2012

Looking for a significantly challenging writing goal for the 2012?  Write 1 Sub 1.

"I Don't Believe in Writers' Block"

I don’t believe in writers’ block. Plumbers don’t get plumbers’ block. Why should writing be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working.
- Philip Pullman

There are some authors who have no problem meeting their daily word count. Stephen King, in his hybrid memoir-manual On Writing, notes vaguely that he’s written “thirty-five or so” novels and wonders (impatiently) what exactly writers do with their time when they’re not writing:

Knit afghans? Organize church bazaars? Deify plums? I’m probably being snotty here, but I am also, believe me, honestly curious. If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?

Sage, if somewhat flippant advice.

The OWL at Purdue (the go-to site for every college Writing Center Office in America because they'd like to make their own resources look like this but why bother when Purdue's already done the work?) claims writer's block is real.  Their Symptom/Possible Cure approach doesn't challenge the writer's belief in being blocked -- but if you look carefully at the symptoms you'll see that they all fall under "things I've done to myself that make writing impossible."

Not everyone's as nice as the online writing lab at Purdue.  Some are tough-love-bitches on the subject: "There is no such thing as writer's block. Anyone who says they have it is just in denial."

I now know what writer’s block is. It’s the fear you cannot do what you’ve announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn’t worth doing. That’s the rarer form.

Tom Wolfe in an interview with George Plimpton in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Ninth Series (Viking 1992).

Just when I begin to think the condition doesn't exist I find proof that it does: Writer's Block Wines out of California. With a nice picture of the Bard on the label to remind you of how prolific he was and how prolific you ... maybe better just to drink the wine until you can't think.

Isaac Asimov had writer's block once. It was the worst ten minutes of his life.
* Attributed to Harlan Ellison

So, what do you think? Does it exist? What is it? Have you suffered it? Or just bantered witty quotes about it?

Where I'm At

- News: President Obama chose Kalamazoo Central High School as the one US high school where he'll give a commencement address this year.  http://www.whitehouse.gov/commencement  They won a video-essay contest.
- Speak Coffee journal giveaway: still open!

This is so where I'm at right now.  YA writer Natalie Whipple blogs that should she never get another idea for a novel/story she would have more than enough to keep her writing for the rest of her life (agreed).  She's restarting/rewriting a project (so am I), and it turns out she's a big fan of rewrites (I sure hope I am).

I start today on a novel that I've officially started twice before.  This time, however, I have an outline and a much better idea of who my characters are.  I hope to finish said novel draft within the month of May.  Which is crazy, but no more crazy than author Kiersten White completed her first novel.

On Kiersten's blog (Kiersten Writes) she posts on her "method" ... basically there is no method other than obsession. Getting the novel done  means becoming completely obsessed with the material.  I'm completely with her on this one (minus the writing while the kid is napping part).  My one completed novel manuscript (it's drivel but it's completed) came out of a January of obsession -- I remember nothing of that month but writing, coffee and overcast skies.  And wearing the same sweatshirt most days. Hmm.

But I'm worried about being able to complete a draft of this project. The first time I attempted it I had a fun idea but I didn't know where it was going or who my characters were, so it died at 20,000 words of manuscript. That's 20,000 words of place description and funny snips of dialog that had no place in the narrative and very little actual story.

The second time I attacked it I still didn't really know where I was going -- I'm a self declared pantser -- and I tried to edit the old scenes and then write the new ones.  I got bogged down by rereading the first attempt scenes.  I ended up spending my time editing not writing.  And then I got depressed at how poor my old writing was and further depressed by my lack of forward progress.

This time I don't intend to look at anything but my synopsis and outline as I write the new draft.

I know!  A synopsis!  An outline!  The self-declared pantser has an outline.  Have I gone over to the dark side and become a plotter?  I don't yet know.  Ask me in three weeks.

I used to love attempting the type of controlled chaos that Linda Grimes talks about on her blog Visiting Reality.  (BTW, I love her blog when she starts tell stories, like how she was accidentally recruited to run guns for the IRA).

Now is the perfect time to start (and finish) a manic novel writing dash because I'm free. Spring semester has ended and I don't teach in the summer nor am I taking class this month.  Sure, I'm playing big-bad-editor for the literary journal, and I'm getting ready for a six week stint in New England, and trying to recover my apartment from the tidal wave of chaos that washed in during finals ... but I'm free(ish).

