Tag: Writing

The Shape of a Story

Pavowski7 Comments

There’s a shape to writing, and that shape is a pear.

No, I’m kidding.  To be fair, writing does go pear-shaped, almost every day if I’m honest, but rare are the days when it doesn’t turn around and end up feeling productive or enlightening or, at the very least, right to have written, even on the days when the writing is total bollocks.  But to say that writing is pear-shaped is to oversimplify in the worst way.  It’s calling a baby a factory for poop and tears and snot.  It’s calling a puppy a factory for poop and vomit and midnight barking.  It’s calling my car a lumbering bucket of soon-to-be-rusted-and-worthless bolts.

Also, to call writing pear-shaped is to essentially say writing is fruity, and it’s certainly not that.  Fruit can’t shave away at your soul like writing does.  Fruit can’t make you feel impossibly brilliant and numbingly stupid in an instant.  At its best, fruit is delicious but transient.  It doesn’t stay with you.

No, I think writing is not so much a shape as a line.  Specifically, it’s a line describing a downward arc through the depths of the soul and the psyche.  You start high, full of motivation and ambition and giddy thoughts that you’re writing the best thing ever, that the story will be momentous and the characters transcendent and the themes and the symbolism and the echoes of the real world will reverberate through the annals of literature, or, at the very least, score you an interview segment on Conan.  You start at the top.

Then the work begins and you lose steam.  You start to struggle.  You realize that writing is hard.  That it’s incredibly difficult to write believable characters, that making multiple plotlines weave together is as easy as playing Chinese Checkers blindfolded, that the nuts and bolts of your narrative make as much sense as a box of chocolates without the label card.  You bite into this thing and you don’t know if you’re getting coconut or caramel or a goldfingered disgusting cherry.  Then you get halfway through your draft and it gets really hard.  The characters are stupid.  Your idea is stupid.  Your narrative might as well be a bile-soaked hairball for all that you want to try and straighten it out, and the end you imagined makes about as much sense as the Duck-Billed Platypus.  And down, down, down you slide.

But you FINISH.  And you float there for a moment, translucent and gleeful, basking in the fact that you finished this monolith task.  Slew the mammoth.  Ate the five-pound steak.  And then you re-read the thing and you realize it’s even worse than you feared, and DOWN, DOWN, DOWN you slide, all the way to the bottom, where maybe one day you finish the thing, and it’s terrible and crippled and ugly and squealing and you feel like you really should put it out of its misery but you spent so much time on it that maybe you ought to just send it out, and then the bottom really, finally, truly, for realsies, drops the fargo out and you plummet into the all-consuming black hole at the bottom of your self-doubting soul.

No, that’s not right.

Writing is a line, but it doesn’t arc downward.  It curls up, like the pointy ends of Snidely Whiplash’s majestic mustache.  You start at the bottom.  Your idea, ill-formed.  Your characters, half-baked.  Your voice uncertain.  But you pick the ball up and begin to write.  For days, you struggle.  You fight the momentum of non-productiveness and you urge the story forward, bit by agonizing bit.  And then a little miracle happens.  The lights start to come on.  The engine turns on, splutters, then catches.  The story starts to move under its own power, just a little bit.  And this gives you hope.  And you keep writing and the story develops its own momentum and one day you’re writing but it doesn’t feel like you’re writing anymore, you’re just seeing the story unfold and transcribing as it does, like some lunatic translator scribing a lost manuscript into English for the first time.  The dragons you’ve yet to slay don’t seem so large, the sharks don’t seem to have quite so many teeth, and you feel you may actually finish this thing, and that momentum lights in your fledgling little wings and spirits you off the ground.  And you finish the thing, in a heady swirl of accomplishment and drunken confidence and sheer self-amazement that from nothingness you have created SOMEthing, in an act that flies in the face of everything you thought you knew before.

You still have doubts, but you know you’ve accomplished a capital “T” Thing, and then you go back and read it and you realize that for all its problems it’s not that bad.  And that realization buoys you even further up, into the rarefied air that only the astronauts and the gods get to breathe (okay, astronauts don’t breathe the outside air, I get that, I’m on a roll here).  And you begin to refine your creation, to shape and polish and sharpen it into the thing you never knew it could be, and then, finally, giddy with achievement and drunk with confidence, you send it out, and Icarus himself could not fly closer to the sun.

Maybe Icarus is the wrong comparison, or maybe he’s the perfect one.  Both of those lines are true, and both are false.  Writing lifts you up on the crests of the highs and casts you down into the snakepits of the lows, in a wickedly exhausting roller-coaster ride that somehow lasts for months on end.  The point is, it’s a hell of a ride, and you might barf at the end.

This post is part of SoCS.  Somehow I wrote all this without an edit.

Whaturday

Pavowski4 Comments

The edit continues.  Hard to give a status update; it seems like I’m moving more quickly through the book but not actually getting all that much accomplished with it.  I try to deal with the notes I left to myself in the draft, but I feel like I end up only leaving more notes for further future mes to deal with.

