I wish I could say it hit me like a bolt from the blue. That would
be poetic. But the truth of the matter is, the solution came to me
like one of those 3-D illusions from the '90's – y'know, those
glossy, kaleidoscopic prints that were all the rage before apps
robbed us of our wonder. Stare at the undulating pink sea foam with
the paisley trim, in a minute you'll see an elephant and her calf,
clear as day. So there I
was, staring, glassy-eyed, my brain straining to hold onto the middle
distance, my gaze gone slack but STILL not able to see the answer I
knew was right in front of me. Finally, after frustrating months of
no elephant, no calf, I stepped back and decided to try something
novel for my novel: look at the picture through my hero's eyes
instead of my own. I'd been conceited enough to think that I, as his
creator-god, possessed the all-sight that would solve his problems
and he, the automaton pawn, should lie back passively and wait for me
to tell him the answer. But my hero wasn't a dreamer. He put no
stock in whimsy. He didn't believe in sudden inspiration. No, my
hero was a pragmatist, an analyzer, and a deducer. I'd created him
specifically to be a problem solver in a future where no one so much
as tied their own shoes. And for over a year I'd been helping him
look for his missing ex-wife while I built a world of future tech and
alien monsters around him, tossing villains and pitfalls and
aw-shucks reversals in his path, sculpting a universe and crafting a
history all for him...all to keep him distracted from the fact that I
couldn't figure out where his ex-wife had gone to.
It was a good hook. I knew it the moment I thought of it, a mere
three years after my rough draft had disembarked. After first
dropping my hero onto a strange planet alone, confident he could make
it on his own (he couldn't), then partnering him with his ex in Draft
2 and hoping fireworks would ensue (they didn't), I happened upon the
notion of his former wife gone missing, vanished without a trace
scant months after taking a prestigious job at a high-tech firm on an
Earth-like world. Their split was not amicable and the fights had
been epic, at least as epic as their love for one another during the
better days. Now she'd moved on and his life had gone south, but
suddenly she was gone and only he could find her. Their last words
to each other had been spoken in anger, and they had each nursed
bitter wounds that left ugly scars. But damned if he hadn't married
the broad, (though a lady she was, and no mistake) and that still
meant something, even in a future (impossibly) more cynical than the
one you and I occupy now. A story ensues: political intrigue,
mysterious deaths, old rivalries, unlikely allies, strange
coincidences...and all the while, I never actually knew where I'd
stashed poor Rachel.
That she was missing seemed like enough. It motivated my hero and
left him conflicted, edgy, and more apt to do the kinds of
uncomfortable things interesting characters are supposed to do when
they're miles out of their comfort zone. I'd come up with plenty
for him to do otherwise: work a
shady job, unmask a conspiracy, run afoul of heavily-armed
dilettantes – always trusting that when it came to it, I'd get him
on track to find his wife in time for a show-stopper of a third act.
But time passed, and reams of notes and a hundred long walks with a
hundred longer cigars had yet to yield a solution. I avoided the
problem more often than not, busying myself with any number of other,
smaller problems – where to go next, how much exposition, what that
particular rolling plain looked like from the road, and so on. I
even toyed with the notion that I subconsciously didn't want
Rachel to be found because it
might rob my guy of his spur. I assumed working around the issue,
filling in the negative space everywhere else, would make the picture
emerge in due time. So I sent him off on his first excursions,
pushed him into first mistakes, introduced him to a rogue's gallery
of supporting characters and generally tried to dupe the Muse into
thinking it was all part of the show. I leapt ahead, laying
breadcrumbs for the second and third acts and crafting whole scenes
out of context, ready to be dropped in on a moment's notice. Keep
chipping at the boulder until all that's left is the statue.
In truth, I had squat. I knew I
needed Rachel gone, and getting her un-gone would be the lynchpin to
my hero's catharsis and the fillip that would drive him to his
destiny. But without knowing where his ex-wife actually was, my
narrative had no map. I couldn't know where to direct my protagonist
if I didn't know where he was supposed to go, which in turn made me
gun shy to send him too far afield or do something crazy that might
land him in a logical no-man's-land when the time was ripe. Worse,
not having an answer to the overarching question of my tale made me
reluctant to keep writing, for weighing on my brain was the heavy
specter of “what's the point?” – why do anything when I might
never find the damn
elephant and her blasted calf?
