Tag: Writing

The Howler Monkey of Doubt

Pavowski4 Comments

It’s a widely-held aphorism amongst creative types that we tend to be our own worst critics. This is doubly true.

In the first sense, we are our own worst critics in that I am certainly not aware of anybody out there who judges my own work more harshly than I do myself.  I’ll grant, my audience is virtually nonexistent at this point, but I am constantly naggled at by a vicious little voice in the back of my mind: “That thing you just wrote is stupid!”  “You should have used more commas there!”  “You should use less commas there!”  That OTHER thing you just wrote there is stupid!”  “They’re all gonna laugh at you!”  I’d say that one of the greatest barriers to my progress on the Project has been getting that little howler monkey to shut the fargo up.  Problem is, he never shuts up.  Much like the Id-Writer, who is always screeching from the damp cellar he gets locked in, “WRITE ABOUT THIS AND ADD MORE METAPHORS AND MAYBE MAKE A COMPARISON TO JESUS OR AN INFINITELY-LEGGED OCTOPUS OR I DUNNO WRITE ABOUT COOKIES,” the best I can do to overcome the ever-present, ever-negative voice of writer’s doubt is to tune it out for a while.  That doesn’t mean it shuts up.  That means that, like the muzak in an elevator, or like the phantasmal infinitely-legged octopus floating just out of my line of sight, I tune it out and attempt to live my life. 

In the second sense, we are our own worst critics in that we are TERRIBLE JUDGES OF OUR OWN WORK.  Perhaps I shouldn’t speak for other creative types; I imagine it’s easy for a Stephen King, for example, to discern whether the pages he’s written today are utter tripe or not. Personally, I have no idea.  I wrote 1300 words today, and haberdashery, I think they’re pretty good.  There are parts in there that suck, but I enjoyed them while I was writing them.  Some of the metaphors in there are pretty darn clever, I think, but who knows, maybe you’d read them and find them inane.  I really have no idea.  I just vomit up my word-slurry (slurry has been my word of the week) and hope that when I finish writing it, I can edit it up into something that will eventually pass as entertaining and not awful to the masses.  (Let’s be optimistic, right?)

It’s a weird place, being a writer.  I sit here, banging my fingers against this poor defenseless keyboard which has never done me any wrong (the tablet keyboard is another story, I want to murder the built-in tablet keyboard in the face), pouring the better part of an hour most days into telling a story (which I’m not sure is any good) to an audience (which I’m not sure I will even have) in a way that will hopefully be funny and poignant (which I’m not even sure I’m capable of).  It’s a quagmire of uncertainty, a web of doubt, a forest of what-ifs. And it’s daunting as haberdashery.  On the daily, I am daunted.  Always, always, always, the howler monkey of self-doubt chitters away at me.  It flings its tiny little balls of doubt-poop at the wall, it leaves the peels of its doubt-bananas on the floor for me to slip on (doubt bananas?  Really?  YES.)  Whatever form it takes, the message is the same. 

You’re not good enough.  Quit.  Writing is hard.  It would be so easy to quit.  Just quit.  QUIT.

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No thank you, howler monkey of doubt.  Not today.

Take the Long Way Home (some writing advice to my future self)

Pavowski4 Comments

I just finished the first act of Accidentally Inspired.

This was a surprise to me.  I hadn’t been writing it with a 3-act structure in mind, though certainly I’m aware that stories tend to read well when there’s a structure like that in place (problem is introduced in the first act, characters bang their heads against the problem in the second act, problem is resolved in the third act).  Nonetheless, I’ve never been much of a planner.  In storytelling, I like to learn who the characters are, decide what the central problem is, and then simply write the characters and let them figure it out.

In retrospect, this might be why I’ve burned myself out on writing in the past.  Because as much as any character worth his salt can surely find his way to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it helps if there’s a trail of breadcrumbs, a map, or ANY SEMBLANCE OF ANYTHING TELLING YOU YOU’RE MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.  Up until the current project — and I mean that as literally as I possibly can mean it, as in I took action against this problem TODAY following my Project writing session — here’s how I write.

