Tag: writing advice

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!

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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.

 

The Weekly Re-Motivator: The Anchor

Pavowski10 Comments

So, you’re a writer.

And you have this project.

It’s a project that you’ve had for months, or maybe even years. It’s a project you return to time and time again, when inspiration for other work deserts you or when a bolt from the blue strikes and you just have to, have to, go work on that project again. Maybe it’s your first project, maybe it’s your latest one, maybe it’s a project you started and forgot about and go back to every few months. When your mind goes blank, inevitably your thoughts turn to that one project, and even if you’re not actively working on it, your brain is always bent toward it.

This project is the anchor.

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Like a security blanket, you need this project. It comforts you in times of need, it fills you with nostalgia; even just opening the file (or turning the pages, or unrolling the parchment you scribed it onto, you insane purist) makes you smile. Like a true anchor, this project keeps you moored. Keeps you grounded. Keeps you from getting off course, keeps you true to yourself — or at least true to the self you were when you started the project. Without the anchor project, you wouldn’t be the writer that you are, you wouldn’t write the way you do.

The anchor project is a good thing.

But the anchor project can’t stay forever.

Like a security blanket, it works wonders for you for a while, but eventually, you start to outgrow it. People stare if you’re still dragging it around in public. It gets threadbare and worn-out, and not even functional for its original purpose beyond a point. Like a true anchor, well, it keeps you from drifting off during the storm, but it also keeps you from letting down the sails and exploring the ocean.

Comes a time when you have to cut the anchor loose, when you have to accept the fact that you’ve outgrown it and move on. When you have to drop the anchor and sail out into the wild blue. When you realize that the anchor is not the project that needs your time, your effort, your constant thought anymore.

Accidentally Inspired has been my anchor project since I was in college, which is to say, for about fifteen years. The idea was born in a scriptwriting class in 2002, I expanded it into a full-length play by 2004, when it actually saw production with my old high school. Then I mothballed it for almost a decade, though I always hung onto the idea of turning it into a novel, and there it nested in the depths of my brain, ripening on the vine.

Well, I’ve followed through on that seed of an idea, finally. I wrote the novel. I’ve revised and edited it through several iterations. I’m working on one last edit now.

And somewhere along the road in this last edit, I realized it’s time to cut this anchor loose.

I love this project. I always will. but the longer I keep reworking it, the more I’m neglecting other stories I want to tell, the more I give in to the fear of putting it out there and letting it walk on its own, like a wobbly-kneed colt.

I’ve got about one more month left in this phase of the work, and then it’s time to pull up roots and let this puppy go.

Bittersweet, to be sure, but the time is right. It’s time to move on.

Am I alone in this, or is there an anchor holding you back, too?

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.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Categories Are Crap

Pavowski6 Comments

I’m not NaNoWriMo-ing, as I’ve said before, but I do have a thick skull full of dubious writing tidbits for those of you out there scrambling to make your 50k. (What are you, at 10k today, pushing for 12? Maybe a bit further along to buy yourself a breathless, red-eyed day off over the weekend? You poor souls.)

Today’s rumination: categories are crap.

Let’s be clear: your work is going to be categorized, and it should be categorized. Eventually. Categories matter: without them, we’re never going to be able to get our works into the hands of as many readers as we’d like to. But (and here’s where my novice chops are going to show, maybe) I don’t think categories matter until it’s almost time to publish. Because categories are for readers and editors and publishers, so they know where to put and where to find and how to push your book.

But for you? The author neck-deep in a 50k slog that needs to be completed in three weeks? (Or in the midst of a 100k slog that you’d like to complete this year, more conservatively.) You can give a big middle finger to categories.

“Oh, I’m writing an urban sci-fi horror YA cyberpunk thriller.”

No, you’re not. You’re writing a story about some kids with computers that spawn monsters who drag their souls into the dark web and sell them for Bitcoins. (Copyrighted!)

“Me? I’m writing an alternate-historical period piece romance / spy novel.”

Negative. You’re writing a love story between secret agents in a made-up setting where you can make up any rules you want.

But what’s the difference? I hear you cry. Why not pick my category now, so I know how to write it the piece as it grows?

In this humble writer’s opinion, putting a category on your work is like putting up a fence in your yard. On the one hand, it makes it real easy to see where your property ends, or where you need to put on shoes lest you step in a pile of dogsharknado. On the other hand, it makes it real easy to see where your property ends, or where you need to put on shoes lest you step in a pile of dogsharknado. Putting a category on your work means that you’re saying, this stuff belongs in my story, and this other stuff does not. It means, these sorts of things can happen in my story. It means, I’m going for this specific feel in my story.

Which, again, is great … for later drafts. Later drafts are the time to think about audience, about marketing, about where your story fits. But to think about this stuff during the first draft, or even the first round of edits, is suicide. To use the fence metaphor, you’re marking out clearly defined areas where your story can and cannot go.

But why would you do that during the first draft?