My new mindset is wholly encompassed by this flow chart. I'm printing it out and taping it to the window behind my desk. No seriously, I'm taping it to the window. And if my neighbors start doing something stupid but entertaining I will have to lean to the side to watch around the flow chart taped to my window.

It's time to get the damnwriting done.  What's your method?  How do you get it done?

Stay Away!

I have to be very careful and stay away from this site. The artist has done beautiful trading card style artwork of the major characters from the epic Robert Jordan series The Wheel of Time.

I have to stay away because every time I go there I want to read the series. Which is very bad because ... well ... time drain and brain drain if nothing else.

I got through about six of these Robert Jordan novels while I was a teenager. They run about 600-1,000 pages each. And then I was caught up with the publication cycle. So by the time I took up book seven-ish (maybe it was eight), enough time had passed that I no longer remembered the extended-extended cast of characters. Trust me: extended-extended cast. The characters that the artist has drawn as trading cards are the "main" characters and you can see how many of those their are.

Sure, Matt, Perrin, Rand, Egwene, Elayne, even Siuan -- I gotcha, I remember who you are. But everyone else? All those backwater characters that show up once every four hundred pages? I can't recall if you're some cast-off Child of the Sun or some bit of evil that seeped through, or if you're the other-other rogue male with the whatever power. And I get the sense that you're evil-ish but I'll be damned if I can recall if you've made a deal with the Black Aes Sedai or if you're a Seanchan spy.
What was the worst were scenes where your point of view character was someone you'd been introduced to before but in the new scene you never got their name just some facts that would have clued you in if it hadn't been 400 pages and eight months since you read the previous scene.

Robert Jordan has passed away (he was really too young) but the series is still going. Someone is working to finish based on his drafts and outlines. But the series has 12 books now (number 12 is almost 1,100 pages) and a prequel and I'm still not seeing the phrase stunning conclusion written anywhere on the jacket copy.

Actually I just found an article on how Jordan had drafted his "twelfth" book before his untimely death but when the new writer began working on it he broke it into three "short" books. 1,100 pages is the shorter version?

So there will be 15 of these book -- 16 with the prequel -- I've read about seven of them. Having invested in almost half of the series makes me think maybe I should see it out to its end. But to do the end any justice I would have to start at the beginning (again) or be hopelessly confused.

Instead, I'm going to devote time this summer to reading Lord of the Rings -- I've read the Hobbit but never the Lord of the Rings. As a teenager I had no patience for Tolkien's style of writing; I was very pissed off about the dwarves taking their precious time knocking one by one, hanging up their cape of this color and their hat of that color and then, oh look!, another dwarf to repeat the process for the eighth time. So, needless to say, I had to learn some patience to make it out of chapter one. I'm looking to tackle at least one of those books and at least one of the Foundations Trilogy this year.

Dream Bigger

Welcome to 2010.

Aquarius posted that her 2010 resolution was to dream bigger. Her reason for why is a short but sweet little story that is worth popping over to her blog to read. But even without a story behind it, dreaming bigger is the kind of goal, resolution, initiative that we all should embrace.

Think about how many people will resolve to lose weight in the new year only to quit their diets before the end of February (I'm being generous with my time estimate). Dream bigger. Dream not of the result but of the life that encompasses the result. Don't resolve to lose weight, resolve to change your lifestyle. Not "I'm gonna see Sven in the gym six days a week" change your lifestyle, but "I'm gonna think differently about food" change your lifestyle.

Perhaps this is a small example of thinking bigger but I think it is an apt place to start considering the practice of dreaming bigger and not just the dream of dreaming bigger.

I have big plans -- big dreams -- for 2010.

My only resolution is to read 52 books in the coming year (one down, 51 to go). Last year I made this same resolution and came in at 50. Not too bad but I can do better.

As for my 2010 dreams: I'm playing this one close to the vest. Don't get me wrong, I have giant lists posted on the walls of my apartment where I can't much miss seeing them everyday. But it seems to me that when you start dreaming big you might be able to tell someone your end goal -- and they'll nod and think you've got stars in your eyes -- but you can't tell them how you'll get there. You can't hammer them over the head with your lists and your plans and formulas. If you insist on discussing your big dreams then they insist on pointing out the flaws and holes and improbabilities. So I'll stick to keeping my big dreams and bigger goals written down and hung beside my desk; I'll post calendars with dates and deadlines and quotas in my living room.

