Tag: writing about writing

Tone it Down (Pun intended, but I regret it now)

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I’m struggling a lot with tone today.  No, not my shower- or car-singing (always pitch-perfect, thanks very much).  That is, the way I’m saying the things I’m trying to say.  Or maybe it’s a struggle with voice.  The two are interrelated but not interchangeable, which is irritating in practice and maddening to try to teach.  Point is, the howler monkey of doubt is all up in my business about the words I used today and I can’t shut him up.

Accidentally Inspired is a whimsical kind of story about a whimsical kind of guy in a whimsical kind of situation. (See, that sentence right there is the kind of thing I’m talking about.) The story itself is playful and fun, so it needs to be told (correction, it BEGS to be told) in a playful, at times ridiculous kind of way.  BUT (There is always a butt, and there is also always a but).  The rules of proper writing, and good writing, and especially of intelligent and, probably, consumable writing, dictate that playful, whimsical, overworded writing gets treated with an axe rather than a razor.  When I go through and edit, I’ll be cutting off limbs, not whiskers.

But I love my playful, too-verbose tone, the Id-Writer protests, it works for the story and it works for me and I LIKE It GOLDFINGER IT DON’T MAKE ME CHANGE IT.  And I’m at war with myself, because on a lot of levels, I agree with him.  However, the Id-Writer and the ego-writer will eventually have to sit down and share a conversation, and I’m afraid that when they do, I’ll need to hire a cleaning crew to get the blood off the walls.  The ego-writer wants the book to be read, and to be accessible to everybody, and for people to love the story and the way that I tell it, but the Id-Writer only wants to tell the best fargoing story in the best fargoing way I know how to tell it.  The Id-Writer swears a lot more, and is (probably) more likely to bludgeon the Ego-Writer with a keyboard or a hammer or in fact anything else that may be handy, including my own precious pseudoganglia.  Are there pseudoganglia in the brain?  I don’t know, I don’t do Science (see below).

The more I think about it, the more it dawns on me that this is probably a problem (a probable problem, whee) best left for Future Me to deal with, not that Past Me and Present Me aren’t adding to the steaming pile that is (will be) is inbox on the daily.  Nonetheless, it’s bothering me now, and if it’s bothering me now, it’s gonna end up on the blarg, and here it is.

So how do I deal with voice and tone in the here and now?  I have no fargoing idea.  I hate to cop out, least of all on myself, but I really am at a loss as to how to fix this problem.  The tone of a story isn’t just window dressing.  It’s an integral part, a functioning limb in the Rube-Goldberg machine that is story.  The story-bone’s connected to the tone-bone.  (ahuh, huh.  I said tone-bone.)  Change the tone and you change the story.  The Tell-Tale Heart, if told in a humorous fashion, could very well be a humorous story.  Take the rhyme and meter out of Doctor Seuss and you’re left with a sharknado-ey yarn about a couple of bored kids and an asgard-hole of a cat and his two asgard-hole pets.

I guess that for lack of a better idea I’m just going to have to do with this problem what I do with 98 percent of other problems that have cropped up while writing this thing, which is make a note of it (see this blog entry), chuck it in Future Me’s landfill of an inbox, and allow my Id-Writer to toss back another creative beverage, press on writing, then run screaming madly into the night, leaving a trail of ink-blood and rent pages in his wake.

Say what you will, but that guy knows how to party.

If you’re reading this, help (Future) Me out.  Any thoughts on how to clean up my tone and get all my overstatements under control without totally changing the feel of my piece?

(Sidenote).  On the topic of I don’t do Science:

This weekend, while sharing dinner with my family, my engineer sister related a question from a very difficult engineer’s exam that she has just taken (results pending, but considering her average level of achievement, I imagine they’ll not only pass her but ask her to write the next version of the test).  I’ll do my best.  Say you have to replace 100 light bulbs in an apartment building.  Each bulb has a 1 percent chance to be faulty before it’s plugged in.  Say you take a random sample of five bulbs.  What is the likelihood that the bulb you chose will be faulty?  (I fully own that I may be remembering the question wrongly in order to make my answer seem righter.  Sorry, sis.)

Easy, right?  1 percent means one in one hundred.  Five bulbs means five one-in-one-hundred shots, which is to say five-in-one-hundred, which is to say one in twenty, which is to say, FIVE PERCENT.  This math I did in my head quickly before announcing my findings to the table.