The first draft is hard enough without arbitrary lines criss-crossing the landscape telling you you can’t go here. The first draft is a brutal hike through overgrown jungle with a machete, it’s a solitary sojourn through unforgiving desert.  Boundaries are a great way to bog down, and if you’re NaNo-ing, you can ill afford to get bogged down. (To be fair, even if you’re not NaNo-ing, getting bogged down in your work sucks — lose your momentum and you lose your motivation to continue.)

The first draft is a baby bird learning to fly — it needs all the clear space it can get to figure itself out. Your story needs the space — you need the space — to breathe, to try new things, to make a hard left and run the story into a ditch, to cut back right and drive it through a building. You make that harder on yourself if you’re locked into categories, into preconceived notions of what your story can and can’t be before you’ve even written it.

Stories are living things that change as they grow. I started my just-finished draft of a novel thinking I wanted to write a YA sci-fi coming-of-age piece, and I ended up writing something a lot more like a survivalist cyber-horror fate-vs.-free-will story, if any of those things are actually things. One way or another, I’m a lot happier with the story I wrote than the story I was trying to write. Further, I noticed that every time I got stuck in the novel, it’s because I was trying to force the story or the characters to do something out of character. I can’t have this happen in a YA novel, I thought, but when I let go of that constraint and just let it happen anyway, the story moved along just fine.

Don’t get me wrong. That first draft is a mess. It needs tons of work, and the time will come when I will refine it down and decide what neat little boxes it fits into. But if I’d gotten hung up on the categories, I don’t know if I could even have finished it.

Your story wants to be something.

You have to accept the fact that maybe you don’t entirely know what that is yet.

But, just like a teenage daughter, if you try to force it to be something it isn’t, it’s going to rebel and bring home a guy with a mohawk.

Don’t let your story bring home a guy with a mohawk.

Let your story be the guy with the mohawk.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Collecting Fireflies

Pavowski2 Comments

I’m flolloping around in the doldrums of the wake of finishing my first draft.

There’s depression here. An aimless, impotent feeling. I’ve gone from working tirelessly on a singular project day in and day out to … well, not. To working on side projects, to taking a little time to refocus and rethink your goals for the next few months, and I’ve felt a little lost.

It’s a lull, to be sure; a haze as transient as the weather. Still, it sucks at the feet like a bog, a slow inevitable creep of inertia. I sit back wondering if I’ll be able to make myself do it again, if I can make myself go through another six month draft, another three month edit, a brand new project, a rehashing of an old one. And I don’t know! I really wonder if I have any more good ideas in me, any more stories waiting to be told, or if I’m deluding myself that the ones currently in the telling are worth the time I’ve spent on them. Maybe every idea has a bit of validity, but by the same token, every candle in the darkness gives off a little light. The hope, of course, is that I’m not a candle in the darkness, but a raging forest fire, or at least a cozy little bonfire around which some lucky individuals might sometime warm their hands and their hearts.

But these times of respite are important for the body, mind and soul. Because as I find myself not exhausting myself on a capital “P” Project, I find there’s a little more time in my day for thought, for aimless and okay-to-be-aimless writing, for reflection, for the cultivating of new ideas, for the reviewing of old ones.

I keep a little Evernote file for potential future story ideas. (If you’re not using some sort of brain-dump software like Evernote, you should be.) Some of them are just a couple of words, some are great sprawling paragraphs. Any time an idea strikes me (and ideas striking are about like neutrinos striking screens deep below the earth — they happen millions of times a second, but only incredibly rarely does matter actually contact matter and cause a reaction) I jot it down.

Well, today came one of those lightning flashes, so I reached for the old bottle. And while I was stuffing this particular lighting strike into the jar, I took a peek in there. And there were over a dozen little fireflies buzzing around in there, dinging off the walls; some with the reckless lunatic energy, some as massive and indomitable as barges.

So I feel a little bit better about the lull I’m in. It’ll pass soon enough, and it’ll be time to get back to work, catching more fireflies, stuffing them into my jar, selecting some for release back into the wild.

8 Writer Excuses (That Are Total B.S.)

Pavowski6 Comments

As I get closer and closer to the end of my project, it gets harder and harder to write. Like a magnet that simultaneously pulls you in and repels you, the finish line of the first draft is a daunting milestone in the life of a novel, one that looks impossibly bigger and bigger the closer you get to it: an alien obelisk growing out of the horizon of an uncharted planet that never actually seems to get any closer.

As such, it becomes easier and easier to make up excuses not to write, and those excuses become more and more reasonable-sounding.

Here are a few of them (not that I’ve used any of these myself during this project or any other, OF COURSE.) Eight, to be precise. Why eight? I don’t know. Eight is musical. Eight is my lucky number. Eight is also how many I happened to think of before I realized I was using this blog post as an excuse not to write.

So.