If you're going to accomplish the impossible, you have to start somewhere, right?

NaNoWriMo: Post Mortem

Some people refuse to let go of their NaNoWriMo energy and come December 1, they immediately embark on NaNoFiMo (National Novel Finishing Month), where those pesky little things like endings, transitions, and all of chapter five are written.

Others engaged in NaQuRejMo and immediately query agents about their brand new NaNoBabies

My biggest goal at the end of any crazily intense period of writing is to keep writing consistently even if I'm not writing at the previous quantity. It's been a goal I had to abandon this month. With the end of semester, the holidays, and all the things I put off in November [edit of earlier post where I said December although it's beginning to feel like a Freudian slip], I had no choice but to plunge back into real life and take care of shit before shit took care of me.

I'm saving up my thoughts and hopes and energy for writing starting the week after Christmas/January. I have many a writing friend who has decided that 2010 will not only be the start of a new decade but the beginning of a new chapter in her life: publication. I too am throwing my hat in the ring and going for it with gusto.

Yes, I've been submitting short stories regularly for the past eight months, but, as of yet, nothing has come of that. What I plan to work toward in 2010 is seeing a short story in print and getting a novel to the point where I can query it ... and the agent can, of course, say yes!

I am also hoping to rid myself of my proclivity to using exclamation points in blog entries and responses.

Those are my 2010 goals -- not resolutions, but goals. Although, truth be told my one 2009 New Year's Resolution -- to read 52 books this year -- has almost been fulfilled! 44 books read and nearly two weeks of vacation coming up before the year ends. :)

[edit: as of Sunday night, 45 books read so far this year.]

Hauling Ash -- The Market -- Career Outlook

Ash was a doll the entire weekend. Everyone's in love with her and she's single-handedly (pawedly?) generating new cat owners across the country.

On the way to my father's house she cried a little in the car. I had her in a harness and leashed to the back door handle of the car so that she couldn't get under foot. But once the crying finished she was fine. Just hunkered down and waited it out.

While I drove four hours north to visit family, the kitten went to stay with my father's fiance who was only an hour away. Both there and back, Ash just curled up in my lap and sat/slept the entire ride. On the way home Saturday she hardly moved from my lap she was so calm.

It was great! Only once she got back to the apartment she curled up on "her" chair and slept for four hours straight. Not catnap sleep but deep sleep. The kind where cats twist into funny positions and their whiskers twitch as they chase mice in their dreams.

I'm behind on everything.

Don't be like me kids; don't procrastinate. Just don't.

I'm keeping afloat just barely, but I'm not feeling well at all. Hopefully this will pass.

I'm sure many of you have seen this news at PW and other outlets last week: "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books."

Yikes.

I guess this is the first time the "good news" has been that I'm not ready to publish a novel length work. However, while I might not believe that trickle down tax cuts ever get to the "average joe" -- and no, Joe the Plumber never saw a dime of trickle down economics -- I do know that the big boys' cuts frequently affect smaller and smaller presses. Blah. These guys are 1.) making me glad I'm in school and 2.) making me want to stay in school through the Ph.D.

Thanksgiving was a time of friends/family asking about the Ph.D. My friend from high school wanted to know if that was still my plan, my father still thinks it's the best plan, and unless the economy rebounds in the next 20 months during which time I sign with an editor for publication of a novel, I think I'll be applying for that Ph.D. Meanwhile I need to talk with the advising-people in my program and see what the deal around here is for switching over from an MFA to a Ph.D. without earning the MFA. There are only about 20 (maybe 24) Ph.D in creative writing programs in the nation. They are, essentially, lit Ph.Ds with a creative thesis ... and there are mixed emotions about hiring Ph.Ds in writing over MFAs in writing. Some schools claim that in 15 years they'll hire only Ph.Ds for the spots they're now considering both; some schools are doing searches for faculty and viewing Ph.Ds with suspicion. These inconsistencies are to be expected in a subjective field but they make me want to scream get your shit together for crying out loud!