Step 1: The idea strikes.

Step 2: A few days / weeks / months pass in which the idea putters around my head like a hobo looking for change.  If the idea is a good one, it will grow, drawing my focus and attention to it like protoplanets gathered matter in the infant solar system.  If it sucks, it withers and dies like every tomato plant I have ever tried to grow.

Step 3: I start to write.  Notice there is no “planning” step.  I simply pick a moment at the beginning of the story and begin to write it.

Step 4: In a flurry of energy and excitement, I write several scenes / pages, typically about five to ten pages or so, and maybe I even take a few character notes (not PLOT notes, you know, things that would help me to tell the story and make sure things stay interesting, but CHARACTER notes, so that I know exactly what kind of patent leather shoes to put on the ANTZhole lawyer character when he arrives at the end of the first act because THESE ARE THINGS THAT MATTER).  Then I get distracted with something; let’s say that it’s painting a bathroom or replacing some light fixtures and definitely not watching Seinfeld reruns.

Step 5: The idea falls from the pockets of my mind like a discarded candy wrapper, to lie forgotten in the ditches of my memory for a couple years, until it reoccurs to me out of nowhere (probably while I’m, again, patching some drywall, and definitely not watching the Lord of the Rings films again), at which point I think, oh yeah, I started writing that idea a while back, I wonder if I still have my notes on it somewhere?

Step 6: While looking for the notes on the original idea, I have an idea for another idea, and the process begins again, cycling back on itself into infinity.  This can occur once every few months or every few years.

So, how can I be sure that it’s FOR REALZ this time and not just an extended step 4?

I’m glad I asked.  For one, and I really can’t pinpoint the exact reason for it now more than at any other time, but I simply want to make it happen.  There’s more drive there and, frankly, I don’t want to question it too much, I just want to ride it like the strong wind that it is.  For another, as I mentioned above, I’ve taken some proactive steps to make sure I don’t bog down.  Like salting the roads before an ice storm (and I live in Atlanta, so enjoy the stupidity and futility of that simile), this will keep my sharknado from spinning out of control.

So I’ve outlined some high points for the story to follow.  Not a rock-solid outline — technically I already have that in the form of the stage play, though in a lot of ways that’s out the window if it’s anything other than a ROUGH outline — but rather some tentpole moments, as my kung-fu master Chuck Wendig would call them (if Douglas Adams is my spirit guide, Chuck is my ANTZ-kicking bearded ninja guru, perching on treetops and dispensing wisdom and beatdowns with one hand tied).  For the moment, it’s a scribbled series of notes: this happens, then that happens, at some point these characters need to make this happen, try to bring this situation about.  It’s what I see in the distance for now, and it’s by those shining points of light that I will steer through the darkness.

But.  (There’s always a butt.)

Translating this story from play to novel has taught me a few things.  First of all, the dialogue is easy, it’s the descriptions that are hard for me.  Being that there is virtually all of the former and none of the latter in stage plays, it’s easy to see why I gravitated to those (and, likely, still will in the future).  Second, stories are living things.

I set out to tell the story of the play in novel form, and it was like tossing a sea monkey on steroids into the ocean.  That thing swelled up and expanded and started growing all sorts of spider appendages and lizard tails and buzzard beaks and IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES.  As I write the characters, I keep learning new things about them, they keep doing things that surprise me, and as a result, the story is taking odd turns I never expected.  And therein lies the lesson I learned from my work today.

Are you listening, future me?  REMEMBER THIS MOMENT, because you learned something today, and if you forget it, Past Me is going to reach up through space and time and punch you right in the nads.  You hear me?  RIGHT IN THE NADS.  It’ll hurt me as much as it hurts you, but sometimes you have to send a fargoing message.

TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME.  Sure, plot the path.  Figure out how you’re going to get from where you are now to the end you imagine.  But don’t be afraid to blaze a new trail, to take a turn down a side street and see what secrets are hidden off the main drag.  Maybe the end you end up with is better than the end you thought you wanted.  (Whose end?)

Following that advice has led me, as I mentioned back at the top of this post, to the end of the first act of this novel.  The characters are all stuck, they’re all in trouble, they’re all in doubt.  They’re at the edge of a cliff, and it’s hard for any of them to see the way out.  (BUT THE ID-WRITER SEES ALL).  It’s a moment that never existed in the staged version of the story, caused by a character who existed only as a throwaway joke in the staged version, and yet it fits so perfectly (at least in my mind at the moment) that I don’t see how the story could unfold any other way.

For now.

So they’re stuck.  Tomorrow the second act begins, and it’s time to start digging them out.

OR IS IT?

*evil laughter echoes*

*sounds of struggle*

Sorry about that.  We’ve really got to get a handle on that guy.

Late Night Write

Pavowski2 Comments

Getting the writing done a little bit later than I’d rather.  But such is life.  I still have yet to miss a day or a deadline, and that’s something.  In fact, I sat down to write tonight at 9pm telling myself, “just get the 900 words and sack out,” and my ink-crazed id-writer half kept me going all the way to 1400 words, where my clearer-thinking half realized that if the rest of us didn’t get together and stop him soon, he might keep us up and writing all night, so we tagged him with the tranq gun (yeah, there’s a tranq gun in my head for when my other mes get out of hand, what do YOU use??) and he’s taking a little nappy-nap now.  And YES, it’s considered to be late at night at 10:30, I’m the parent of a toddler and THIS IS MY LIFE.

Spring Break is halfway over — actually more than halfway, now that today’s at an end — and that’s sad.

Two things from today.

First of all, I had my first post-podiatrist run on my not-actually-shattered foot, now infused with cortisone, AKA liquefied unicorn horn, AKA jumpin’ jamba juice, AKA I-don’t-know-what-pain-is-anymore happy medicine.  Seriously, in my first contiguous three-mile run in over a month, I felt not a tweak of pain or discomfort or “wrongness” in the heel, and nothing since.  Not only was there no pain, but I found myself running faster and easier than I have in months.  I kept going faster than I wanted to and reminding myself to slow down, which, for a runner, is sort of like asking your torturers to give you a few more lashes and really take their time with the thumbscrews.  The run over, I iced it and stretched the foot, per doctor’s orders, and for today at least, it’s holding up fine.

What’s not holding up fine, on the other hand, are my lungs, for two reasons.  First, I’m out of shape.  Not running consistently since basically December has reduced my conditioning to (for me) pitiful levels, and I cut the run short today as much out of an inability to breathe enough as out of caution not to overwork the heel.  Second, spring seems to have sprung here in Georgia, and if you’ve ever been in Georgia in the merry merry months of springtime, you know that the trees are mating, and their yellow, uh, genetic legacy just lays like a blanket over EVERYTHING.  We had an honest-to-goodness deluge of rain at the beginning of the week, and in the two days since, the pollen has piled up enough that our blue car is now blue-under-a-fine-misting-of-vomit-yellow.  The breeze stirs and you see it swirling like a desert sandstorm.  The trees rustle and it comes cascading down like the yellow snowfall of your nightmares.  When it rains again, the rivers and streams will look like streams of snot.  So me, I go out for my first run in a week, and as much as it’s a nice day out, I’m breathing in these coarse particulates by the metric sharknado-ton.  Oh, but I’m not breathing so much as gasping for my life, so I don’t even have the benefit of the filtration system in the nose, no, it’s all going straight down the gullet and powdering the inside of my lungs.  I feel confident that if you could shine a blacklight into my trachea, my entire respiratory system would fluoresce with this gunk.

So I’m hacking up what looks like powdered yellow-cake uranium, but I had a good run, so that’s awesome.  And I got my writing done for today, and that’s awesome too.