I couldn't say what made me
unclench. Maybe it had been a particularly good day, or a
particularly bad one. Maybe my hero had finally gotten fed up with
his creator-god insisting he knew what was best for him and epically
screwing the pooch every time. Maybe – and this is what I truly
hope – maybe I finally decided to push those petty concerns aside
and allocate just five lousy minutes to really thinking
about the answer. I reigned in my famously wander-prone noggin and
forced myself to consider, carefully and without pretense, where this
young lady had run off to. I knew why she'd vanished. I knew where
she wasn't. I knew who wanted her back and what would happen the
moment she was found. Like Lennie Brisco, I wove through the streets
of my imagined metropolis, questioning dock workers and cabbies,
hookers and beat cops, all the while crossing possibilities off my
list. I clung tight to my story, determined to solve this problem
within the boundaries I'd already set; I would not remake my world to
accommodate one wayward element, however vital. Some might say that
was foolish and a different sort of arrogance, but I knew
I had a good thing going here, dammit, and I refused to believe I'd
lost the race simply because I'd stumbled on one hurdle.
Then my hero took over, and I heard him muttering under his breath,
cursing me for a lazy philosopher completely unfit for the universe
I'd made for him. Fer chrissake, kid, there's only so many places
she could be. Who else wants her found besides me? Where would she
go once you eliminate the impossible, the too-obvious, and the
flat-out stupid? And how did she escape notice long enough to get to
where she was going?
I think I made it another 500 feet
before the answer emerged, and hell if it wasn't like that elephant
and her calf had been standing there in front of me the entire time.
A perfect answer, flawlessly logical, slipping like an Isotoner glove
around my existing story without the need to change so much as my
font. The Muse didn't deliver this one, folks; this one was all me.
In the end it took five freakin'
minutes, and all it took was finally focusing my ass and applying an
embarrassingly small amount of time and energy to the issue. It was
not some wingding insight that showed me the right path, or some
left-field solution arrived at through desperate groping. I had been
the obvious answer, there for the taking. Behind my shoulder I heard
my hero exhale slowly and whisper his first words of pure gratitude.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now what was so damn hard about
that??”
The something extraordinary happened. If I had read this in one of
those self-serving meet-the-author interviews I would have dismissed
it as so much pretentious twaddle. But I'm telling you, this
happens:
Pieces fell into place. And not a
few of them. A lot.
Whole scenes left treading water for lack of context suddenly had
purpose. Motives I could only hope were orbiting just outside the
logic perimeter steamed into port with foghorns blaring. Bits of backstory and little narrative quirks had a
place in the larger scheme. Entire plot threads finally bonded and
became a cohesive whole. In another hour my story had gone from
perhaps 40% complete to 80%, maybe more, only the smallest of
adjustments required to smooth out the surface. It was like lighting
a candle in a darkened room – my space was still cast in long
shadows, but now it was bright enough to orient myself to every
object, visible or otherwise.
Secretly I had expected the day I
arrived at Rachel's hiding place would be a bad day for me. I assumed
prodigious rewrites would be needed. If ever I was lucky enough to
happen upon a solution, I would of course have to bend over backwards
to allow it. Whole chunks would need re-stowing like so much
ballast, but it would be worth it; whatever it took to make space
for my long-delayed caveat. Yet the pieces click-clacked together
like tumblers in a master-made lock. How could such a thing happen?
How had six jigsaw puzzles tossed together somehow resulted in a
(nearly) complete picture? Had I unintentionally built all those
pre-fab scenes with an out-of-the-box option, ready to plug-and-play
once the mystery was solved? Had I subconsciously rendered my
chapters into so many Legos, able to snap in place when the time was
right? Had some other component of my brain been hard at work on
this problem even as worried about making it to my 9am meeting on
time? I simply don't know. If that's how the writer's mind is
supposed to work, how it normally works,
I'd never experienced it before then. But the hour after my grand
revelation was one of the most exciting in my writing life so far, a
thrilling and unlooked-for validation of so many confused nights when
it all seemed so arbitrary, so pointless, and so damned
disheartening.
Maybe there's a more conventional answer. Maybe I've been doing
this at least long enough to understand basic plot structure, the
general sequence of a story arc, and how a character progresses
through a landscape of one's own making. Maybe I'd compartmentalized
the missing element effectively, so that when it finally materialized
I was able to swap it in and make the rest of the pieces dance.
Maybe I'm getting better at this. It's not as romantic as a bolt
from the blue (wherever The Blue happens to be), and it's not as sexy
as a late night booty call from the Muse. But I'm guessing it's way,
WAY closer to how things really work in this lunatic vocation of
mine. We are all just pieces, after all; just parts of a whole
yearning to be complete. My story isn't finished. I can't say when
that will happen, or if. But I'm closer now, and maybe, just
perhaps, I'll find the next elephant a little easier.
The Liar in Winter
To
wit, aren't all writers just liars with better agents?
So,
catching up (again)...