My dad, a math teacher, just shook his head.  My sister, the engineer, did the same, and then said, “That’s cute,” before sharing a laugh with my dear, loving wife.  (NOT THAT SHE KNOWS MATH EITHER.)  Hear me now, and believe me later.  You don’t tell a thirty-year-old man that he’s cute.  That’s a good way to get a dirty look and a sternly-worded blarg post written about you.  If said thirty-year-old man does or says something that is so oversimplified and ridiculous that it doesn’t make sense to explain to him how he’s wrong (I’m not saying this is ME, okay, I’m just SAYING), the way to handle it is by nodding politely at him and telling him yes, not only is that correct, but you’ve brought a new level of simplicity to what I wrongly assumed was a very complicated problem.

Take that, sis.  You may be smarter at every turn (including the turns I haven’t thought of yet, because you took Calculus in college while I took creative writing) but you’ve now been lambasted in the immortal turns of the internet.  LAMBASTED I SAY.

Keep Calm and…

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Time, as they say, marches on. Yesterday’s roadblock felt like a monstrous one.  I am happy to say, however, that as with all things, a bit of time and a simple willingness to return to work and keep moving forward have righted the ship. I am sure that it must unnerve some writers to think […]

The Howler Monkey of Doubt

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It’s a widely-held aphorism amongst creative types that we tend to be our own worst critics. This is doubly true.

In the first sense, we are our own worst critics in that I am certainly not aware of anybody out there who judges my own work more harshly than I do myself.  I’ll grant, my audience is virtually nonexistent at this point, but I am constantly naggled at by a vicious little voice in the back of my mind: “That thing you just wrote is stupid!”  “You should have used more commas there!”  “You should use less commas there!”  That OTHER thing you just wrote there is stupid!”  “They’re all gonna laugh at you!”  I’d say that one of the greatest barriers to my progress on the Project has been getting that little howler monkey to shut the fargo up.  Problem is, he never shuts up.  Much like the Id-Writer, who is always screeching from the damp cellar he gets locked in, “WRITE ABOUT THIS AND ADD MORE METAPHORS AND MAYBE MAKE A COMPARISON TO JESUS OR AN INFINITELY-LEGGED OCTOPUS OR I DUNNO WRITE ABOUT COOKIES,” the best I can do to overcome the ever-present, ever-negative voice of writer’s doubt is to tune it out for a while.  That doesn’t mean it shuts up.  That means that, like the muzak in an elevator, or like the phantasmal infinitely-legged octopus floating just out of my line of sight, I tune it out and attempt to live my life. 

In the second sense, we are our own worst critics in that we are TERRIBLE JUDGES OF OUR OWN WORK.  Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for other creative types; I imagine it’s easy for a Stephen King, for example, to discern whether the pages he’s written today are utter tripe or not. Personally, I have no idea.  I wrote 1300 words today, and haberdashery, I think they’re pretty good.  There are parts in there that suck, but I enjoyed them while I was writing them.  Some of the metaphors in there are pretty darn clever, I think, but who knows, maybe you’d read them and find them inane.  I really have no idea.  I just vomit up my word-slurry (slurry has been my word of the week) and hope that when I finish writing it, I can edit it up into something that will eventually pass as entertaining and not awful to the masses.  (Let’s be optimistic, right?)

It’s a weird place, being a writer.  I sit here, banging my fingers against this poor defenseless keyboard which has never done me any wrong (the tablet keyboard is another story, I want to murder the built-in tablet keyboard in the face), pouring the better part of an hour most days into telling a story (which I’m not sure is any good) to an audience (which I’m not sure I will even have) in a way that will hopefully be funny and poignant (which I’m not even sure I’m capable of).  It’s a quagmire of uncertainty, a web of doubt, a forest of what-ifs. And it’s daunting as haberdashery.  On the daily, I am daunted.  Always, always, always, the howler monkey of self-doubt chitters away at me.  It flings its tiny little balls of doubt-poop at the wall, it leaves the peels of its doubt-bananas on the floor for me to slip on (doubt bananas?  Really?  YES.)  Whatever form it takes, the message is the same. 

You’re not good enough.  Quit.  Writing is hard.  It would be so easy to quit.  Just quit.  QUIT.

image

No thank you, howler monkey of doubt.  Not today.

Take the Long Way Home (some writing advice to my future self)

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I just finished the first act of Accidentally Inspired.

