Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

On Being A Fake

Posted: June 14, 2013 in life, writing
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Fake Eyelashes

About as real, and about as useful.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is an actual conversation I had:

Me: So, what kind of stuff do you like to do?

Other Person: I’m a writer.

Me: Really? That’s great! What do you write? Or do you have more than one project?

Other Person: No, just the one. I like to devote myself fully to an idea. I’ve got this epic cycle, where the fate of worlds hangs in the balance*. It draws on the philosophies of Buddha and Richard Dawkins. It’s incredible.

Me: Wow, that’s a hell of an undertaking. How far along are you?

Other Person: Oh, I haven’t started. But I’ve been thinking about it for a decade.

Me: ….

Other Person: It’s going to be awesome.

Other Person, you are not a writer. You have not written, ergo you are not a writer. You’re a thinker, and, you know, congratulations on that. I hear Rodin did a sculpture of you. But until the moment you put pen to paper or fingers to keys**, you are not a writer.

You are a fake.

You’re like a person who calls themselves a fighter pilot because they’ve seen Top Gun 400 times. If thinking about things was all it took to be allowed to call yourself by their title, I would by now be an expert marksman, world-class trauma surgeon, and have the ability to communicate telepathically with machines. But, alas, I am not. And I don’t go around pretending to be.***

We all have the potential to do things. But, until we do them, that’s all it is: potential.

You want to be a writer? Go write. Then you are a writer. You might not be a published writer, or a financially independent writer, or even a good writer. But those are qualifiers. You’ve written: you are a fucking writer. Congratulations.

Until then, stop wasting my time.

*All right, I can’t actually remember what they said. But it was some variant of ‘big thing that will take the rest of my life’.
**Or, given the timeline this guy is on, put brain to the Automatic Thought Enscribing Machine.

***Except when I try to take control of the back hoes at construction sites.

 

My Brain Wears A Black Hat

Posted: June 12, 2013 in writing
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Cowboy

And she that sat him’s name was Imagination. (Photo credit: Kevin Zollman)

My head is full of frontiers.

I put this down to the countless hours I spent watching science fiction and western movies with my dad back when I was a much smaller terror than I am now. All those towns with a single dusty street, all those galaxies beyond the edge of known space.* And all the characters that are made by those settings: the hard ones, the daring ones, the abject cowards and the morally questionable.**

This comes out in my writing, I think. Looking back at a lot of my stories, I notice a trend. The ones I love best tend to take place on borders of some kind. Occasionally they occur within the confines of a larger setting—a modern city, for example—but the main action always happens somewhere outside of the light, like the lawless confines of a hidden underground dog fighting ring. Places where normal morality has been suspended.

And now that I’ve recognized this, I’ve taken a fresh look at some of the stories I’ve been stuck on. You know the ones: they just didn’t work out and you’ve got no fucking clue why. They died of Story SIDS. But now I’m thinking that maybe a few tweaks of setting might breathe new and terrifying life into them.

I don’t think I’m the only one who has a place inside their head. All writers do. Maybe yours is an ancient city, steeped in history and corruption, layered in beauty and horror and fabulous inventions and terrible crimes. Maybe it’s the cozy confines of a small town, its casual simplicity overlaid with a Byzantine tracery of friends and neighbours and obligations and old secrets. Maybe it’s the clinical sterility of a spaceship or a lab or an institution. Or the broken post-apocalyptic landscape. Somewhere, there’s a place where your imagination feels at home.

So, what would we see if we cracked open your mind? Where does your imagination put its clawed feet up and relax?

Mine’s riding into some wild dead-end town right now, magic and horror following behind.

*Not hard to see why I love Firefly, is it?
**I’m aware that variants of these appear in almost all settings, but in the frontier, there’s much less accountability. There might be a token of the law, sometimes embodied by the character themselves, but ultimately they have to make choices based on what they can live with at the end of the day. It makes for strong protagonists, if often damaged ones.

The Dead Zone

Posted: June 7, 2013 in writing
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Stacking books until...

Picture this, but higher and with a cat balanced on top. (Photo credit: Alexandre Dulaunoy)

I’ve hit a dead zone.