  1. I don’t have time. This is probably the easiest to claim and the easiest to dispel. Unless you’re one of the rarefied few doing this writing thing for a living, this is probably true on some level. (Then again, those rarefied few are long past making this excuse.) But the fact is, we all get the same 24 hours in the day, and time can be stolen in bits and snatches from any number of sources: lunch breaks, wasted time in front of the TV, hell, I’ve been known to forego an hour or so of sleep to get it done. The fact is: if it matters to you, you will find time or you will create it from the raw fabric of the universe.
  2. I’m just not inspired to write today. We tend to think that writing is a sort of magic, and on some level, it is: Where else does the average person get to play god like a writer? And on some level, some sort of inspiration is required, but not in the way we think. You need a decent (not awesome) idea, and you need the willingness to work at it, to stick your hands into the clay time and again, shaping it and molding it and firing it and destroying it to start again. That’s it. And some days, the writing does feel like the gods themselves are pushing your cursor around the page, spilling their divine wordseed through your brain and onto the page. But far more often, writing is a little bit like playing nose tackle: it’s a whole lot like getting your brains smashed in, again and again, and crawling back to take another one on the chin. To reiterate: inspiration may strike now and then, but you’re a whole lot more likely to be struck if you drape yourself in tinfoil and wander out in the storm carrying the biggest TV antenna you can find.
  3. I can’t write when I have xxxxx going on. Again, anybody could claim this at any time, really. Life happens to us all, bringing with it a stew of relationship difficulties, livelihood uncertainties, existential doubts, or, well, just name it, really. There’s always something going on that we could use as an excuse. And sometimes, to be fair, it’s a valid excuse. When your house has burned down or you’ve just lost your job, it’s maybe a good time to take some time off the writing project, because that sharknado will bleed through into your work. The thing to be wary of is allowing yourself to continue making this excuse beyond the time when it is reasonable to do so. Momentum matters, and this excuse will destroy your momentum if you let it.
  4. I’m not any good at writing. Well, pardon me for saying so, but who the hell is? Writing is a skill like any other. No budding musician picks up a guitar and starts shredding like Steve Vai. No wannabe singer just spontaneously spouts the perfect lyrics and harmonies one day while driving to work. This thing takes time, and the beginning writer is allowed — if not expected — to suck. It’s a thing to be embraced and accepted and forgotten about. We’re all toddlers that have been chucked into the deep end, and we’ll either figure out how to keep our heads above the water, or we’ll half-drown and be terrified of water for the rest of our lives.
  5. My idea isn’t going anywhere. Ideas are as wonderful and varied as the fishes of the sea; some of them have huge, smoke-belching jet engines, while others are lost puppies trembling in the thunderstorm. Some slide along under their own power for a while (but, really, THE POWER IS YOU) while others have to be dragged along by the wrist, kicking and screaming and whining every step of the way. But the fact is, if you’re not working on it (and as tempting as it is to think that thinking about it or outlining it or in any other way laying the groundwork for it counts as working on it, none of those things actually increase the idea in any way, none of them move it closer to the goal), then at best, it’s a tricked-out Bugatti sitting abandoned in a ditch. At worst, it’s a busted-out, multicolored hoopty sitting abandoned in a ditch. The constant, of course, is the ditch. Your idea won’t get out without some pushing.
  6. It’ll never sell. I’m probably unqualified to be dispensing this sort of advice, but I’ll do it anyway: if your primary concern for a story is whether or not it will sell, then maybe, I dunno, you need a new idea. What sells your story is that it’s your story, told in a way that only you can tell it. Plus — frankly — it probably won’t sell anyway. The market is a bloated jellyfish floating around on unpredictable currents; maybe your story will get snared in the tentacles and carried off to the promised land, maybe it won’t. But if you don’t love your idea, if you’re not burning to write it whether it sells or not, then the story is going to languish in the unpublishable depths, whether the jellyfish scoops it up or not.
  7. My idea isn’t original. Yeah, sorry, but this one is absolutely true. I’m one of those pessimists that feels every story has been told before, every arc has been explored, every wrench in the gears has already been thrown there, multiple times, by multiple monkeys. (See tvtropes.org if you don’t believe me.) The upside to all this is that it doesn’t matter. As I mentioned above, what sells a story — what people love about a story — is not the nuts and bolts of the story itself. That stuff should be practically invisible. What sells it is all the you-juices oozing out of all the nooks and crannies you build into the story. And that stuff only gets in there if — again — you love what you’re writing.
  8. I just don’t feel like it. Here’s where the real harsh truth sets in. Again, outside of the rarefied few, writing isn’t a job. It’s not something that people are depending on you to do, it’s not like paying your taxes or fixing that loose board in the back porch or taking the car in for an oil change. The world will keep on spinning, and you won’t go to jail or into the doghouse if you don’t write. But if you really don’t want to write — and that’s true for, I dunno, a week? A month? — then maybe — just maybe — it’s not that important to you, and maybe — just maybe — you ought to just save all of us the trouble and stop beating your head against this particular wall.

Now, look. I’m hardly an expert, but I do have about 300,000 words in various stages of completion between my second-draft first novel, my nearly completed first-draft second novel, and almost two years’ worth of drivel here at the blarg. Whether any of it is any good is a question for people smarter than me, but I have all that while scores and scads of people out there are just dreaming of writing someday. That’s something. And I certainly didn’t get it by listening to my excuses.

Speaking of which, it’s about time I take my own advice and go work on my project.