The
first draft of my latest shot at a novel turned out every bit as much
of a mess as it should have. When it was done it looked like I had
spent half the process typing with my feet and the other half
interpreting fever dreams. Okay, maybe not that bad. But it was raw
form to be sure, an experiment to see if the basic structure of the
story would work. I paid little attention to pleasantries like word
choice, pacing, internal geography, or what time it day it was (it
can be night ten minutes after morning in my world if I damn well
please, assuming I forget it was morning when I started, thank you
very much). Thank God for Final Draft and its convenient outlining
tools, as I must have shuffled and rewritten my virtual index cards a
dozen times, ditching dumb scenes, lancing characters like boils, and
purging whole chunks that seemed brilliant for a bit but aged badly
and had to be put down for MY own good. The craziest part was that
my stopping point was not even the end of the story, but rather a
cliffhanger I'd envisioned months before, a mental firebreak where I
decided my slapdash efforts had to end. I would go no further with
my character's journey until I could shore up the foundation of what
I already had. Otherwise I'd be in danger of just mass-producing
another directionless leviathan, a revisit of my first manuscript
disaster years ago (that was also some of the most fun I've ever had
in my life). I would not become a literary cat lady, stepping over
vomit-flecked subplots and ignoring piles of pace-killing paragraph
feces while one bad scene spawned another and the neighbors
complained of the smell. Regroup, rearm, renew the assault.
When
it came time to start Draft II (an undertaking I faced with only
slightly less trepidation as a quadruple root canal), I reread the
whole damn thing and rescued as many pieces as I could for use in the
new, improved version. If it was 5,000 words – out of a 113,000
draft – I'd be surprised. It wasn't that Draft I was so
irredeemable. Lots of stuff simply had to go – I'd achieved enough
distance that I realized certain things were dead ends. But I knew
in my heart that even the scenes that were making the cut into the
next draft were supposed to
have been rush jobs, and each one was deserving of a more serious
effort. Rather than shoehorn better words into clunky sentences, or
retask the good sentences into weak paragraphs, I decided I could do
better by burning most of it down the the rebar and rebuilding.
This I did, to significantly greater effect, and so far my new draft
is looking leaps and bounds better.
In
addition to patience, temperance, and the perspective one gets with a
year of pure personal growth, I have several other things to thank.
First,
I read – and reread – a book that has been a wellspring of
pragmatic instruction on the topic of long-form writing: The
Essential Guide to Writing a Novel
by James Thayer. While I love King's On Writing,
which is more philosophical, Thayer's book is an instruction manual,
a compendium of work instructions and practical guides for navigating
the novel's innumerable foibles. Thanks to him I knew my first two
chapters were garbage, and I knew why
they were garbage: too long, way too much backstory, too much mundane
dialogue between two characters who agreed with each other about
almost everything. I made a rookie mistake of trying to get
everything 'just so' before plunging in. I had always known that to
be a common misstep, but to hear Thayer state it in such plain
English really helped. On Draft II I shortened that scene to one
(small) chapter and incorporated a fundamental change between the two
characters that occurred to me during one of my long, cold winter
smoke-walks. The improvement was immediate and startling. Thayer
continues to help with topics on which I wasn't even aware I needed
help: dialogue, pacing, filtering (God, was I guilty of filtering –
don't describe the character seeing
the action; describe the goddamn action!!), and the importance of
pumping conflict into the story as soon as humanly possible. Most of
all, Thayer helped me overcome that arrogance all writers have that
the reader is going to be as interested in each sentence as you are.
News flash: the reader isn't. The reader cares about just one thing:
what happens next (a clue, by the way, why all prequels in all
formats universally suck).
Second,
I read – and reread – The Lord of the Rings.
I hadn't read it since college and decided it would be a good thing
to work through slowly before bed, a nightcap that could lull me to
sleep with dreams of Middle Earth and high-cheeked elf maidens. But
this time I made a point to study – really study – the Tolkien's
language, his syntax, and his sentence structure. Whatever your
opinions on fantasy, however 'slow' the book may seem compared to the
crack-addled dimestores filling the shelves today, damn but that man
knew how to put one beautiful active-voice sentence in front of
another. Every line has a purpose that paints a picture (and that's
the last allocation of alliteration I'm allowed). Reading masters
like Tolkien and being ever cognizant of how they assemble the base
parts of their stories inspired me to polish my own sentences to a
glossy sheen. I enjoy their works, and while I may not mimic them I
do want to do them proud. I don't have a chance in Hell, but to the
average reader I'll sound better for trying.
Also,
I finally dispelled an irrational fear I'd been nursing for a while
(something with which Tolkien helped a lot): the fear of using proper
English. I've wrestled a lot with the notion of 'style': what is it?
What is mine? How do I create a distinct 'style'? And some time
ago in an attempt to stand out I decided my 'style' was to
short-change good English in exchange for a punchy verve that spawned
a shitload of bad sentences and stilted writing. Or to put it
another way, I was trying for Guy Ritchie and ended up more Guy
Fawkes – strung out. Get it? Point is, once I stopped trying to
break the rules (something only peerless geniuses like Shakespeare
are allowed to do) and started following the rules – as best I know
how – things started sounding better, sentences came more easily,
and I was overall more satisfied with what I was producing.
