Tag: writing about writing

Super-Secret Hidden Writing Goals

PavowskiLeave a comment

I am pleased to report that I made my writing goal for today.

I am less than pleased to report that it’s the 4th day in a row in which I have just barely made my writing goal for today.

Disappointment over not exceeding goals is sort of a first-world problem to the stars; this I fully realize.  Truth be told, though, 900 words daily for five days every week is not the “real” goal.  Okay, it’s the goal I talk about and it’s the goal I won’t allow myself not to meet.  I understand it’s maybe even still a little bit of a lofty goal for a guy like myself with a full time job and a full time baby and a full time wife and a full time distractable streak hold on while I get a cookie.

Where was I before I ate that ENTIRE BAG OF COOKIES??  Ah, secret goal.  Yes, the 900 words is the public goal, but the secret goal for my id-writer half is more like in the range of 1200-1500 words daily.  “Why two goals,” I hear myself asking myself.  “Because,” my self tells myself, “the first goal is for your baseline don’t-feel-like-sharknado-goal so that you can have the sense of accomplishing something for the day.  It’s the congrats, you got up and put on pants today – you have officially reached the bare minimum for living in society, you may now relax goal.  It’s not the goal you strive for, it’s the baseline standard you set for yourself.”  “What kind of sadist (masochist?) sets a crazy-ANTZ goal like that for himself,” lazy me further asks, “it’s bad enough I’ve undertaken this writing project in the first place, now I have to deal with a bare-minimum goal that’s higher than it really needs to be AND a super-secret psycho goal?”  “Only if you want to feel a soul-saturating sense of true accomplishment.”

Lazy me then kidney-kicks Overzealous me and curb-stomps his neck.  And overzealous me has gotten curb-stomped a fair bit this week.  While the soul-saturating sense of true, deep, secret second goal accomplishment is nice, it just hasn’t happened this week.  Maybe I’m coming down off the high of committing to this project, maybe it’s because I’m about to start the murky middle of the book, maybe it’s because the freaking bottom dropped out of the temperature outside and my lizard blood is cooling in my veins.  One way or another, I just haven’t been able to push through and go the extra mile this week.

This is the same problem that led to my running injury, of course.  The desire to be greater than the challenge rather than just meeting it.  Had I been satisfied with simply starting back to running a little bit at a time following a minor injury, odds are I could have avoided overdoing it and borking things even worse than before.  (By the way, I borking love the Swedish Chef.)  Similarly, if I could just be pleased with myself for meeting the public goal, I wouldn’t have to deal with the sense of shortcoming that I’m suffering on the inside from not meeting the real goal.

Having two goals suddenly strikes me as kind of dumb.  But then, id-writer says NUT UP, SOLDIER, AND WRITE SOME FARGOING PAGES.  This little internal feud is not likely to get resolved or to go anywhere, so I just need to make sure it keeps pushing me forward.

This kind of circular thinking was almost certainly driving my words today; I slipped into a much more verbose, Douglas Adams-esque prose, which never fails to make me smile.  Problem is, I fear it may be a little bit too verbose to be viable if I want to move toward actually getting this thing published.

HOWEVER STILL FURTHER, the first draft is not a time for second-guessing or over-editing.  The important thing is getting the words down.  I accomplished that, and while I don’t know if the way I’m telling the story is right, the story I’m telling definitely feels right.

Here’s a bit of the text in question.

  • “Still,” the reader might protest, “a live chicken?  Surely the ability to produce such a thing at will is nothing short of magical and should, therefore, be outside of the realm of her ability.”  Too right.  And were the muse in question any other than the muse of comedy, the reader would indeed be correct.  However, being, as she was, the muse of comedy, Thalia always kept chickens around in various iterations (live, on the verge of laying eggs, shedding feathers crazily, cooked, rubber) because the comedic possibilities really are inexhaustible, as Gonzo of the Muppets would readily avouch.

    Comedy, however, was the least of her concerns at the moment; what Thalia wanted was a distraction, and as far as distractions which can be found in crummy apartments in metropolitan areas go, a live chicken will certainly do in a pinch.

