Tag: Writing

I Should Probably Just Quit

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Every now and then I get to thinking (as many writers do, maybe?) …

Man, I dunno if I’m cut out for this.

It’s just so hard… to find the time in the day, to make the words come, to face the editing monster, to spend time thinking on all these ideas…

Life would be a lot easier if I just gave it up. Just quit worrying about writing, stop stressing about my stories, give up grinding over grammar (okay, that one was a stretch. I’m a former English teacher, grammar is in my blood.)

And that’s not Writer’s Block talking, or laziness, or any other cop out. That’s 100% true. I have a full-time job, I like getting up early in the morning to run, I like having weekends to hang with the fam, and oh yeah, there’s my whole extracurricular program at the school, too…. life would be easier if I weren’t trying to write stories too.

I entertain these thoughts.

But then I think of the stories I’m in the middle of, of leaving them unfinished. (Not even unread by an audience’s eyes, but just “unfinished by me”.) And I’m appalled. To not polish them up and get them ready to leave the nest (whether they ever do or not)? Seems like a crime against humanity … a crime against all the time and work and strife I’ve put into them.

And I think of the ideas I’ve had for stories I haven’t told yet…. stories that may come to nothing, that may never have their first word written, that may start with tons of gusto and then never go anywhere. And I can’t handle that thought either, the thought of never bringing these stories into the world, half-formed and imperfect as they no doubt would be.

In short, I can’t picture a life when I’m not writing or creating something, no matter how hard it is and no matter how much I might rather live that way.

Writing has become as natural and necessary as sustenance, as exercise.

So even though I don’t do it as much as I should, and even though my projects take forever to finish … I’m gonna keep writing.

I just don’t see any other way.

Beta is Better

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You need space from your work if you want to perfect it.

I know this, because I am only the tiniest bit obsessive about my work and I can still spend hours and days fine-tuning paragraphs and pages and finding new things to fix far beyond the time when the fine-tuning is actually improving the situation.

This is a problem, and it’s not a thing you can simply “turn off”. While you’re in the thick of it — editing, in my case, or whatever your chosen discipline does to self-correct errors in the first drafts — you can’t detach.

You reach that point where you have to let the thing sit for a while. Let it mellow. Let the dust settle. And if possible, have somebody who isn’t you have a look at it in the meantime.

Coming back to my novel after letting it lie for a month? The edits are coming fast and … well, I won’t say easy (because editing is never easy). But paired with notes from a couple of faithful readers whose input I believe in, the editing process feels about 90% less painful than when last I left it back in January.

Moral of the story: let your project rest for a little while.

And get some beta readers.

Creating Should Be Fun

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We all have that image in our mind, right? The haggard writer, stooped with their spine bent over the keys, tumbler of coffee (or something stronger) clutched in spindly fingers, red-rimmed raccoon eyes staring at the page.

Tortured. Tormented.

And you know the thing about stereotypes: there’s always a grain of truth. Sometimes more than a grain. We think of that because we’ve all been there — as you fight to get the story just right, as you push and pull and strive and struggle, you smile less, you agonize more. You hate the work some days and other days it feels like the work hates you right back.

But creating can’t be like that *all* the time. I mean, if the writing is like that *all* the time, why are you doing it?

On a good day, the writing is like turning on the hose on a hot summer day — it’s crisp and it’s clear and it flows without end. It’s almost like magic.

I haven’t had enough good days with my writing lately, and I wonder if it’s not because I was trying to make the wrong project happen. I switched gears today and I recaptured a little of that magic. So if you’re like me — struggling for days, weeks, months with your writing — maybe do yourself a favor and give that project a break. A *little* one, at least. And let your brain work on a project it wants to work on. Let it stretch its legs.

Find that magic again. And if you can’t?

Create new magic.

Out, out, damned line

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The more I write, the more I think about the craft of writing, and the more I think about the craft of writing, the more I think about how badly I screwed up by not thinking about it more when I was just starting.

Of course, when I was just starting, I hadn’t thought about it all that much, so I couldn’t have done otherwise… and yeah, thoughts like that are ultimately pretty useless.

The point of this is that I’ve got this story idea that I’ve been kicking around for a few years now and I’ve just started actually putting words to paper (or, y’know, words to pixels or whatever, you know what I mean) on it, and … I mean, the idea is nifty and all, but… okay, I have to digress further.