Everything I can* submit has been submitted somewhere. I’m waiting to hear yay or nay on…*checks files*…four short stories and a novel query. I have no big projects I’m working on except the editing, and that’s proceeding at its usual snail’s pace with no option on rushing. There are no short stories in progress; all the ideas from my last bout are finished.

So: what now?

This happens from time to time. These lulls between the word storms seem to crop up about twice a year. If I remember correctly, the last one I had was in January, right after I finished the zero draft of my last novel. There was nothing on deck to replace it, so I went into a holding pattern of read-research-think-plan. Which kicked off this latest phase of short stories.

At one time, I would have found something, anything, to work on at a time like this. Old novels. Other stories that weren’t past the idea stage. Half-assed novella projects. If I’m going to do this, I reasoned—this being defined as write in an attempt to get as much published as I can—then I need to do it all the time.

Which is bullshit, of course. That’s the very epitome of working hard but not smart. It’s also the fastest way I know to burning out. Do that long enough, and you’ll hate what you’re working on with the white hot flaming intensity of a thousand suns.

The illusion that effort is equal to product is a powerful one. And you’ll never hear me say that the way to success lies through slacking off. But there’s a difference between working to an end and working just to stay busy.

I’m still writing every day. I have the blog posts, of course, and my own journal entries. I also have exercises I do, little experiments to stretch my skills. None of that is meant to see the light of day—hell, most of them are less than 500 words—but they’re still important. Like the finger exercises guitar players do, even when they’re not writing a new song. It’s a way of keeping sharp.

So, the next few weeks will probably be about rebuilding. Keep working on the editing, because it still stubbornly refuses to do itself. And start looking for those new ideas. Some new short stories would be nice for summer. And NaNoWriMo is five months away, give or take, but if I want to get something done during that month this year, I need to start looking for the ideas now. It takes time to work out the story kinks.

In the meantime, this looks like a great time to catch up on my reading.

*In other words, everything I feel won’t embarrass me if I let it out the door.

5 Places Writing Ideas Are Hiding

Posted: June 5, 2013 in inspiration, writing
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Hide

Get the fuck out of here! The writers are coming! (Photo credit: Trevor Coultart)

1. Outside. You don’t even have to wait for a nice day. Get out there in the sun or the rain or the snow or the kind of in-between weather that’s not really doing anything interesting or narratively convenient. Go for a walk or sit in the grass or stand on a street corner. Let the world intrude on you. Feel the texture of it on your skin. Taste it in your breath.
And keep an eye out for wandering ideas. Sometimes they’re not where you thought they were, and it’s up to you to go out and find them. With a club, if necessary.

2. Somewhere loud. Eavesdropping is terribly rude, but, in some places, also terribly entertaining. Not malicious eavesdropping, just the picking up of conversational overflow. The coffee shop, the mall, school, the park, anywhere. Pick up a few snippets of conversation. Listen to the way people really talk, the little noises they make in between their words and while they’re waiting for their turn to speak. Write a conversation of your own, using what you hear. Finish that story you only heard the beginning of while waiting in line for a burger.

3. Somewhere quiet. Libraries, empty rooms, secluded glades. Find the silent places. Let the stillness echo until, finally, you can hear your own thoughts more clearly. They might have something interesting to say. Or, hell, just revel in the quiet. There’s a lot of noise and distraction around, but stillness is harder to come by. Enjoy it. You might be surprised by what comes out of it.

4. Somewhere new. No matter how small a town you live in, there are places in it you haven’t seen. Go and find one. Take a look around. What do you think happened here? What story does this place have to tell? Who wrote that graffiti on the wall? Was it the same person who pasted that Bible tract to the door? How about that broken bike helmet with the Anti-Flag sticker? What’s that doing here?
Leave when you’ve got enough questions to be getting on with, and see if you can figure out the answers on your way home.

5. Inside your own head. And not just anywhere. Really dig down and find the dark corners. You want the wrong side of the tracks of your brain, the place where everything is sharper and darker and somehow more important. Take a look at what you find there: old angers with their bright metal blades dulled by rust; rickety looming monuments of insecurity; festering piles of fear and shame.
This is your hidden gold mine.
This is where you’ll drag up the stuff that makes you write things you didn’t know you could. The things that make you feel gut-punched. And you’ll do it because everything here is personal. It hurts.
So, if the ideas just won’t come, then hold your breath and go digging around in that pile until your hands are dirty. I guarantee you’ll find something worth writing about.