     

So, I dunno.  Probably too wordy.  But it still kept me on track for today, and that’s 14 writing days in a row on track, and THAT AIN’T BAD.

Thought I Took a Spill

PavowskiLeave a comment

Yikes, I let a couple of days get by without a blog post.  Unless you count Saturday’s Flash Fiction.  I DON’T.  Those little Flash Fictions, tangential though they may be to the Project, count as REAL WRITING, and the blog doesn’t.  Never mind that some of my blog posts go on longer than some of my daily court-mandated Project writing (The court, of course, is the court convened by my id-writer and his slavering, ink-blood crazed alter egos).  It doesn’t count for my daily WordCount ™ and it therefore does not count.

That said, I feel a little bit of failure when I don’t get around to posting just a little bit here.  Okay, my frame of reference is not long enough for me to claim a statistically significant sample size (alliteration x4, c-c-c-combo!) but I feel like if my daily progress on the Project is the equivalent of hooking the car up to a two-ton trailer and dragging it down a muddy road to make some productive work happen, then my writing here on the Blarg (yep, just renamed the Blog to “The Blarg”, make it so) is the equivalent to unhooking the trailer and driving 200 miles an hour down a side street.  It burns out the gunk, clears the pipes, stretches the metaphorical legs of my metaphorical engine so that I can do more metaphorical “writing”.  Wait, the legs aren’t metaphorical.  And neither is the “writing.”  (The quotation marks, however, ARE metaphors — for the BLINDERS I HAVE TO PUT ON TO GET THE GOLDFINGER WRITING DONE SOME DAYS.)

At any rate, failure to blog felt a little bit like failure to write over the weekend, although I clearly did that.  Upon further review, the ruling on the field stands, and I am DonDraper pleased with my latest bit of Flash Fiction, The First Wave.  That one took me in new directions on a couple of fronts and, well, I said it already but I’m pleased with it.  Go me.

In fact, The First Wave felt doubly like a success because I completed it under duress: I wrote about 60% of it on the car ride back from my nephew’s birthday party in Alabama.  I deliberately did not name the city in which we were in (oh man, my English teacher brain hated letting that one slip by), not out of a concern for anonymity or avoidance of non-existent stalkers, but because it’s Fargoing Alabama which means it doesn’t matter what part of it I spent the day in, it was still Alabama, and that’s bad enough, isn’t it.  (My apologies to friends, relations, and other acquaintances who might enjoy Alabama, or worse yet, live there.  But you live in Alabama.  Come on.)  So yeah.  Conceived and written under the duress of Alabama.  Huge W-I-N.

Then I took Sunday off.  And proceeded to do nothing with the entire day except go to the store and flollop around the house.  A rare and pretty glorious day, one that merited a break even from Blarging.

But it’s Monday, and that means a return to the breach.  It was a busy day at work, compounded by the fact that I’m taking a day off in the middle of the week.  By the way, as a teacher, calling it a “day off” from work is a complete misnomer.  Because there is no respite.  You have to leave an assignment that the kids aren’t going to do.  You have to decide how harshly to penalize the students who don’t do the assignment and how to fairly balance that against the poor kids who, bless them, actually do the assignment and continue to distinguish themselves from the herd, like golden manatees in a slobbering, sorry school of sea-cows (c-c-c-combo!).  And then you’ve lost a day of instruction and you have to get back into the rhythm.  And then there’s administrative business coming down the pike that you missed on that day, but, surprise, the information you missed on Monday is needed to properly complete paperwork on Tuesday and oh, you’ll just have to come meet with your administrator for thirty minutes to get “caught up”, just come in during your planning period WHEN YOU’RE TRYING TO GRADE PAPERS AND GET BACK ON TRACK FROM THE DAY YOU MISSED AND DON’T FORGET TO CARVE OUT A BIT OF TIME DURING LUNCH TO GET YOUR WORDCOUNT FOR THE DAY IN RAARRRGH BLARGFARGLE *begins throwing cats*

I’m not going to lie.  Teaching is not a bad gig a lot of the time.  But it’s also a little bit demanding and overwhelming and stressful a lot of the time.  If you have a teacher in your life, hug them.  Seriously.  This is what we’re up against:

wpid-IMAG0900.jpg

That was written by an 18-year old.  (The green is mine.  If you look closely, you can see the hopelessness with which I wrote it.)