I wish there was more cleverness to be had in this post, but the id-writer is snoring so hard over there with that dart in his neck that he woke the neighbor’s dog up.  Nothing but drool and night terrors for that guy.  What a mess.

One-Month-iversary

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The blarg is a month old!

*pops champagne poppers*

*cranks up the stereo*

*trips over a cat*

I’ve been a capital-w Writer for a month now.  Actually, a month yesterday, but WHO’S COUNTING?  (I am, and EVERY WORD AND EVERY DAY COUNTS)

So, what do I have to show for myself?  Let’s take stock!

I have completed over 28,000 words on The Project.  This fact alone is both overwhelming and overwhelmingly frustrating.  Overwhelming in that I have well and truly jumped into this thing with both feet and given myself a better start than I could hope for.  When I set my goal of 900 words per day, the truth is I felt it was a little ambitious, but I’ve found that with only a few exceptions, as long as I give myself the time in which to get it done, 900 words is not enough for me.  My id-writer is not satisfied stopping at 900, which led me to the super secret goal I mentioned before – and I even make that goal most days.  So the progress is phenomenal.  When you add in the (almost) daily word count I squeeze off here at the blarg, it adds up to a heck of a lot of writing, which means a heck of a lot of practice, which (by virtue of the commutative property or some sharknado – I don’t do maths okay) means a heck of a lot of improvement.  Okay, probably not a heck of a lot.  But if you’ll *never* get better if you *don’t* practice, then if you practice *all* the time then you must get at least a *little* better.  So hopefully I’m getting better.  Still gotta work on those adverbs, though.  But I let the real rules like that slide over here.  Put your feet up.  Throw your peanut shells on the floor.  That’s what we have the army of roombas for.

What’s that?  No army of roombas yet?  Pick up those fargoing shells.

So the progress is stunning, but the partially-OCD side of my brain is irked beyond measure at coming so close to thirty-thousand words for the month and not making it.  And yeah, I *could* go for it tonight, but I’m just not going to.  I accomplished some good writing today and I need to let it marinate before I go after the next scene.  Like a fine wine or a good bowel movement, you just don’t rush this stuff.  That’s not an excuse, that’s just good business.  I don’t know what THAT means, but I know that after this blarg, more work is not something that’s going to be happening.  Spring Break is officially on, which at one time in my life would have meant a lot of imbibing, but like so many other things in my life, I’m just too old for that now.  All it means these days is a bit of relaxation, which is, to be fair, welcome and overdue.

And the blarg!  Apparently I’ve made thirty steaming posts of drivel here, which is well above what I had even planned to write.  Given that I’m unable to keep from going on at length on virtually any topic — even when I start out not knowing what I want to write about, I still end up with more than I intended to say about it — you can peg those posts at a conservative average of 500 words apiece, and that’s really really conservative – this post, for reference, is already past 500 and showing no signs of slowing.  So the commutative property (shut up, I don’t do maths) tells me that 30 posts at 500 words makes an additional 15000 words of non-project writing.  Probably closer to 20000, but we’ll call it 15000 and be joyful; fifteen-thousand words of off-topic, pipe-cleansing ramble.  Sidenote: WordPress gives me happy little notifications when things happen (somebody new liked your post!  somebody left a comment!  you left the oven on!), one of which is meeting your posting goal for whatever period you desire.  The fastest posting goal you can set is one post per week.  So I get a charge out of the cheerful little “you met your posting goal for the week!” on Monday evening when the week is just getting started.  Hooray, “achievements”?

And let me not forget that enmeshed in those 30 posts are five (hopefully, by the weekend, six) entirely unrelated short stories running the gamut from weird to dark to depressing (seriously, why can’t I write a happy short story?) which I also can’t complain about.  Each one is about 1000 words of brain-stimulating, boundary-stretching weirdness, helping me to write outside the box that The Project locks me into.  Not that I feel boxed in with the novel — far from it — but the stories help me to envision other projects beyond the edge of this one.  And to me, they work well enough that I feel hope that those other projects can be as good as this one (which hopefully assumes this one’s any good to begin with?!)