This was a surprise to me.  I hadn’t been writing it with a 3-act structure in mind, though certainly I’m aware that stories tend to read well when there’s a structure like that in place (problem is introduced in the first act, characters bang their heads against the problem in the second act, problem is resolved in the third act).  Nonetheless, I’ve never been much of a planner.  In storytelling, I like to learn who the characters are, decide what the central problem is, and then simply write the characters and let them figure it out.

In retrospect, this might be why I’ve burned myself out on writing in the past.  Because as much as any character worth his salt can surely find his way to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it helps if there’s a trail of breadcrumbs, a map, or ANY SEMBLANCE OF ANYTHING TELLING YOU YOU’RE MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.  Up until the current project — and I mean that as literally as I possibly can mean it, as in I took action against this problem TODAY following my Project writing session — here’s how I write.

Step 1: The idea strikes.

Step 2: A few days / weeks / months pass in which the idea putters around my head like a hobo looking for change.  If the idea is a good one, it will grow, drawing my focus and attention to it like protoplanets gathered matter in the infant solar system.  If it sucks, it withers and dies like every tomato plant I have ever tried to grow.

Step 3: I start to write.  Notice there is no “planning” step.  I simply pick a moment at the beginning of the story and begin to write it.

Step 4: In a flurry of energy and excitement, I write several scenes / pages, typically about five to ten pages or so, and maybe I even take a few character notes (not PLOT notes, you know, things that would help me to tell the story and make sure things stay interesting, but CHARACTER notes, so that I know exactly what kind of patent leather shoes to put on the ANTZhole lawyer character when he arrives at the end of the first act because THESE ARE THINGS THAT MATTER).  Then I get distracted with something; let’s say that it’s painting a bathroom or replacing some light fixtures and definitely not watching Seinfeld reruns.

Step 5: The idea falls from the pockets of my mind like a discarded candy wrapper, to lie forgotten in the ditches of my memory for a couple years, until it reoccurs to me out of nowhere (probably while I’m, again, patching some drywall, and definitely not watching the Lord of the Rings films again), at which point I think, oh yeah, I started writing that idea a while back, I wonder if I still have my notes on it somewhere?

Step 6: While looking for the notes on the original idea, I have an idea for another idea, and the process begins again, cycling back on itself into infinity.  This can occur once every few months or every few years.

So, how can I be sure that it’s FOR REALZ this time and not just an extended step 4?

I’m glad I asked.  For one, and I really can’t pinpoint the exact reason for it now more than at any other time, but I simply want to make it happen.  There’s more drive there and, frankly, I don’t want to question it too much, I just want to ride it like the strong wind that it is.  For another, as I mentioned above, I’ve taken some proactive steps to make sure I don’t bog down.  Like salting the roads before an ice storm (and I live in Atlanta, so enjoy the stupidity and futility of that simile), this will keep my sharknado from spinning out of control.

So I’ve outlined some high points for the story to follow.  Not a rock-solid outline — technically I already have that in the form of the stage play, though in a lot of ways that’s out the window if it’s anything other than a ROUGH outline — but rather some tentpole moments, as my kung-fu master Chuck Wendig would call them (if Douglas Adams is my spirit guide, Chuck is my ANTZ-kicking bearded ninja guru, perching on treetops and dispensing wisdom and beatdowns with one hand tied).  For the moment, it’s a scribbled series of notes: this happens, then that happens, at some point these characters need to make this happen, try to bring this situation about.  It’s what I see in the distance for now, and it’s by those shining points of light that I will steer through the darkness.

But.  (There’s always a butt.)

Translating this story from play to novel has taught me a few things.  First of all, the dialogue is easy, it’s the descriptions that are hard for me.  Being that there is virtually all of the former and none of the latter in stage plays, it’s easy to see why I gravitated to those (and, likely, still will in the future).  Second, stories are living things.

I set out to tell the story of the play in novel form, and it was like tossing a sea monkey on steroids into the ocean.  That thing swelled up and expanded and started growing all sorts of spider appendages and lizard tails and buzzard beaks and IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES.  As I write the characters, I keep learning new things about them, they keep doing things that surprise me, and as a result, the story is taking odd turns I never expected.  And therein lies the lesson I learned from my work today.