…Yeah, you might have gathered that I did not get my desired word count done during the day.  But it’s all good.  I’ve finished it up this evening (almost 1400 words today) and topped it off with this post which is creeping toward the 1000 word mark, which means it’s time to stop it BEFORE THIS BLARG POST BECOMES SENTIENT AND BEGINS EATING MY BLOODY FINGERSTUMPS.

I keep meaning to post more about parenting and running.  The sprout has had a couple of gems lately that really are worth relating and I’m getting back up to speed (oh god, the puns have started, RUN [OH GOD IT’S GETTING WORSE]) with the running and I have some musings to post about that.  But that will have to wait.

Here’s a favorite passage from today’s work.  It’s not particularly lyrical or evocative, but I felt it captured pretty well a moment that would be much easier to capture onstage or in film.  Word pictures!

  • Andy nodded at her.  She nodded back at him.  He continued nodding, turning his nods toward Thalia, who received them, smiling, and returned them.  He nodded up at Lexi again.  She nodded back again, helplessly.  Clearly it was up to Lexi to take hold of the situation.

Now, to do some dishes and sleep.  Yeah, I go to sleep at 9:30, wanna fight?  (I do not want to fight.)

Thump Thump

Pavowski2 Comments

Amidst all my musings on gouda last time, I forgot to mention the project.  It’s happily chugging along; a thousand-ish words yesterday, thirteen hundred-ish the day before, a solid fifteen hundred and change today.  The momentum is still boiling and I’m thanking goodness for that.  Strangely, it’s been a little bit tougher to get the writing done this week.  Not nearly so many demands on my time, but I seem to be hitting more roadblocks with the story.  But as I’ve detailed before, I’m getting better at throat-punching my roadblocks, which is exactly what I’ve done, which all contributes to the rather monumental discovery that I made today.  Having typed that, let me clarify that the discovery is only monumental on a personal sliding scale.  I’m not curing cancer over here or anything.  That said, hyperbole is exciting!  Fireworks!  Streamers!  Puppies!  Accomplishment!

So anyway, I was happily squeezing out my daily word count over a sandwich at lunch today when I saw my page numbers have rolled over into the thirties.  I use a nice small font and don’t waste a lot of space on the page, so it takes me a good chunk of words to fill a page, though I’ve not yet counted how many words I get on a page on average.  Actually, I guess I have, but I haven’t done the math yet, because fargo math.  I didn’t take creative writing in college because I’m the kind of person who does math for fun, DonDraper it.

That’s a lie.  Numbers are fascinating and complex and, if you think about them long enough, the sheer overwhelming enormity of their significance, could, I’ve heard, devour your soul without a whit of conscience.  (I checked my comma usage in the previous sentence and, rest easy, it is correct.)  (Also, I fully realize that my comma [ab]use is probably the least of your concerns.)  However, being one of those creative types, I prefer to admire their poetry quietly from afar, musing on their possibilities in the way that I imagine an ant knows and appreciates the sun is there without having the slightest understanding that its (the ant’s) entire existence is fueled, nay, POSSIBLE because of it (the sun); in other words, don’t bother me with the goldfinger details.  I will leave it to others to dive screaming into the swirling throbbing depths of the infinitude of numbers, armed with their brains of +4 maths.  People like my brother-in-law, who builds missiles.  That’s right, mother truckers, a real-life honest-to-god ROCKET SCIENTIST reads my drivel and gets his jollies (not all, but at least one or two) from my little pile of content.

Sidenote: rather than a table of contents, I want to write a book that has a “pile of contents”.  Then again, when you think about it, that’s all a book is, innit?