With my other stories, it sort of felt like, from the premise, the story just wanted to get up and go. Like the conflict started up and took off immediately, like a cat startled out of slumber by a zucchini squash.

netflix and chill GIF

With this one, there’s less of that immediate impulse to action. So it feels like the story needs something. It needs guidance. Or, I dunno, maybe it’s not fully formed yet and it needs more time to incubate.

So I spent my session today doing something I’ve never done — in advance, anyway — for a story: outlining it.

That’s right, I went back to high school and I made an outline.

The outline sucks, it’s vague as heck and it reads like every action / spy / thriller movie you’ve ever heard of, but y’know, it’s an outline. And once I had it down, I started fleshing it out with possibilities.

And man, it’s weird. Because in my other work, I usually don’t plan all that much. I just strap a lead on the story and try to hold on while it rushes off to wherever it’s gonna rush off to. But what I noticed is that, in my other stories, they end up wandering around, feeling lost in the middle.

I don’t want to get lost on this one. So I’m trying something new.

Will it work? I don’t have a clue.

Anyway, here’s another cat gif, because cat gifs are awesome and it’s Friday and that’s awesome.

cat attack GIF

Tappity Tap Tap

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I wrote 1018 words in 27 minutes today.

I know this because WriteMonkey tells me this.

It also tells me that those numbers average out to give me a words-per-minute rating of a little over 37. But I also know that, during the early phases of the shift, I was spiking as high as 54 words-per-minute.

What do these numbers do for me? Not a whole hell of a lot.

They tell me that I had a pretty productive session (a heckin’ productive session actually, as my old goal back when I had lofty goals was 1200 words in an hour and I clipped along at nearly twice that). Which in turn tells me I made decent use of the time I carve out for myself when my coworkers are eating lunch (which I skip) and that that carving-out is worthwhile.

Then I go back and remember that I wrote almost 1000 words this morning in my drivel, and I’ll be punching out a few hundred within this very post. Which puts me north of 2000 words on the day, easily.

Which, you know, great, I guess? Numbers are just numbers after all. 2000 words is a pretty great day, productivity-wise, for me. It’d be a garbage day for some. It’d be almost unachievably awesome for others. But it’s just a number.

Kinda like the step counter I still wear on my wrist even though they’ve stopped being cool. (Gotta upgrade to a smartwatch so I can stay fresh, dawg.) Sure, it tells me my (approximate) steps per day (9121 so far!), and it (kinda) tracks my sleep, and it tells me (within a reeeally generous ballpark) my heart rate (61!). But what am I doing with that information?

Nothing, really. I mean, it’s there. It aggregates in cyberspace and could be used, at some point, to track trends over time. But I’m not actively monitoring it. I’m not doing anything with the information. Hell, corroborating that information was the first time I’ve opened the app at all in almost a month. I’m just not that fussed. I run three or four times a week and I’m on my feet all the time at work, so I’m not super worried about my daily steps. I sleep reasonably well (just don’t ask my wife about the snoring). So … there hasn’t really been a good reason for me to worry about these numbers.

But … quantifying things is good, right?

Well, with writing, it feels like it. The feeling that I had a productive session is a good one — and I would certainly have it after a day like today — but knowing — through hard data — that I tore the top off for a second day in a row? That’s quantifiable. That’s something I can point to. That creates a second wave of the GoodFeel I get from writing in the first place.

I am trying out WriteMonkey again for the first time in a while while I’m drafting some new stuff and toying around with some new ideas (now that the previous round of edits on the most recent novel are well and truly finished and in their graves RIP FOR ETERNITY). For the past few years I’ve worked almost entirely in Scrivener, which I love, but which has frustrated me with its endless delay of a massive update. I ranted about this, then googled my old flame, saw that it, too, had had some massive updates, and installed it again.

And you know what? It’s fun. It’s simple. And it has this lovely little carrot of tracking word count and WPM and progress and all that stuff — and Scrivener does that, too, make no mistake — but in WriteMonkey it’s there in the main window, it’s clean…

But maybe more than that is, it’s just different. I’ve been staring at Scrivener’s interface for so long, maybe I’m just a little sick of it. Maybe it’s the change that has me feeling good.

New project, new word processor, new president (WHOOPS I PROMISED I WAS DONE TALKING ABOUT THAT FOR A WHILE)…

Feels good.