Writing: Art, Craft and Beauty

From the comments to yesterday's post:

Blogger Guerilla Grodd said...
A few weeks ago I was talking to my buddy Gordon, who is a very gifted composer. We were discussing the ongoing debate about the "art" of composing. What is the purpose of music? Is it a pure art form, or does it require a degree of accessibility for the listener? Can a piece of music be commercially viable AND artistically relevant? For whom is music written, the composer or the listener? I think this conundrum is also applicable to writing.

I sat down to address this comment with a firm notion of where I was going with my response. I was going to define "art" as per the academy and then I was going to talk about "craft" and then "beauty" because that "beauty" is where the soul lives. But then I choked. I couldn't get the first part down. I just sat here and turned one question over in my mind: What the fuck is art?

There's art for the sake of art -- although given that I can't find a definition of art that I believe both logically and intuitively in relation to any form of composition, we're going to have to gloss that phrase as meaning there is a reason for doing technically difficult stuff and that reason is that it's technically difficult.

I suppose that's akin to why Olympic athletes choose to do vaults or high dives that are worth a possible 10 points or a possible 9.9 instead of ones they know they can accomplish that are only worth a possible 9.6. But when they're spinning and flipping that fast all I know is that they are air born and that gravity will shortly end their flight. I only know if something went wrong when they don't stick the landing -- or because the commentators told me so. Dangerous, that last one is.

Anyway, I started this because I truly believe the purpose of writing is to produce joy, awe, wonder, to share a moment with the reader and give them something beautiful. That beauty could be sad beauty. It could be comic beauty. It could be poetic, assonance filled literary beauty. It could be scary beauty, or troubling beauty, or whimsical beauty.

I stopped myself short of sleeping beauty so we can all rest easy now that I've admitted my near miss of a bad pun.

Should writing entertain? Entertainment in that sense is a form of beauty, so why not? Should it accomplish other goals? Why not?

For whom should it be accessible? Well it damn well needs to be accessible for the author. I just finished that Nancy Kress interview in The Writer's Chronicle, and that interviewer harps on the woman constantly about "conscious decisions" in regard to genre, content and market needs/demands, and Kress seemed to get really testy because there are only so many ways she can say I wrote whatever came to my mind, I wrote in genres I had read, although I read almost every genre but romance; I didn't pick science fiction writing to make a career of, it happened simply because I was passionate.

Writing that is passionate is ten times closer to beauty, ten times closer to art than writing that is rote and dry because it is what someone else wants.

There's many an agent out there on the internet writing blogs saying yes, this is hot on the market right now, but don't write another novel just like [Twilight] just because it's hot; your novel will be stilted, boring, and the world will move on without your unimpassioned novel.

I'm here to go against the writing of the academy (a notion of contemporary fiction fashioned forty years ago as "artistic" and unanalyzed ever since) and say that writing to the academy simply for the sake of garnering their approval is exactly like writing another Twilight knock-off.

Specifically to Tanya and others in her crises: I think there is a great deal to be gained from learning how to do "academy approved" writing in an MFA program, but that doesn't mean that this is the type of writing you should be doing, nor the type of writing you need to do for the rest of your life.

Blogger Guerilla Grodd said...
... As artists, we can all study the "how" of our respective disciplines, but often we are not quite sure of the "why."

The "why" needs to be because we love it. Otherwise we're doing a whole lot of work for a very tiny profit that we do not give a damn about.

Embrace the Inner Creepy

So I was flipping back through my Kenyon notes and now that I've accepted that I am capable of creepy I found this snippet hilarious:

I struggled. I really did. I wrote three beginnings that I ditched because I didn't know what happened afterwards and they seemed to ominous to me. They say this really happened to Melanie Kirowitz. After she married the man from Ishpeming. Or was it Oscoda? Well, that doesn't really matter but the two of them moved down state to Bloomfield hills (he was a doctor) and kept a lake house up in Black River. ... And then there were a couple others and all of them felt that with the kind of opening I had given them someone needed to die. Or if a character didn't die that they found a dead body. And ... well ... I'm not Stephen King.

Now when I read that opening that's in italics I'm like
hmm, I see potential there. LOL! When did this happen to me? Obviously it was sometime between Sunday night and Wednesday night. Then it took another couple of days before I embraced my inner Joyce Carol Oates. Argh. Maybe Oates is pushing it too far. Maybe I need to think of it more as the eeriness of poets James Tate and Thomas Lux because the two of them intrigue me but never cross over that line to truly upsetting me or just plain freaking me out.