As
I write this I am dreading an upcoming expository chapter, a
between-action break where people in rooms have to talk to each other
about story. I take my trepidation as a good sign: fiction newcomers
often report liking
exposition scenes because it allows them to get the story's head on
straight. But I'm starting to realize long exposition is sheer
death, even in long forms like novels, and the real challenge – and
joy – is in economy: telling a complete and satisfying story with
as little backstory as possible. Sometimes you just gotta do it,
though...which is something I tell myself most every day when I roll
out of bed now. I have too much residual Catholicism in me to
declare “It's gonna be a good year” (God will hear me, and punish
me for my presumption), but I'm hopeful and even, I think, ready for
what's next.
Pieces
I'm
a walker who gets cagey after too long indoors. I also live in an
area of tenacious winters, short autumns and slow warm-ups.
Consequently I tend to horde my nightly walks, often ranging out for
hours under the pretext that in a few more months/weeks/days I won't
be able to do it anymore since the cold will become unbearable.
Nights out, movies, cleaning, correspondence, projects,
writing...these are all things that suffer while fair Persephone
plans her return to Hades. What's funny is that since as long as I
can remember I've found ways to get out even in the ice and the snow;
the walks are shorter and the recoveries longer, but I manage.
Walking
occupies a slot adjacent to writing in my Grand Rationalization
Handbook. If you've never read the dustjacket of the GRH, don't
worry; it's entirely mental. It's also entirely self-maintained,
seen by no one but yourself, and contains more scribbles,
strikethroughs, dogears and doodles than a Tarantino rough draft.
Mostly,
though, the GRH contains excuses.
When
I walk at night I take out my copy of the Handbook and draw an arrow
from the block set aside for writing and point to the other column
labeled 'walking'. I draw it with a yellow marker instead of a red
Sharpie to indicate it is a 'related activity'; I'm thinking about my
novel, swear-tah-Gawd and true. Two miles, probably more, the long
route, not the short one and slow
fer chrissake...I've got a long stride for a short guy.
Doesn't matter: I'm thinking about that manuscript, plotting
revisions, running dialogue, sketching scenes...I'm surely not
using my walks as an excuse to avoid actual writing! No, that'd be
something a pretender would do, or just a bad writer. Stephen King
took walks. They didn't always work out for him. *awkward cough*
But the point is he took them.
Over
the last six months I've taken countless walks and done a good amount
of work on my present manuscript. 'Good' seems an appropriately
vague, innocuous term that might imply 'a large amount' or could
simply be interpreted as 'a noble effort'. Honestly I couldn't tell
you either way. I have no way of saying how much I've really done to
this thing because there's no way of knowing really how much work
– not walking – is needed to nudge it across the finish line.
Like Donald Rumsfeld, I just don't have the metrics available to
comment. I've written enough to know the patient requires major
surgery and a hell of a facelift before it can see the light of day,
and I know now that I made some mistakes on the outset that are
obvious in hindsight but can only be rectified with great effort. I
know that once I apply these corrections, trim the fat and ditch the
lopsided ballast that threw me off in the first place I'm going to
have something much closer to a functional story, a better one, one
worth telling...depending on who you ask.
The
kicker is that the part I've completed is perhaps one half of the
tale originally envisioned. My baby grew in the telling and by the
time I finally stopped to check the score I was ahead – far
ahead – on the word count and
yet only marginally closer to the end. So I stopped on a cliffhanger
and stepped away, half of me desperate to hone and polish and 'fix'
the Frankenstein's monster that sits now in a little icon on my
desktop, the other half hellbent on plunging ahead up this San Juan
Hill merely decent words, to take
the damn thing against the withering odds and assemble a butcher's
bill of dead and dying plotlines later.
Thus
the walks. Thus the 'thinking'. Thus the excuses.
It's
not all in vain. Walks are beneficial. I get fresh air, I stretch
my legs, I get my blood flowing...and I do
think. Lord, have I thought about this story. I've repeated the
one-page summary and the ten-page breakdown to myself so many times
it has become name/rank/serial number, the only thing I'd reveal
under torture though my spirit be broken and my mind a ruin. I have
had no fewer than three HUGE thoughts – 'ah-ha!' thoughts, real
course-changers – on my walks in just the last couple months, one
of which was so obvious and whose integration into the manuscript
solved so many problems all at once I am truly embarrassed to admit
how long it took me to have it. I've taken extra laps around the
neighborhood purely to stretch my thoughts just a little farther
afield, to inch down the avenues of theory and 'what if?', probing
new paths...most times. Sometimes I just go in circles, legs and
thoughts alike.
The
most maddening thing about all this thinking time is that it has made
me realize this story can
work. All the pieces are there; I know because I spend my walks
shuffling through them, stacking them in a semblance of an order,
toying with sequence to see if they hold up, then knocking them down
and reshuffling again. The pieces are solid.