How To Give Up: 6 Options For Quitting Writing

Posted: May 31, 2013 in inspiration, writing
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give up

You’re not going to argue with a wall, are you? (Photo credit: abradyb)

1) Hold yourself to an impossible standard. Man, nothing sucks the fun out of something like expecting to be perfect at it. And once the fun is gone, you’re just slogging away at yet another thing that eats your time. You might as well be breaking rocks into smaller rocks with a third, slightly larger, rock.
So if you want to give up, I suggest trying really hard to do the impossible. Set a goal to write a novel in a weekend and not have it suck! Make it non-negotiable that every word you write will be as pristine as the unused toilet paper of the gods! Write a multi-part epic with thousands of characters by randomly smashing your face down on the keyboard once a day! I guarantee you’ll be giving up in no time.

2) Expect that you’ll find the time somewhere. Don’t bother making time for writing. Just fit it in whenever there’s nothing worth watching on TV.* Or there’s no kids to take care of, or work shit to do. It’s always easier to not do something than to do it, right? So take the easy way out.
The best part about this one is that you don’t even have to actually quit. You can just keep saying, “I’ll get to it someday” until the stars go dark.

3) Accept absolutely no criticism. Okay, this one won’t make you give up. But after the third time you throw a hissy fit when someone dares to tell you to stop using the shotgun approach to punctuation**, the inevitable death from blunt force trauma caused by repeatedly being hit with a chair will take the decision out of your hands.

4) Listen to haters. All those people who ask ‘why are you wasting time on that?’ or ‘shouldn’t you be doing something more productive with your time?’ can really help you give up. Let yourself be sucked into the poisonous vortex of their combination of negativity and envy. Stop struggling. It will all be over soon.

5) Burn out. Instead of giving yourself time to recharge, work until you fucking hate the sight of your computer. Really bash your head against the wall on this one. No days off, no side projects, no taking a break for your uncle’s funeral. No taking care of yourself, either. Eat shit food, get no exercise, have no social activities to make you into a well rounded human being. By god, you have to sacrifice for your art and you’re going to do just that until the only release is quitting or death.
And, if circumstances conspire to keep you away, really beat yourself unmercifully about it. How else will you learn?

6) Talk yourself out of it. You didn’t really want to write that book anyway. You’re not sure if you have the talent, and it’s really hard. In fact, it’s better if you don’t write, because it leaves you with more time to catch up on Deadliest Toddlers and The Real Housewives Wars. So just sit back, relax, and give up.

*Defined in this case as ‘nothing that you’d rather sit on your ass and watch rather than actually do something productive’. It’s a surprisingly broad category.
** “It doesn’t matter where it goes, as long as it’s in there somewhere.”

Five Characters That I’m Fucking Sick Of

Posted: May 29, 2013 in reading, writing
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Moody

I tried being nice once. It was awful. (Photo credit: andrewrennie)

1) Moody Guy. Wanders through the pages being angsty and, you know, damaged, but never actually does anything to address these qualities. Like see a therapist, or occasionally think of someone other than himself. Despite these detriments, he will unerringly attract anyone with more than a whiff of estrogen about them. We are led to believe that there’s a nice guy lurking somewhere underneath, but letting him out just hurts too damn much.

2) Awkward Guy. Usually a supporting character, often The Friend of either The Moody Guy or The Girl. In the case of the former, he’s the loveable but silly best mate who jollies his dour friend along, though we have no idea why he hangs around with the depressing bastard to begin with. In the case of the latter, he’s the guy who moons over The Girl and will never, ever get to be with her.

3) The Girl. That’s all she is, because that’s all she has to be. She just stands around having boobs and a vag and that’s somehow enough. People tend to point her out as evidence of inclusion. As in, “Look, we’ve put a girl* in the story. And she’s surrounded by all these sketchy-yet-cool people and can somehow keep up with them despite having no abilities or personality. That makes her a strong female character, right?”
Funnily enough, her obvious lack of any definable characteristics can continue even when she’s the protagonist.

4) The Authority. Parents in teen novels, bosses or superiors or occasionally parents in adult. Only come in two flavours: the Monolithic And Controlling or the Clueless And Embarrassing.