On that note, I have a problem. I've introduced a switchblade into a story. But I have no idea how to bring it back. It's like Chekhov's gun: if you introduce a gun in act one, the damn thing needs to be fired by the end of the play. But what happens to this little switch blade? I've already figured out how to kill off every one who needs going ... *sigh*

Teeth Gnashing

I bought one of those dental mouth guard things to keep me from grinding my teeth at night and waking up with an incredibly stiff jaw. It works well enough. But since I've made an effort to save my teeth by night I might as well do something to stop grinding them together by day out of worry and frustration.

Enter today's solution: the website.

I spent the afternoon in a chilly basement unaware of the time because there is no freakin daylight down there building a template for my own personal website. Ya!

I like it. It's pretty. And -- better yet -- I think I've built it in a way that will be functionable! I have Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator so I was able to make the template and slice it with an eye to graphics. Illustrator also allows you to save the sliced image in a html document with a table in it. From there I had to go through notepad and repreive my HTML skills of yore (read: high school) and it didn't turn out half bad. I would have liked to have used an editor for the HTML but Mircosoft tanked their editor that used to come with Windows. It was called FrontPage and I don't miss it. It was an editor that tried to be smarter than you and in the process made your site ugly unless you knew HTML to fix its flourishes. But without FrontPage I no longer have an editor program period. I'm certain I could find one to download for free somewhere (any suggestions?) but for the time being I am doing alright keeping the form simple and tweaking the script by hand when needed.

This has been good because it has kept me occupied, productive and optimistic all day. I feel like I accomplished something, I didn't gnash my teeth with worry. In fact, worry was the farthest thing from my mind as this was a tangible indulgence in my Successful Author Fantasy. (A fantasy which now has its own website, I might add.)

The SAF website is not online and running, so no link as yet. Today I worked the art template and the HTML but there's no written content and no official domain name. Those are the next steps.

Happy New Year

2007 Retrospective
Coffee. Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop (like coming home). Brief, almost comic, stint at law school (like the sinking feeling of getting pulled over for the first time). Coffee. MFA applications. Four weddings, no funerals. Blog. Coffee. Snow!

2008 Prospectus

• I begin the new year with coffee and about 6” of snow. More of each are anticipated throughout the day. Snow!
• Last year (last spring actually) I made it a goal/effort to post a new blog entry once a week. In 2007 I accumulated 50 entries, most of which occurred in a flurry at the end of the year. This year the goal is to make it a more evenly spaced 52+ entries.
• There’s the JanNoWriMo goal already mentioned.
• Then there’s me lighting candles, praying to idols and doing rain dances to bring myself an MFA acceptance letter. If I don’t get one I will have to have a Woah-Stop-Evaluate moment. Library science classes, anyone? That or radio intern, that was always fun.
• There’s other goals out there to be had, like losing a stone this year. Not because I’m British but because I think a stone is the most wonderfully awkward unit of weight. Anyway, weight isn’t my goal so much as working out more so that my knee hurts me less. I have my mother’s genetics to thank for the fact that I have never done anything mean to my knees and yet they hate me.
• Maybe I should also get a better aka "real" job. Attempts have been made: none successful.
• Writing! At least one hour straight daily. They say that if you make it a daily habit, that if you sit and write for a set amount of time even if you’re not inspired that you’re that much more productive when you are inspired, and that inspiration strikes that much more often. They (scientific researches this time) say that if you do something every day for 21 days it becomes a habit. Tangible goals: an hour+ per day on fiction and a story per month (length unimportant).
• Coffee!

If nothing else, the last item well definitely feature prominently in 2008.

Oddly enough tonight feels like it has more magic than New Year’s Eve did. Maybe because there’s a layer of snow on everything creating these great highlights and the sky shimmers back the street lights creating a grey-orange background to the night. Maybe it’s just that everything last night was about the end and tonight is all about the beginning of something. Either way I’m writing in the dark, because the dark preserves my view of the night out my window.

Pictures: top coffee stolen from Jud, snow = outside my house courtesy of my most awesome christmas camera.