It's
the assembly that's the bitch.
After
six determined months of writing the story as a one-perspective
piece, a lone-man's struggle kinda jive, it occurred to me that the
things happening to him would make a lot more sense if we
occasionally heard about it from someone other than him. I wrestled
with how much and how often I might shimmy in a secondary villain,
never quite satisfied with what I'd done with him, before realizing
his perspective would
made for a nice series of interludes in the main narrative AND inject
some much needed perspective. After all, how can we trust the hero
if his is the only opinion we ever hear? This led me to brainstorm
on how I might round out the rest of my story, the other half (or
two-thirds? God help me!) where interesting things are happening all
around the protagonist and he simply can't be everywhere at once to
witness them. Now suddenly I've got a whole new blueprint for
assembling this little opus of mine that hardly resembles the
original, and I won't know if it's going to stand until I plunge back
into the manuscript with both hands and start building her back up
again.
Walking
is a great way to forestall such a disagreeable and
difficult-sounding task. But it was on one of my cowardly excursions
into Excuseville that I experienced a moment of almost physical pain
– a sudden rigidity in my walk and a spontaneous huff of air like a
frustrated horse – when I realized that I'd been repeating the same
thirty scenes in my head since long before I needed layers to stroll
comfortably. The pieces are all there, dammit! And no matter
how many times I review them in my head, they're still going
to be flat, monochrome, one-dimensional little widgets unless I get
them down and give them life. When that happens certain pieces are
bound to fail, or go in warped or be undersized or swollen. Some
will have to be jettisoned altogether. Others will have to be pulled
out, turned around, and put back in at a different angle. It
happens. I know this. But I dither because this new blueprint scares
me – the possibility it might work, the possibility it might not.
It scares me because I've never done it before, and the chance
exists that if it does flame out I might have squat for a backup
plan.
But
my first draft of my first part has yielded a lot of lessons. It's
given me a chance to ferret out the crap and think hard on why it
isn't working. Most of the time – happily, very happily – I can
solve the problem with simple omission, or with a minor change.
Occasionally a genuine roadblock appears, but, bearing my soul, most
of those are the seemingly “good” ideas I've fallen in love with
and are unwilling to let go no matter how obviously they don't fit.
My crummy first draft – and those prodigious walks – helped me
figure out what's important in this tale I'm trying to tell. That
isn't to say I'm nearing a catharsis or that I've found the root of
the reason I started it in the first place. That may be many drafts
away, and it may come during a hot shower instead of a cold walk. I
hate admitting that it is likely going to be the weather of
all things that's going to change my writing routine for the better,
but – though I'm awesome at rationalizing – I suffer no illusions
about just how bad our winters can get around here, and how far I
must wander for relief.
In
the end, it's progress.
And
think how great my circulation must be.
Transcendence
Writing
is a transcendental experience, at times perversely so. The lessons
we need the worst often come at the damned strangest of times.
As
writers we dream of the moment when our Third Eye sprouts, when our
words transubstantiate from functional parts to sublime whole and
what we see in our mind's eye takes shape on the page. I hope for
this every time I sit down to the blank screen. I wait for it
distractedly as I hammer out my daily thousand. Occasionally I'm
rewarded for my diurnal grind and I end up with something that looks
the way it should
look, dammit, and my existence is validated another night. More
often I'm disappointed because I fall short in some way, maybe when
the word count clocks in under four figures or because the sentences
are less than gold standard, merely descent...if I'm lucky.
Fortunately
there are ways to up the odds of achieving catharsis. The pros tell
us writing the same time every day is an invaluable habit to acquire.
Doing so works new furrows into the gray matter and transitions us
into creative mode more easily (it's true – it does). But it also
breeds a dangerous conceit: the assumption the mere act of showing up
will draw the Muse from her eyrie. And why the hell shouldn't it?
Keeping that lonely cursor entertained while it winks like a broken
traffic light means we've kept our end of the bargain, right? What's
left but to spreadeagle ourselves at inspiration's mercy and await
our own private Rapture, a special delivery from the idea gods, be it
a new poem, a fresh lyric, a sexy hook, a finished manuscript?
But
what if we can't leave the day behind? What happens when we can't
shake that yardstick-long to-do list, when we can't believe the guy
in the next cubicle still won't shut up about his daughter's
dance recital, when the world's annoyances and imagined slights, the
slopped coffee and banged knees, compound into a slurry of angst and
pissy rationales not to write? Is the Muse going to thank us for
dragging that crap to the nightly palaver? Of course not. Yet there
we sit, fussy, resentful, agitated, pecking away like muttering
nuthatches, working the keys and waiting, waiting for it all to gel
together.
It's
a fool's errand. The Universe doesn't owe us cohesion. And as any
woman whose survived a bad date will tell you, it takes something
more than just arriving on time.