Are you listening, future me?  REMEMBER THIS MOMENT, because you learned something today, and if you forget it, Past Me is going to reach up through space and time and punch you right in the nads.  You hear me?  RIGHT IN THE NADS.  It’ll hurt me as much as it hurts you, but sometimes you have to send a fargoing message.

TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME.  Sure, plot the path.  Figure out how you’re going to get from where you are now to the end you imagine.  But don’t be afraid to blaze a new trail, to take a turn down a side street and see what secrets are hidden off the main drag.  Maybe the end you end up with is better than the end you thought you wanted.  (Whose end?)

Following that advice has led me, as I mentioned back at the top of this post, to the end of the first act of this novel.  The characters are all stuck, they’re all in trouble, they’re all in doubt.  They’re at the edge of a cliff, and it’s hard for any of them to see the way out.  (BUT THE ID-WRITER SEES ALL).  It’s a moment that never existed in the staged version of the story, caused by a character who existed only as a throwaway joke in the staged version, and yet it fits so perfectly (at least in my mind at the moment) that I don’t see how the story could unfold any other way.

For now.

So they’re stuck.  Tomorrow the second act begins, and it’s time to start digging them out.

OR IS IT?

*evil laughter echoes*

*sounds of struggle*

Sorry about that.  We’ve really got to get a handle on that guy.

Late Night Write

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Getting the writing done a little bit later than I’d rather.  But such is life.  I still have yet to miss a day or a deadline, and that’s something.  In fact, I sat down to write tonight at 9pm telling myself, “just get the 900 words and sack out,” and my ink-crazed id-writer half kept me going all the way to 1400 words, where my clearer-thinking half realized that if the rest of us didn’t get together and stop him soon, he might keep us up and writing all night, so we tagged him with the tranq gun (yeah, there’s a tranq gun in my head for when my other mes get out of hand, what do YOU use??) and he’s taking a little nappy-nap now.  And YES, it’s considered to be late at night at 10:30, I’m the parent of a toddler and THIS IS MY LIFE.

Spring Break is halfway over — actually more than halfway, now that today’s at an end — and that’s sad.

Two things from today.

First of all, I had my first post-podiatrist run on my not-actually-shattered foot, now infused with cortisone, AKA liquefied unicorn horn, AKA jumpin’ jamba juice, AKA I-don’t-know-what-pain-is-anymore happy medicine.  Seriously, in my first contiguous three-mile run in over a month, I felt not a tweak of pain or discomfort or “wrongness” in the heel, and nothing since.  Not only was there no pain, but I found myself running faster and easier than I have in months.  I kept going faster than I wanted to and reminding myself to slow down, which, for a runner, is sort of like asking your torturers to give you a few more lashes and really take their time with the thumbscrews.  The run over, I iced it and stretched the foot, per doctor’s orders, and for today at least, it’s holding up fine.

What’s not holding up fine, on the other hand, are my lungs, for two reasons.  First, I’m out of shape.  Not running consistently since basically December has reduced my conditioning to (for me) pitiful levels, and I cut the run short today as much out of an inability to breathe enough as out of caution not to overwork the heel.  Second, spring seems to have sprung here in Georgia, and if you’ve ever been in Georgia in the merry merry months of springtime, you know that the trees are mating, and their yellow, uh, genetic legacy just lays like a blanket over EVERYTHING.  We had an honest-to-goodness deluge of rain at the beginning of the week, and in the two days since, the pollen has piled up enough that our blue car is now blue-under-a-fine-misting-of-vomit-yellow.  The breeze stirs and you see it swirling like a desert sandstorm.  The trees rustle and it comes cascading down like the yellow snowfall of your nightmares.  When it rains again, the rivers and streams will look like streams of snot.  So me, I go out for my first run in a week, and as much as it’s a nice day out, I’m breathing in these coarse particulates by the metric sharknado-ton.  Oh, but I’m not breathing so much as gasping for my life, so I don’t even have the benefit of the filtration system in the nose, no, it’s all going straight down the gullet and powdering the inside of my lungs.  I feel confident that if you could shine a blacklight into my trachea, my entire respiratory system would fluoresce with this gunk.

So I’m hacking up what looks like powdered yellow-cake uranium, but I had a good run, so that’s awesome.  And I got my writing done for today, and that’s awesome too.

I wish there was more cleverness to be had in this post, but the id-writer is snoring so hard over there with that dart in his neck that he woke the neighbor’s dog up.  Nothing but drool and night terrors for that guy.  What a mess.