That said, occasionally the notes I left to myself back then brighten my day here in the present.  I came across one yesterday that made absolutely not one stonking bit of sense.  “Nope, but good try.”  Stuck in amidst a not particularly compelling bit of dialogue, not referencing anything in particular, certainly not communicating any sort of useful message, it lurks there in the margin, taunting me, daring me to puzzle out what it means and what it’s doing there, like a cat turd on the kitchen countertop.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts about the edit how time especially is an issue that vexed me in the draft, and continues to vex me in the edit.  Time is so crucial to the plot of this thing and it is so often referenced that nailing down the times that things start and end, and the times during which things are happening in the background, has become one of my primary giants to slay.  My Past Me’s notes to my Present Self grew more and more frantic from about one-third of the way into the book right up until the end, but today something different happened.  Rather, I found something different which happened several months ago.  The note was actually in the text itself.

Characters are arguing.  Things are happening.  And there, jammed into the story like one discolored brick in a mosaic, is a note to myself lurking with the story itself.

“His agent met him out front with a haggard look on his face: it was, after all, nearly midnight on a Whaturday.”

Not italicized, not asterisk’d or otherwise cordoned off like any self-respecting note; just there, hands on its hips, tongue sticking out, thumbing its nose at me.  With its third hand.  (I don’t know, it’s a word, it doesn’t even have hands.)  At least I remembered to capitalize it.  I can picture my Past Self typing furiously away, realizing I was about to have to remember what day it was supposed to be in this tangle of time and deadlines, then saying, “Fargo it, it’s a Whaturday.”

It cracked me up when I stumbled upon it because I can recall the frustration I was feeling and the complete lack of fargos I gave about trying to sort out the problem at the time.  But I wonder if I didn’t accidentally name a thing that needs naming.  These last few days, with my wife and kids out of town, with the regular punctuation of the day scattered to the winds, one day feels very much like another.  Is it Tuesday?  Thursday?  Monday?  Does it matter?  What day is it?  Whaturday.

This goes doubly for the summer, when as a teacher, I don’t even have a regular work schedule to anchor my time.  The summer becomes one long unbroken string of Whaturdays.

Then I take that last step too far, start really breaking down the word itself, and realize that it’s got the word “turd” right there, unavoidable and undeniable, as turds always are.  And turds are always funny.  Well, the word is.  Turd.  Word.  Wordturd.

God, editing a book is hard.  Please let this Whaturday be over soon.

How do you Write in the Silence?

Pavowski4 Comments

I hate to harp on a topic, but I’m home alone this week while my wife and kids are still living it up on the beach in Florida.

Well… living it up may not be entirely accurate.  Storms have forced the local authorities to close the beaches, so they can’t do much more than dunk their toes in the water or hang at the pool, but still, they have the lovely view every day, and they have each other, which is a lot more than I have at the moment.  And don’t get me wrong — it’s nice having the house to myself.  It’s quiet.

But it’s also soooooo quiet.

I never thought much about it before, but I always write with a healthy supply of noise in the background.  At work there’s the intermittent shouts of students in hallways or the low drone of teachers in other classrooms, not to mention the constant hum of the air conditioners.  At home there’s the buzz of the kids’ monitors or the sound of the television in the other room, or the click-clack of the pets’ claws on the hardwood, or — even when I write in bed — the softly interminable whooshing of the white noise machine that we can’t sleep without.  There is noise everywhere.

But this week, there’s an astounding lack of noise.  The kids aren’t here, so there are no tantrums, no shouting, no pitter-pattering of feet, no whining.  The wife isn’t here, so there’s nobody to watch TV with or chat about my day.  And to top it off, the weather has been frustratingly gorgeous this week, so the A/C hasn’t had to run.  The silence is shocking, and as I sit in the silence trying to write, I find myself increasingly unable.  It’s almost as if, without those periodic punctuation marks for my concentration, I find myself unable to maintain focus.  Does that make me ADD?  Lonely?  Stir-crazy?

I’ve got the television on now in the other room just to break the monotony, but even that isn’t doing the trick.  This house, normally so full of irritations and distractions and light and life and love is driving me batty with the overpowering lack of movement and noise.  I feel the silence creeping in around me and settling into my soul.

Silence used to be a comfort to me.  It used to be a thing I sought, a thing I chased for all I was worth; perhaps because it was so unattainable.  Now it’s here — all around me — and I’m running from it.

When it's gone, will I even remember it was ever there?
When it’s gone, will I even remember it was ever there?

Anyway, it got me to thinking.  Am I uncomfortable with the silence or am I uncomfortable with what it means: the isolation, the inability to hide from my thoughts?  And it got me further wondering.  Am I the only person writing like this?  I know some out there must write in perfect silence, but then I think there have got to be others on the spectrum like me that simply can’t abide it.

How does the silence affect your writing?