Take
me, the other night. I'd arrived home fully intending to put in
three hours on the porch. The evening was still, the air warm-ish
and while I hadn't a clue what I was going to write, I trusted that a
comfy perch in my Adirondack chair and a full pipe of MacBaren
Scottish blend would open the taps and let the genius flow. But by
the time I got out to my favorite spot the weather had turned. It
was double-digits cooler. The wind had come up considerably, adding
a chill to the air. It was raining, too, and though I have a roof
over my porch the northwesterly gusts had conspired to whip the
droplets sideways into a fine spray that wet my ankles and dewdropped
my monitor. Wind also decreases the enjoyment of pipe smoking; it is
a vise best enjoyed in slackened air.
Well
sturm and drang, let the beating of breasts and rending of flesh
begin. I was an inconsolable shrew, grousing into my pullstring hood
and snarling at nothing. Thank God I was alone and double thanks
writing is a solitary pursuit; I would have made supremely rotten
company in that moment. Even alone in my quiet apartment on my quiet
porch overlooking a quiet yard I felt the foulness of my mood
emanating like airborne soot, casting a pall on my every attempt to
compose. Why me, oh Mistress Bitch of the Universe? I had really
wanted to write tonight, you
know. And I ask for so little. But once again you've
conspired to cheat me of my scrivener's bliss and offered me less
than ideal conditions in which to create. Sorry. No deal. I'll try
again tomorrow.
I
was angry at the weather, for
God's sake! And because I'd failed to solicit compliance from no
less than Mother Nature Herself, I was prepared to table my writing
time for the whole night and retreat before my keyboard was even
warm.
And
when asked by strangers I say I'm a writer. Jeezus!
But
I stayed out there. Why, I don't know. It may have been only
because I'd already sparked my tobacco and I wasn't willing to tamp
it out – the stuff's pricier than ever. But
shivering on my wind-battered deck and raging at the unfairness of it
all, something occurred to me: I had complete control of the
situation. There was nothing physically stopping me from writing.
The only barriers to the Muse were the ones I'd erected, those
chicken-shitty capitulations to a hundred dumb non-factors. I didn't
need to be warm. My deck didn't have to be windless. I wasn't even
required to be comfortable. My rickety seven year-old laptop could
take the occasional spatter of rain; God knows I'd subjected it to
worse. My cooling digits weren't really going numb; if they were
thirty seconds of vigorous friction and a couple jumping jacks would
remedy them. I was out here, dammit, and I was going to get
something down, even if I ended up looking like Nicholson at the end
of The Shining and the
super had to scrape me off the deck with a snow rake.
It
may have been nothing more than childish defiance, a new and
different way to lash out at wretched circumstance. Perhaps I
secretly prayed to get sick. That would show the Universe I meant
business. But there, before I'd written word one, was my moment of
transcendence, my Third Eye. Without trying – Hell, doing my
damndest not to try –
I hit upon an insight as profound as any I'd ever had: the
Muse has to know you're serious.
It is not enough to merely declare your intent, to get that new
document open and start typing. You have to prove you want to write,
need to write, crave it like oxygen, yearn for it like a lover's
touch, and are willing to power through the crap to prove what in
this life is important to you.
Trite?
Probably. In fact, you're perfectly welcome to cry 'oh, what
stuff!' and remind me that an evening on my porch in something less
than meteorological perfection is hardly the zenith of adversity. I
won't argue. But see, that's my point, folks: I got so caught
up in making things perfect for my date with the inkpot, planning my
evening to the minute and congratulating myself for holding true to
our rendezvous, that when imperfection reared it's head I freaked and
couldn't deal. My bitching and puling chased the Muse away worse than
bad body spray.
I
realized this. I grit my teeth and thought hard. I started typing.
A little later that night I wrote this piece. Whether the Muse was
pleased with my devotions and gave me anything good is for my readers
to decide.
In
What Dreams May Come Richard
Matheson's recently deceased narrator describes the moment when he
goes beyond the purgatorial here-and-now and ascends to a higher
plane. But the fillip for his transition didn't come from an
intervention by a higher power or by pounding his ethereal fists on
the Pearly Gates. Rather it came when he finally stopped focusing on
all the bad things he'd left behind in life and allowed himself to
consider there might be something better. He had to want
to move on, to surrender to the
possibility that something wonderful awaited him, if only he could
let go of his corporeal baggage.
Writing
is like that, my friends. Transcendence from uncanny places. The
trick, it seems, isn't so much showing up on time as it is showing
someone how much you care.
Moments of Doubt
It's
a triple threat, my thoughts this autumn morn. Scattered thoughts,
really, runny like impatiently cooked eggs. I'd thought for a while to
do a segment on world-building, a topic about which I have been and
remain fascinated both as observer and participant. But in the
process of playing God to my newest Big Thing, growing landmasses and
history and architecture and assorted minutiae enough to fill a
non-existent atlas, I've found myself a bit stymied, nay muddled.
