Tag: Writing

I Write Like Awesome Writers

Pavowski4 Comments

I was recently directed to a neat little corner of the web: a textual analyser designed to scratch the egos of fledgling writers everywhere by informing them that they write like this or that famous author.

Now, obviously, only James Joyce writes like James Joyce, but it’s fun to pretend. And testing a few of my samples in the machine, I got results that pleased me mightily.

First…

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

Which just makes me smile, seeing as he’s absolutely, full-stop, make-no-exceptions my favorite author. But then, just for icing on the cake, I tried another sample and got this one:

I write like
Neil Gaiman

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

At which point I stopped, because why keep playing when you’ve already won the game?

You can check it out at I Write Like.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Cold Storage

Pavowski4 Comments

 

When we talk about writing, we’re usually focused on the glitzy stuff. LOL JUST KIDDING, as if there’s anything glitzy about sitting in our darkened rooms, pounding feverishly on our keyboards until we collapse from exhaustion and despair.) That act of raw creation is what non-writers think about, it’s what burgeoning writers focus on, it’s indelibly the picture of what a writer does. Rightly so.

If only I could look like such a boss when I write.
If only I could look like such a boss when I write.

Sitting down to write the draft, spilling the words forth onto the page is what it’s all about. Whether it’s the unstoppable flood of a river smashing through its dam or the pained trickle of a man with a swollen prostate, the writing is what matters. Word count. Finished chapters. The flutter of ink-stained pages landing on the pile.

But it’s not the whole picture, not by far.

The first draft, magical though it may feel, results in something you wouldn’t want to bring home to meet your parents. Like a Frankenstein’s monster made of mismatched limbs or a garage-built car constructed from nothing but spare parts, the first draft is imperfect, incomplete.

What the monster needs, though, is not to get fixed right away. What the monster needs is some time in cold storage.

My wife makes a hell of a cheesecake. The process is simple: whip all the ingredients together, smash them into a mold, bake at 350. But it’s not done after it bakes, not nearly. It comes out of the oven and goes straight into the fridge to draw all the heat out of it, to actively stop that act of creation that causes all its components to chemically react. Only then — only after it’s lost all the heat of its making and had a chance for its parts to settle, compact and congeal — is it ready for the finishing touches, its layer of cream frosting, its drizzling of cherry syrup.

The time not cooking, in other words, is just as important to the finished product as the cooking itself.

So it is with writing.

You pour the raw ingredients of character and conflict into the mixing bowl and beat furiously for the first draft, then toss it into the oven of creation for a while for those conflicts to bake, boil, and bubble over. You drain yourself as a writer and channel all that energy of creation into the making of this thing. And then you throw it in the freezer.

Take it off the fire of creation. Remove the heat of your emotions for all its little parts. Give it some time alone to settle, and more importantly, give yourself time to cool off. Put those emotions about the story into storage and do your best to forget about the damn thing for a while. Only then can you come back to the story level-headed and clear-sighted enough to put the proper finishing touches on.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think we’ve still got a bit of leftover cheesecake in the fridge.

This post is part of SoCS. Head to LindaGHill‘s blog to check it out and get involved. And, yeah, I’m still taking something of a break from my standard re-motivational weekend rambles; it feels odd to write about writing when I’m not actually writing much. Regularly scheduled programming will return someday.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Cloistered In

Pavowski14 Comments

When a nun pledges her life and her various other parts to God, she goes to live in a convent. Those convents have some fairly archetypal architecture, like what you see below:

File:Cloister of the monastery Unser Lieben Frauen Magdeburg.jpg

This covered walk is called a “cloister”, and this particular feature of religious buildings led to the expression of something being “cloistered”, or shut in and closed off from outside influences.

We won’t be going, today, into the particular irony of a religious institution requiring its most devout believers to live such a cloistered existence, or the fact that such an idea itself comes from religious ideology.

Rather, the metaphor of the cloister. It’s an important one, a powerful one, because so many of us live cloistered lives. We wake up at the same time, drive the same roads to work, see the same people, eat the same things for dinner. Our own footsteps mark the boundaries beyond which we dare not tread.

And there’s something to be said for that. Routine is important, and not only to the writer. (Just try moving naptime up by an hour on your three-year-old, for example.) But as much as time inside the box is vital for our comfort, well-being, and peace of mind, so too is time outside the box critical to keep us from living life in a rut. I realized the other day that I have some co-workers who are almost friends (as close, I guess, as a co-worker that you only ever see during work-related functions can come to being a friend) whom I have not seen in months. The reason? Their classrooms are on the other side of the building from mine.

You can find the cloister as deep down as you care to drill. I write at pretty much the same time every day, even down to the weekends. I park in the same parking spot at work, even though we don’t have assigned parking. I run the same routes over and over when it’s runday funday. We even try to have the same meals on the same nights of the week, just to cut down on that tiresome discussion: “well, what do YOU want to eat?”

It takes effort to break out of the cloister. We’re so closeted in with our routines, with what’s normal and easy, that we resist doing anything else. Our cloisters are climate-controlled, with blackout curtains and indoor plumbing. If we don’t make the effort to leave them behind now and then, they can and will swallow us whole.

So, how will you break out of your cloister this week? This month? This year? (Don’t wait to make a New Year’s Resolution — start today.)

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 Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image above is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cloister_of_the_monastery_Unser_Lieben_Frauen_Magdeburg.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.

Nickels and Dimes

Pavowski2 Comments

Len turns the tin cup restlessly in his hands and slams it to the pavement. It’s been five hours this morning and he has barely enough to buy a cup of coffee, maybe a newspaper.