5) The Token. The friend who is very pointedly not an able-bodied, cisgendered, Caucasian male who fits into standardized patterns for behaviour and appearance. The details vary; the purpose does not. They exist to be different. But, you know, in a cool way.

Seriously, is it just me?

*Always referred to by the diminutive ‘girl’ instead of ‘woman’ no matter what age she happens to be.

 

Reading Crap: Learning What Not To Do

Posted: May 24, 2013 in reading, writing
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English: Azerbaijanian girl Leman reading a book.

Christ, I could do better than this. Someone fetch me a crayon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The older I get, the less patience I have for crappy books.* I’m not sure if this is a product of lessened free time or just a symptom of my oncoming crotchety-old-lady-ness, but, either way, I’m far more likely to put down a book that’s not doing it for me now than I used to be. Once upon a time, I’d have to finish it, just to find out what happened, even if I didn’t really care what happened. I hated leaving things undone. Now I’ll drop it like a hot rock and find a better way to spend my time. I do take note of exactly when and why I stopped reading, though.

Not that I regret all that time I spent reading things that were questionable at best. If nothing else, I learned what not to do from them.

I remember the way it would go.:I’d be reading a book, and something would happen, and I’d find myself thinking, That’s not how that should have gone down.

And then: I can do better.

And I’d go on to make up an alternate story in my head.** One that I found more appealing. I never really did anything with those bits and pieces, but they were still useful. It was the early form of story awareness. Of knowing how things should go for the most impact. What I was really doing was building my own skills by using someone else’s failures. It was like watching a hundred YouTube videos of people attempting a skate jump until I thought: Right. I know what they’re doing wrong. I won’t do that.

And for the most part I didn’t. I made other, newer mistakes. Some of which were even more spectacular failures. But at least I wasn’t repeating someone else’s problems.

I’m not going to go back to finishing crappy books. My patience is just too limited. But I’ll always remember the lessons I learned back when I had to finish them all.

Because if I’m going to fuck up, it’s going to be my fuck up. And, man, it’s going to be epic.

*For crappy anything, really. Food, movies, games, people…the mental math of ‘is this worth my time?’ has grown ever more stringent.
**I’m aware that this is the basis for most fan fiction.

*SCENE NOT FOUND*

Posted: May 22, 2013 in writing
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Screen capture of a 404 message error on Wikip...

Well, damn. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It happens to the best of us. We’re cruising along, writing something, and you hit the queen bitch of all potholes. It’s not writer’s block; you can write quite well. But you find that one scene, that one conversation, that one moment, that you just can’t write for love or money or some combination of the two.

And you sit there, staring at the cursor, and think: What now?

1. Turn it around. Sometimes those scenes are like puzzle pieces or non-standard genitalia*: you have to turn them around and try them a few different ways before you figure out how it all fits together.
Maybe you’re starting in the wrong place. Maybe the scene should have come earlier, or later. Maybe it has the wrong characters. Try a few things and see if anything moves.

2. Give it a rest. Try not to hammer your head against the wall on this too long. Trust me, you will become mired in the frustration that it creates, which just makes it harder to dig your way out. Take a break. Go for a walk. Re-grout the bathroom. Whatever. Just do something else and see if your hindbrain can shake it loose.

3. Drink. No. Wait. *Checks piece of paper* Sorry, that’s my to do list for the day.

4. Switch it up. Sometimes I storyboard things. Or comic-book things, depending. Draw them out in a series of panels just to see how it goes. What expressions go where, what the body language should be. Or I write what doesn’t happen. Sounds ass-backwards, but think of it like Sherlock Holmes’ method: eliminate the impossible and what remains, however improbable, is the truth. Or as close as we need it to be for fiction, anyway.

5. Drop it like it’s hot. Put in a couple of asterisks and fill in the bare bones of what needs to happen. Then move on. For example, I came across this gem in my editing:
***SCENE WHERE CAS REALIZES LORD T. IS ONE OF THE DEBTS***

Solid gold writing, there.
But it was enough. I couldn’t get the scene right, so I figure out the basics and moved on. Otherwise I might still be stuck there and the manuscript would remain unfinished. As it is, I have a much better idea of how that scene will go in the rewrite.
And occasionally, upon a re-read, something else happens. Listen to John Steinbeck:

If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.**

And then aren’t you glad that you didn’t let that section sink the book?