See also hesitant, cautious, gun shy, or, in the preferred
vernacular. 'pussified'.
So
in the interest of making lemonade I thought I'd write about that
instead – shelve the
world-building thing so I might try to pin down these veiled angsts
and see if I couldn't, by acknowledging them, toss paint on them and
render them visible. Why, after two years of resurgent confidence,
was I faltering on that first step of a new story? I adore first
steps! In fact, it's been a thing of no small conceit on my part
that – historically, anyway – I've have never had a problem
clearing the launch pad and lunging full tilt into a fresh yarn. I've
never suffered from that common (natural, understandable) problem of
'not knowing where to start', and usually expend no more than 30
seconds to a minute before sallying forth with a humdinger of an
opening line and achieving best speed. That this technique may have
led to some of the narrative break-pumping, tire-squealing, oh-God-I
almost-hit-that-old-lady false starts and reversals is a debate for
another time (my blog, my rules).
But
just before I resolved to make that the subject of its own screed, I
sat down and took an analytical approach to my new, blunted efforts
and determined that it was perspective
that
was causing the problem, specifically how I can't for the life of me
settle on how I want to tell my story and who among the many good
folks I've birthed in my new world get to tell it. It was then I
stepped back and saw the forest for the first time in a while and
realized that ALL of these issues – world-building, my
uncharacteristic hesitation, and perspective – were tangentially
intertwined, a triad of matters whose sum is more powerful than their
individual parts, at times frighteningly so. I can't address one
without tipping my hat to the other two; doing otherwise would be
just plain rude. What's important is that they are all issues worthy
of a voice, and so I thought I might rap about each of them here and
now, with the understanding that it is bound to make more sense in my
pasty gourd than ever it will on a page anyway.
It
began as an early morning exercise designed to get my ass up and
writing: minimum 1000 words before food and a shower, no tiptoeing
around word choice, no hemming and hawing over sentence structure; my
only stricture was that those thousand words had to make a modicum of
sense and they had to dovetail one to another from day to day until
the piece was done. This I did. I started with virtually no
preamble, little thought to where I was going or how it was going to
end. It began with a three men in a flying machine, skimming low of
a forested valley on an alien world. Two of them were old salts,
jaded veterans of a hundred campaigns (of what I had no clue – just
campaigns of something). The third, I decided, was a dithering,
cowardly man, woefully out of his depth and not a good flyer. He was
paying for this expedition, whatever it was, and thus was nominally
in charge, though he looked like he'd rather be anyplace else in the
universe about then. Why were they there? Where were they going?
How did this milksop fit into the equation? I explored these
questions 1000 words at a time (give or take, depending on the
morning), and by the time I was done I had about 17,000 words.
Only
I wasn't done. See, in the process of pounding out those imperfect
sentences and attempting to answer those questions I'd created for
myself, I ended up generating a hundred new
questions and three times as many potential answers, answers that
entertained my mind long after I'd had my shower and my lunch. By
day three of my exercise I was inserting little nuggets of backstory
and new-minted terms that were popping into my noggin here and there.
It went on like that haphazardly for a few days more. Then after a
week or so I started threading one reference to another, reworking
these random impulses and sculpting a little basin of logic that
could actually hold water. Without really meaning to I took this
loose conglomeration of dialogue and descriptors and mortared it up
into something resembling a home, then a neighborhood, and before
long, a fledgling world. Quite suddenly I had a baby in my arms,
squealing for nourishment, and I, the accidental daddy, felt
obligated to feed it. I'd be lying if I said I was unhappy with this
result; the point of exercise, after all, is to flex your muscles and
to strengthen them, preparing them for weightier tasks and more
prolonged exertion, and even a thousand words can be like tearing a
single divot out of a dam, the crack spiderwebbing into a
catastrophic breach. I wanted this.
But
now what to do with my new baby?
I
started world-building. After my exercise was complete I spent time
every day adding to my little world, inserting history and
background, conflicts and resolutions, peoples, technology,
vocabulary, and, eventually characters. I'd done this before, of
course, at least twice before for my last two major stories, but this
time I really lit into the God complex stuff headfirst. After a
while it became obvious world-building was the main function of this
project, not to conjure a specific story or to dream up a situation
and clack the keys toward a resolution as Mr. King would have it, but
rather to just construct to my heart's content. It was fun. It
still is. World-building traditionally happens one of three ways:
the “outside-in” approach first creates a big picture – like a
planet – and works in a downward direction, creating continents,
then cities, neighborhoods, and residents of those neighborhoods
right down to the shape of the streets. The “inside-out”
approach does the exact opposite, focusing on a single unique and
possibly startling detail – a tree alongside a highway, for
example, or a gun literally smoking on a cluttered desk – and
builds out from there, eventually, after much meticulous work,
settling on the country where that tree might be found or the planet
where you'll find that gun. The third approach, of course, is a
combination of the first two: a judicious mix of macro- and micro-
that incorporates the best of everything. I find I've been doing
quite a bit of this third approach, probably leaning a little more in
favor of “outside-in”, but not by much.