Er, that was a sidenote to a sidenote.  The point is, numbers.

Glorious numbers!  Fantastical numbers!  So-big-you’ll-slap-your-mama numbers!  The overall goal for August is ninety thousand words.  That’s a whole lot of words.  A dauntingly huge amount.  So huge, it’s best not thought of.  So I haven’t thought of it.  But here, at the end of two weeks’ work on the project, thirty pages (and change) deep, I thought that the time for thinking about it might be this time, so I thought about it.  I ran a word count on the entirety of my draft as it stands thus far, just to see where I stood.  The grand total as it stands right now is almost seventeen thousand.

Seventeen thousand words is a haberdashery of a lot of words.  Now, it’s a far, far cry short of the ninety thousand I need to have this thing taken seriously.  But it’s also a far cry from where I started.  It’s tangible, significant progress; progress that is heartening and a little overwhelming; progress that is chest-thumpingly awesome.

There is not only quantitative progress but creative progress as well; the story is organically sprouting tentacles that I don’t even remember coding into its DNA, and it’s now attracting lightning strikes and spawning new lifeforms.  New characters, new plots, new subplots, new complications, are occurring to me all the time, faster than I can write them into this thing.  This is the heady thrill of creative adrenaline, and it is surging.

So this is me, thumping my chest a little bit.  I have almost seventeen thousand words in the bag and a rocket scientist reading my blog.  Sharknado yeah.

Chuck’s writing challenge for the week is a 10-chapter story in just 1000 words.  I’m going to try for it this weekend as I take a break from the Project, but it feels tailor-made to hurt me.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, BUT I TEND TO RAMBLE.  Short choppy chapters are not my bag.  BUT I WILL TRY.

Writing at home kinda sucks

PavowskiLeave a comment

A really rough day of writing today.  Lots of things demanding my attention at work (silly work, intruding on my happy writey time) and more roadblocks falling in my path.

But, as we learned in the previous post, when we hit roadblocks – WE DRIVE THE FARGO AROUND THEM.  (We, here, would presumably be me and my slavering pure-id writing alter ego.  Do NOT feed him caffeine.)

From the current vantage point, from the lofty peaks of oh, a week and a half in, seems to be this: the action of writing a play within a play, while I think it works brilliantly onstage, does not translate particularly well in a book.  Or, if it does, let me amend by saying: I do not know yet how to do it right.  I wrote the first sort of split scene today, and oi, was it an exercise in frustration.  I kept finding myself leaning back in the chair, saying to myself, “god, I really don’t like that,” or, “there’s got to be a better way to do it,” or, “WHY IS MY DOORBELL RINGING AT 7:30 AT NIGHT, WHAT ARE WE, SAVAGES?  No, I don’t want to change my cable provider, you can have a nice tall glass of go to haberdashery, now where was I, oh yes, this passage I just wrote is godawful, maybe I would like to talk to you about my options for upgrading my high speed internet for just a little while, please come back?”

Sidenote: writing at home is HARD.  First of all, there’s the sprout, whose demand for attention is akin to a black hole’s demand for swallowing all matter in the universe.  Basically inescapable.  (And yes, I know that black holes no longer exist, or maybe they do, SCIENCE CAN’T BE TRUSTED.)  Then there’s my dear pregnant wife, who needs as much of my attention as I can give her, and bless her, she deserves it, which is why this post will be extra short so that I can get some quality Walking Dead time on with her.  Then there are door-to-door salesmen at 7:00 at night, apparently.  It’s so much easier to take some time on my lunch at work or get to work a bit early, to close the door and bang out some piping hot words and then go about my day safe in the knowledge that I have achieved a personal goal today.  Twenty minutes writing in isolation is worth an hour of writing in the den, and I will take it whenever I can get it.

Of course, as you may have gathered, that did not happen today.  I got about 600 words in during the day – a good showing, but short of the mark – so I came home to hammer out a few more.  And I got them. Oh, boy, how I got them.  Subvert the roadblocks, leave them for Future Me to deal with, move on to something a lot more fun to write and hi-ho Silver, I ended up with 1200 words today.