Rookie Move (or, why writers should keep pens and paper handy all the time, even when it’s impractical to do so)

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One of the sort of take-it-for-granted bits of writing advice I once heard was, “make sure you’re always able to write something down.”  It makes sense.  If you believe in inspiration as I do (for the most part) then you know that it can strike you at any moment, without the slightest provocation, and that it can depart again with as little warning as it gave you when it arrived.  This is why, in my work bag, I keep a composition book and two pens at all times, no matter where I’m going or for how long.  It’s why I keep a stack of note cards binder-clipped in my back pocket and a pencil on my ear just about everywhere I go.  It’s why I keep a pocketknife ready to carve strips of flesh from my arm in the semblance of words I can later affix to a page, though I’m happy to announce I’ve not yet been reduced to that particular method of transcription yet.

Still, ideas sometimes slip through.  Occasionally I’ll have a brilliant idea strike my cerebellum only to bounce off like so many hailstones on the pavement.  Or, more often, something will seem earth-shatteringly clever to me as the thought strikes, but then when I try to articulate it, I realize it’s so foolish it doesn’t bear further thought.  Then there are the days when the fountain seems to dry up entirely and no amount of coaxing, cajoling, pondering or preening will make the ideas come forth.  It’s a crap shoot, in other words, whether the good ideas will get through or not, which is why it’s doubly important to always have the net ready to catch them before they crater in the vast depths of the ideas I will never write.

Let me back up.

The wife and kids and some extended family and I were all on vacation in a fairly swanky condo in Florida over the weekend.  I mentioned it last time, and then in a dutiful showing of a man on vacation, I didn’t write again until today.  Anyway, I had to come back for work, but my wife and kids stayed on and are staying on for a few more days of sun and surf (NOT THAT I’M JEALOUS OR ANYTHING), which means I’m at home by myself for a few days.  No kids.  No wife.  No distractions.  Perfect conditions to get some writing done.  And I did, and I plan to, and night one was brilliant and night two is shaping up just fine so far.

But at night the monsters come out.

Routine is a powerful thing, and when your routine is shattered, it tends to snowball out of control, like a tiny crack in your windshield spiderwebbing like a mutant octopus every time you hit a bump in the pavement.  With no kids, there is no bedtime.  With no wife, there is no meditative glass of wine before the bedtime I don’t have.  I found myself in bed at the appropriate time last night but unable to get to sleep for lack of the vague comforts that knowing your children are asleep in the next room can bring.  No warm backside to press my cold, bony toes into.  The actual night part of last night was, in short, all wrong.  In addition to staying awake for an hour and a half before sleep took me, I woke up of my own volition several times in the night: something I never do (if only because the kids will make noise and wake me up before I ever have the chance to wake myself).  But something else happened unexpectedly in the night: inspiration struck.

It struck with the illumination and voltage of a 1.21 gigawatt lightning strike direct to my cortex, and unfortunately departed just as quickly.  Because for all my various preparations and eventualities for capturing the most fleeting of writerly ideas during my waking hours, I’ve somehow never had the good sense to stash pen and paper next to the bed.  I just don’t get great ideas at night (or if I have, I’ve forgotten them).  But inspiration struck hard and fast enough to wake me and make me think, “gosh golly, I should really write that down,” which lasted me roughly until I remembered that I didn’t have pen and paper at bedside, and I’m sorry, but I’m not one of those writers who is going to huddle over and mash my latest screenplay snippet into my phone with my mutant monkey thumbs.  I’m just not.  No, the inspiration struck, and I realized I had no way to write it down, and I assured myself that this idea was so good, so inescapably awesome, that I would surely remember it in the morning.

So here I am, grasping at the straws that may once have stuffed its scarecrow, but which more likely were the bed for some flea-bitten ox with a penchant for pooping literal poop rather than the brilliant story ideas I might prefer it to poop.  I know it involved either Sherlock Holmes or some Holmesian character.  I’m pretty sure there was genetic modification involved.  There may have been a jetpack.  Also a rhinoceros on a train.  But it’s all one big useless jumble.  No more good to me than the vague idea that I really should have gotten up early and gone for a run today.

Lesson learned.  Paper is going on the bedside table tonight, where it will probably lie untouched until, months from now, I wonder what the hell I put paper on the bedside table for, and move it back downstairs where it belongs.

It’s Not All Bad

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When I was drafting this novel, I’d occasionally post a favorite passage from the day’s writing, sort of as a pick-me-up to let me know that what I was writing was worthwhile, and not (as I secretly feared) an egregious waste of my time.  I fell off the wagon with it, especially toward the end of the draft, when I felt the writing was not nearly so good or clever or worthwhile.

During the edit lately, though, I’m stumbling across all sorts of gems; gems that a Past Me penned and then forgot about, so they seem as fresh as clean shirts from the dryer.  This one literally made me laugh out loud when I tripped over it, so here, then, is a favorite passage from today’s work:

Inconveniencing him mightily seemed more within her grasp.  It might take a few years, but she could chip away at his empire of friends and associates, and probably cost him a couple million into the deal.  Would he notice?  Maybe.  But she’d sure as sharknado know, and she wanted more than anything to stick it to the jerk with the stickiest stick she could find.

Here, I thought my entire draft was a spaghetti tangle of mismatched characterizations, nonsensical plot progressions, and ridiculous non-sequitur.  Who knew there was actually some good funny stuff in there?