah-rah-rah-you-can-do-it stuff that would be more at home in a literal cheerleading squad than in a book aimed at burgeoning authors. For another, the tone of the book is through-and-through the sort of hippy-dippy, peace-and-love drivel that can give you a toothache if you swallow too much of it. It’s all “writing is a gift” and “the story speaks through me” and “anybody and everybody is a writer at heart”. Then there’s a lot of meditation on the sun rising over her private valley and rumination on her horses as they watch her through the kitchen window, and that’s about when I really want to induce vomiting so I don’t choke on her privilege. Now, okay, those ideas are lovely and all, but it’s all too Kumbayyah for me to ingest in anything other than the tiniest bites.

I don’t need that. I enjoy writing enough in its own right that I don’t need somebody pushing me to do it or ensuring me that it’s okay for me to do it. Whether or not anybody is truly “cut out” for writing is irrelevant, as any list of bestselling books will tell you. Horrible writers still write. This book is aimed at convincing somebody who’s perhaps too timid to leap into the pond that he might, in fact, have something worth writing about in his mind. It’s designed to invite you into the world of writing one baby-step at a time, by writing first about things in your house, then in the news, then about your family, and blah blah blah. If you’re a sometime reader of my blarg, it’s pretty obvious that I do that stuff on my own already.

That said, there’s something comforting in the way she puts her ideas forth.  And even among the platitudes and smug self-righteousness, there are gems of wisdom, little kernels of edible advice embedded in the stew of saccharine crap.

The one on my mind has to do with stakes, and what she has to say about it is this. When novice writers (and sometimes experienced writers, too) sit down to do their capital-W Writing — be it their novel or screenplay or short story or news article or whatever — there is this inescapable sense of pressure and dread surrounding the act. Because it has to be perfect. If I write something crappy, that’s all anybody will ever remember. It’s all I will ever remember. Inability to achieve that perfection and to get all the things exactly right is paralyzing; it can lock up the mental faculties like a bit of chain snarled in the spokes of your bicycle. And this is a fear that I’m on a first-name basis with. (Its name is Todd. Like all horrible things.)

The well-hidden reciprocal of that fear is the fact that so many of us, writers and non-writers alike, engage in writing every day in which we feel no pressure at all to perform at some elevated level. These are your e-mails to colleagues about whatever projects you’re working on, your text messages to your spouse about what you need to pick up at the grocery store on the way home. Okay, it’s not Writing, but they are still words that you form for the purpose of communicating an idea to somebody else… and that’s writing, innit?

The trick, then, is to capture that free, unfazed, not-even-aware-of-any-kind-of-pressure feeling associated with e-mails and apply it to your capital-W Writing, to leap into your manuscript with the same abandon with which you fire off a scathing comment on a message board or a snarky response to your sister’s joke about your mom. It’s hard to do, but I’ve felt flashes of it when working on my novel.

It almost made me mad when I realized it. While I was having a chuckle at all the peace-love-dope sentiment in her book about writing, Cameron had thrown a literary dart and pinned my Id-Writer to the corkboard like a doomed insect. In her suggestion that writing doesn’t have to be this big deal that a lot of people (myself certainly among them) make it out to be, she had explained away the entire r’aison d’etre for this blarg. This is my low-stakes writing. It doesn’t matter what I write here; what matters is simply that I write. That I break apart the dam of mud and sticks clogging up the river of my faculties. That I pull the release valve on the hot-water heater of my brain. That I let the toddler out into the yard to run around in circles and scream its head off so that the adult in my Ego-Writer can get some peace.

This, then, is why we read; this is why it’s important to engage critically even when the subject matter seems like a laugh. You never know when the river of sharknado is going to belch up a hunk of gold. I’m going to keep reading Cameron’s book, even though it irks me, and even though I will no doubt find myself rolling my eyes like a hamster on a wheel at its pithy sayings. Much as it gives me the chuckles, there may just be a few more juicy tidbits in its pages.

Also, it was a gift, and I’d feel really bad about tossing it.

Thanks, sis.

No, not that sister. The other one.

Thanks.

Just Junk

Pavowski7 Comments

In keeping with my realization and resolution yesterday (not a New Year’s Resolution, just a regular old un-arbitrarily-linked-to-meaningless-space-time-data resolution), I attacked the edit hard today. Lots of parsing, lots of tidying, lots of trimming and sweeping, but no reconstructive surgery. And I was flying. I got through twenty pages, wrote several new paragraphs that needed inserting and deleted a handful that were just cluttering up the joint. Twenty pages in a day!

And as I always do when I’m reading over my own writing, I realized another thing. My prose is lousy with junk language.

It’s a first draft, so I’m not mad at myself, but it was still shocking to see how much I lean on empty modifiers and redundant qualifiers. Prime example? Just.

Not just as in right, but just as in only just. This is a word that’s practically invisible to me in speech — I knew that already — but in my writing, it flows out just as invisibly (see? Just there. AND AGAIN.) To be honest, I didn’t even spot it until I was thirty minutes into my work, and then only because just appeared twice in the same sentence. I’d carelessly used it twice by mistake, but the sudden jolt of reading it twice gave me pause. Then I pondered.

An invaluable tool during the edit has been the “find” feature. I can search for swear words (which need editing out), chapter titles (to track down errant plotlines and quickly navigate the document), and goofy little symbols I’ve thrown in to mark trouble spots. It’s a great tool for making quick work of pervasive problems and finding my way around, but today it found a new task: Seek and destroy.

“Just” went into the finder. Actually, “just ” with a space went into the finder, to weed out any fancy words like justice or justified or Justin (all Justins should be removed from all books, just on principle, but that’s a topic for another post). The result? I had written “just” into the book 358 times. The number as a number doesn’t do itself justice. That’s three hundred, fifty eight times I used the word “just” as a modifier in the course of a book that’s 175 pages in Word. Two per page.

An epidemic.

Out came the scissors and the “just”s began falling to the ground like my hair, back when I used to have enough hair to necessitate going in for haircuts. Fifty of them got cut with no other modification to the lines they appeared in, another fifty got removed with minor modification, and the other two hundred fifty are slated for summary destruction tomorrow. Now, don’t get me wrong. Adverbs have their place. But for me, this junk language is as obvious a crutch as you could hope to see.

I usually like to dig below the surface and make extra meaning out of my issues, but there’s nothing extra in this one. There’s something to be said for conversational tone here on the blarg and in, y’know, conversation. But that junk language creeping into “proper” writing is bad news, and I have a feeling that much like roaches in your kitchen, there are a hundred hiding in the walls for every one that you see in the open.