*Which begs the question: is there such a thing as standard genitalia? Quick, someone Google it. I’ll wait here.
**From his interview in The Paris Review in 1975. For more tips, check out this article (via Brain Pickings).

About Last Night

Posted: May 17, 2013 in inspiration, writing
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Human brain NIH

OH HAI. YOU BUSY? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Brain: HEY.

Me: Zzzzzz.

Brain: OH HEY.

Me: Zzzz….buh? Wha’s goin’ on?

Brain: CHECK THIS OUT.

Me: Burglars? Fire? Aliens?

Brain: NOPE. EVERYTHING’S FINE. CHECK THIS OUT.

Me: …It’s quarter to four in the goddamned morning.

Brain: I KNOW. AWESOME, RIGHT? CHECK THIS OUT.

Me: I am going to kill you, even if it kills us both. Because you are an annoying little git.

Brain: I DIED DOING WHAT I LOVE. NOW CHECK THIS OUT.

Me:…Story ideas? You woke me up in the asshole of the night to show me story ideas? Can you not see that I was sleeping?

Brain: SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK. NOW WRITE THIS DOWN BEFORE IT GOES AWAY.

Me: I’ll have to go to the other room. Can’t you hold on to it until morning? You know, proper morning, not this cut-rate pre-dawn bull shit?

Brain: THAT’S NOT THE DEAL, MOTHERFUCKER.

Me:….Did you just call me—?

Brain: THE DEAL IS YOU WRITE THIS DOWN NOW OR I FLUSH IT DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE FOREVER. THAT’S HOW THIS WORKS. NOW STOP BEING A WHINY LITTLE TIT AND GET OUT OF BED, ASSFACE.

Me: (getting out of bed) I hate you.

Brain: HA HA HA. YOU’RE ADORABLE WHEN YOU’RE TIRED AND HOMICIDAL.

Me: (going to find notepad) Die in a fire.

Cat: Oh, are you awake now? Awesome. Feed me, servant, lest I rend your feet with my claws.

Me: (writing) I’m going to start mainlining coffee.

Dr. O’Cyborg’s Prescription for Writing: Leave It Undone

Posted: May 10, 2013 in writing
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Cyborg Hunter

Dr. O’Cyborg’s people have endured much persecution. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Feeling sick today. I blame the change in the weather. We had five days of summery temperatures in a row, and then last night, an hour before I started coaching my beginning runner’s group, it started to rain.* And now it feels like the air pressure is going to squeeze my brain out my nose.

Human barometer: worst super power ever.

Anyway, before I take copious amounts of migraine medication and retire to hallucinate about sentient balloon animals for the rest of the day**, I’d like to pass on one of my writing tricks. Well, I call it mine, but I’ve heard it in so many different places over the years that, like a ret-conned superhero, I just can’t trace its origin anymore.

I have a minimum daily word count: 500. On average, I write about 2,000 words per day. Most times in one go, but other days by picking at it for five or ten minutes here and there.*** Either way, I usually get to that point somehow. And one of the ways I get there is by stopping the previous day’s writing before I’m done.

I know, sounds stupid, right? Leaving the act unfulfilled? Constant writing blue balls. Blue ovaries. Whatever. But I always end the day before I’ve come to the end of the ideas. And then I make a little note of what happens next somewhere, and close the program. I go do my other life stuff.

Then when I come back the next day, I have an idea of what comes next. Which means I do much less staring at the cursor, waiting for an idea to turn up. I waste less time. And, by the time I finish whatever was left over from the previous day, I usually have new ideas waiting for me. My hindbrain works on them while I’m finishing up yesterday’s work.

Of course I always reach the end of the writing day before I reach the end of the new ideas. So I repeat. And very rarely do I completely stall out. My days are vastly more productive because of this little trick.

Just like the old show business saying: leave ‘em wanting more.

*Which I wouldn’t mind so much, but every Thursday night for the last five weeks, the weather has been shit for the weekly group run. I don’t know what I did to offend the weather gods, but it must have been fucking dire.
**Just kidding. I’m not really going to do this. Because that would be crazy, right? RIGHT?
***Today feels like the latter. Sentences interspersed with conversations with Dr. Seamus O’Cyborg, my imaginary half-Irish, half-robot medication provider.

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