Hardly the beginnings of another empire.

He scratches at the back of his grimy neck with jagged fingernails cracked and splintering from scraping change off the pavement. Casts baleful eyes up at the pedestrians walking past him.

“Spare a dollar?”

They walk past with nary a glance down at his unwashed Armani overcoat.

To hell with this small change, he thinks.

Approaching him is a guy in a suit. Pinstripes. Glaring yellow tie. Len owned a tie like that once. Never wore it. Couldn’t stomach the color. Now he’s positively salivating at the sight of it. He gets a wild idea. Smooths down his wild hair, spits in his hand and wipes his face as much as he can. Impressions matter.

He hops to his feet and falls in step with the suit, avoiding his notice for the moment thanks to the cell phone glued to the guy’s other hand.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” he says in his best business school voice.

The suit turns and grimaces. Says nothing. Doesn’t have to.

Len starts to protest, grabbing at the man’s arm. Reflexively, like a squid shooting ink, the man throws a small handful of change at Len: “Just leave me alone!” The coins bounce off Len’s chest and he stares, dumbfounded. Looks at the spinning nickels and dimes tinkling onto the sidewalk. Kicks them away.

Len looks up, catching his reflection in a storefront window. Behind his reflection float rows upon rows of oak-colored liquor in gleaming glass bottles. He steps to the side, craning his neck; a scruffy guy with glasses sits half-reading, half-nodding over a newspaper behind the counter. How much cash does a liquor store keep to hand? A couple hundred, at least, he figures.

He shoves his hand into his pocket, makes a gun with index and thumb, and eases into the store.

He pretends to shop for a minute before approaching the attendant. He steps up airily, looking around, as if he’s about to ask for the time.

“Is that an Armani?” the keeper asks.

Len, flummoxed, mumbles, “yeah.”

“The hell did you get that?”

“It’s mine. I used to run a Fortune 500 Company.” Len can’t help but straightening a little, assuming some of his old posture.

The guy studies him hard, chewing on his lip. Then his eyes light up. “You’re Len Fitcher, CEO of Narrington Pharmaceuticals!”

“Ex. Ex-CEO.”

The man blinks. “Well, shit, man. Do you want a job?”

“Do I want a …” Len is too flabbergasted to finish the sentence. His teeth grind, and his throat tightens in a growl. He thrusts his gun-hand in his pocket toward the man’s face. “I don’t want a goddamn job. I want your fucking money.”

*****************

I’ve been working on a handful of shorts — 500 words or fewer apiece, a real challenge for me — for the past several weeks in lieu of working on novels or other such large-scale projects. This is one of them. Not sure yet what I’m doing with the rest. We’ll see. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Stuff of Substance

Pavowski6 Comments

I was going to write about the stuff-focused holidays we have here in the States (Christmas of course, Thanksgiving with its frankly embarrassing piles of food, and Black Friday, a de facto holiday with a surprisingly adversarial focus on buying as much stuff as you can’t afford) with this week’s prompt, but the moment I started kicking it around, I realized that even I couldn’t take any more of my bitching about holidays and special events… between my tirade about NaNoWriMo, my grumbling about Daylight Savings Time, and my sermonizing about the war on Christmas, I’ve sure been slinging the negativity lately.

That said, the picture is unrelated.

Today, a positive bent, a return to what I like to use SoCS for: to ruminate on writing.

I’m giving myself a break from Big Writing Projects lately — through the Christmas season, really, by the time all is said and done — and as a diversion, and to keep the grooves nicely greased, I’m working on some short fiction instead. You haven’t seen it around the blarg. It’s a SECRET.

Or rather, it’s in progress, which for writers means it may as well be as secret as the Coca Cola formula — we don’t like people sticking their fingers in our pies until we’re good and ready to have our pies finger-stuck.

Anyway, I went and enrolled in a free short fiction writing workshop hosted over at Holly D. Lisle’s site at How to Think Sideways. She lays out a three-step (with multiple embedded sub-steps, but y’know, that’s not as flashy as saying “3-step”) template to writing flash fiction that doesn’t suck. And what I quickly realized is that a lot of my stories kind of suck. Like, most of them have decent ideas at their cores, but they lack any sort of follow-through or intelligible raison d’etre. (I don’t actually know what that means, but I heard it before and it sounded fancy.) In short, stuff happened, but lacking were the reasons for said stuff happening, or an appreciable understanding of the consequences for the stuff happening.

And with the five stories I’m workshopping, there is a real focus on meaning and significance through brevity. It’s been eye-opening, like that air freshener commercial where they blindfold people in squalid rooms, wave air fresheners under their noses, then remove the blindfolds so they see the cloud of actual sharknado they’d been inhaling.

Anyway, I’m not going to detail the … well, details of the course. They’d be tiresome if you’re not interested, and if you are interested, it’s worth your time to roll over to Holly’s site and sign up for the course yourself. Suffice it to say that while this has been some much-needed down time from my big projects, I’ve not been idle, and that feels nice. Momentum matters and all that.

Which is, I guess, the point of the post this week: writing is something you can only ever get better at by sitting down and practicing at it. And a tremendous obstacle for many would-bes is the simple but enormous leap of faith that it takes to even start screwing up a perfectly good blank page with your awful, stupid words. There’s something to be said, then, for the virtue of just sitting down and banging out words week after week. But there comes a point where you feel safe enough in the habit, and you want to actually start refining your craft. I think, a year and a half into this adventure, I’ve more than established the writing consistently part, and it’s time to start worrying more about writing stronger, smarter, sharper stories. Stories where the stuff that happens is stuff that people will care about.

Stuff of substance.

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.