Finally, WordPress gives me a handful of more or less meaningless statistics which are nonetheless fun to noodle over.  It turns out I’ve racked up thirty subscribers to the blarg here.  Given that only a handful of those are folks I know personally, that means that at least twenty people out there have stumbled onto my little pile of drivel and liked it enough to click a button that makes it a part of their daily-ish reading.  While a click of a button is not a big deal, the fact that people who know me only through my writing like that writing enough to invite more of my writing gives me the warm fuzzies.  And the positive feedback from other writers is a solid kick in the hindparts to boot (see what I did there?).

So.

One month.  Twenty-eight thousand words of Pure Project Product.  Fifteen to twenty thousand words of Blargle Fargle Wargle.  Five not-totally-craptastic short stories.  Thirty subscribers.  I don’t see any way to parse that information that doesn’t add up to March having been one pretty goldfinger solid start down the path to capital-w Writing.

Thanks for reading.  Pavorisms will continue after these commercial messages.

More Quotes, More Inspirational Crap, and I’m not very good at writing about music

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Yesterday’s brush with a motivational quote that speaks to me put me in mind of another one that more directly influenced my recent onset of brain fever, AKA throwing down the ink-gauntlet and declaring myself a writer.  Incidentally, the quote is from a band, which is double dumb on me because I typically profess not to get all wound up in the lyrics to songs.  In my defense, how can you?  I listen to the radio every day and wish I didn’t because the songs are so literarily (yep, I did it) barren that it hurts my English teacher brain.  And yeah, okay, I’m sure there are bands out there dropping crazy good poetry penned by angels, but I’m over thirty; I don’t have time to go hunting out new music like I did in my younger and more formative years.  Basically I turn on Pandora and let some music I’ve never heard and never will again wash over my subconscious.

But Pandora’s responsible for this, and I do enjoy Pandora.  I can count on one hand the number of full CDs I’ve bought in the last several years, and I need less hands than that to count the CDs I’m glad I bought.  I also just realized that I’m totally aging myself by referring to it as a CD even at this point.  Does anybody buy CDs?  What do you call it when you buy it online now?  An album?  Sharknado, I’m too old to care about the lingo.

ANYWAY.  AWOLNATION.  The caps are the band’s, not mine.  That’s the band and they’re responsible for the quote.  I don’t know things about music.  I can’t write about it.  They’re best known for Sail, which came out in 2010, and is not the song in question.  Ugh, I’m getting sidetracked.  This is not about the music.  It’s about the words, which are usually at odds with the music.  In fact with AWOLNATION I think the lyrics usually are at odds with the music, which may in fact be the point.  Blarg, there I go off the road again.

Anyway, they have a song called “Kill Your Heroes”.  The video for it is a crackup, riffing on good old Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and the message is brilliant.  The song as a whole isn’t bad either, but what really gets me is the line at the end of the first verse.

“Never let your fear decide your fate.”

This writing thing, for me, has been a thing that I’ve wanted to try for a long time, but well, I’ve always been afraid of failing.  Afraid that people won’t like what I put out there, that I will never find any measure of success at it, that it will be a waste of my time.  The fact is, those fears may be well-founded.  I may never have success at it, people may not like what I have to offer, and if that be the case, then it sure may turn out to be a colossal waste of my time.

But then, it won’t be, really, because I’m having an absolute ball just writing the novel and writing the blarg here for my audience of a handful (so far!).  And I may not come to anything, and in a few years maybe I’ll have burned out on this and moved on to some other crazy obsession (Civil War Reenactments have always fascinated me.  That’s not a joke.).

But at least this time, I won’t let my fear of the thing keep me from trying the thing.

 

1350 more words today, and the train keeps on a-rollin’.