So I’m still on track.  The Project.  Day 7.  It’s gonna be a thing.

Here’s my favorite passage from today’s session.  Might just have to make this a regular feature.

  • Bernardo was a local man who was very well paid to keep Harold’s drink topped off, to have Harold’s breakfast ready when he came down in the morning, to screen Harold’s phone calls for him, and to otherwise stay the Fargo out of Harold’s way and pretend not to speak English, thank you very much.  For these modest services, he was ridiculously well compensated, and was happy to suffer a week’s worth of abuse once or twice a year.

See you tomorrow, bandidos.  Pew-pew!  (That’s a laser gun six-shooter.)

 

Comment Commentary

Pavowski2 Comments

My favorite passage from today’s work:

  • He lowered the paper to examine the details of the place, but found that the restaurant had vanished and been replaced with his crummy apartment again.  Even the heavenly garlic bread smell had been replaced with the unmistakable aroma of “please take out the garbage.”  Frowning, he wound the paper back into the typewriter, and the smell hit him again.  His aunt Martina used to make garlic bread that smelled like that, and it always made him think of summer nights in the rolling hills of Salerno, except for the fact that he’d never left the United States and his aunt Martina was as Italian as Honey Boo-Boo.

So, it will bear editing, of course, but it makes me smile.  Also, I formatted that on the fly, and the look of it pains me, but I’m in a serious-ANTZ can’t-be-bothered mood as far as my writing goes today.  I’m getting some sweet Word Count in; ain’t nobody got time for all that flowery make-it-easier-on-the-reader Sharknado.

Except for you, reader.  You’re awesome.

The weekend is never long enough, but this weekend was a good one.  Lots of family, lots of cleaning, the culmination (and pretty fantastic reception) of a big work project, and I even got some extracurricular writing done.  Really happy with this week’s Flash Fiction, and really pleased with today’s writing.

I got 1639 words done today, which is pretty impressive, considering how badly I was struggling to get my wheels turning.  Luckily, for today at least, once I was able to break the wheels out of the ice, it was smooth sailing.  But I’m learning some tricks to keep from getting stuck.

The trick of the day is Comments.  I am growing to love using Comments when I write.  Past Me would, when having difficulty with a passage or a phrase or any other sort of roadblock, sit and stew in front of the screen until he could come up with something at least passable to use to surmount the problem.  It was frustrating, slow, and perhaps more than anything, made me feel inept and uncreative and ill-suited to even be writing.  In other words, I’d get hung up on some insignificant detail and after a few minutes, my inability to come up with a good peripheral character name or clever made-up song title would balloon into WHY ARE YOU EVEN BOTHERING YOU’RE AN IDIOT YOU CAN’T DO THIS JUST EAT A CUPCAKE AND FORGET THE WHOLE THING.  Eating cupcakes is easy and that voice in my head was loud, so there you have it.  (I wonder why that voice of inner doubt is always shouting.  Probably mommy issues.)

Present Me, on the other hand, hits a roadblock then powers up his PNEUMATIC JUMPING CAR (note to the future, invent pneumatic jumping cars), jumps the obstacle/plot hole/misplaced character/encroaching cupcake (okay, let’s be honest, I still eat the cupcake) and sticks a flag in the ground when he lands, warning Future Me HEY LOOK OUT THERE’S A PROBLEM BACK THERE, HAVE FUN DEALING WITH THAT SUCKER, I’LL BE UP HERE STILL WRITING LOL WOO TYPETYPETYPE.  (Turns out my voice of inner writing badANTZery shouts a lot too.  Who knew.)

So my first draft is a Haberdasheryscape of stuck-in comments like “omg this part, help” to “MORE BACKSTORY, WRITE IT LATER” to “jesus, so BORING”.  They say that writers are their own worst critics, and that certainly seems to be holding true at the moment.

In short, Present Me is a Darwin to Future Me, but at least Present Me gets to stay productive and keep moving so that Future Me will have the opportunity to do the same.