Now
my 'world' has become much more than that: several worlds, in fact,
constituting an entire system, and a curious melange of people
populating it. It's been an immensely satisfying challenge, coming
up with the reasons
those
people are there, why they'd bother doing whatever it is they're
doing, who's in charge, who's kidding himself, where the little
people live and how they got to this spot in their lives. Yet in the
midst of it all there's that voice inside me going: “Uhm...where,
exactly, is the story
in
all this??”
Right.
Story. Guess I would need to tackle that at some point, wouldn't I?
See, world-building is the writing equivalent of carrot cake: a
writer can indulge in it all he wishes and convince himself it's
worthwhile because it's writing-related,
part of the process, as carrots are part of carrot cake and therefore
part of a balanced breakfast. When we sketch a character in broad
strokes or dash out an abbreviated history of some long-forgotten war
in our fake universe we feel productive, even inspired, though all
we're really doing with those reams of copious notes and slick,
orderly timelines is licking our fork for the frosting, gobbling easy
calories and not thinking one whit about writing the damn story.
Heavens no, that would require putting one functioning sentence in
front of another and getting them to make sense. I mean, I know what
the people of my world eat for breakfast and can readily tell you why
they button their coats on the right side instead of the left, but
giving them something to do with a motive and a purpose and trying to
articulate that in a thoughtful fashion? Gosh, that sounds,
y'know...hard. Don't mistake me: world-building is great; we owe it
to world-building that we have Middle-Earth and Westeros and
Discworld and thousand other places; words on pages that feel so real
we can smell the horse dung in the streets and feel qualified to
critique the drapes in the throne room. A well-built world invites
us to take off our coats and stay a while, makes us sad when we have
to leave and makes us pine for the day when we might return.
But
for me, and for many writers new and seasoned, it's also a stall
tactic, a sophisticated form of procrastination that loopholes
through all our filters and gives us a sense of satisfaction without
putting in the hard hours. World-building, if you let it, can be
nothing but empty calories, filling us up while offering no
nutrition. Which goes a long way in explaining why I've been so into
it lately.
As
I've already explained somewhere in the 1s and 0s of this digital
epistolary, I have been pecking away at two formidable projects for
many months now. Both would qualify as novels if ever I could finish
them. Alas, my parchment was far bigger than my ink pot and both
projects ran aground in various ways for various reasons, among them
insufficient planning, undefined antagonists, nebulous motivations,
too much telling and not enough showing, and a general penchant for
putting the cart several miles before the horse, narratively
speaking. And those are just the ones I'm self-aware enough to
identify. They're not lost causes, these stories, but neither one of
them is going to come out of the mud with any great ease. I know
this state of things shouldn't be cause for lament; on the contrary,
it's written in the stars for new and aspiring novelists. The first
few tries – even the really good tries – are gonna suck. That
according to writer Michael J. Sullivan, an accomplished novelist in
his own right, a writing teacher and keeper of a stellar blog of
writing advice based on his own experiences
(http://riyria.blogspot.com/).
I happened upon Mr. Sullivan's anecdotes shortly after I put my
second novel on life support and was desperately hunting for succor
for my wounded ego. 'Wounded' is putting it real mild-like. I was
awash in despair, convinced that my failure to get it right on the
second try meant there was something fundamentally wrong with the The
Whole Thing. Truly I was always meant to be the world's greatest
stunt unicyclist, but some unremembered blow to the head during my
formative years had filled me with the lunatic notion that I could
actually write fiction, thus depriving the world of the great
unicycling it so richly deserved.
But
there was Sullivan, politely but firmly reminding us that the vast
majority of successful novelists ate it hard the first time out, and
the second, and many times after that. He pointed to his own
thirteen novels – that's thirteen finished
novels – before finally being published, and his
many contemporaries who had at least that many notches in their belts
before finding success. In a post specifically about dealing with
failure he offered a running account – a hypothetical thought
process – of an idealistic new writer trying his first novel and
the pitfalls he was bound to encounter. It was a near word-for-word
description of what I went through during my first go, all the manic
highs, all the disheartening reversals, the confusion when it all
went sideways on me. Sullivan even goes on to describe the same
hypothetical writer – a little more seasoned now, skin thickened by
newbie mistakes – on Attempt Number Two, and the new litany of
pitfalls and fuck-ups he was almost certain to experience on that
run. Again, it was as though Sullivan was reading my mind...or
my unfinished manuscripts. I wasn't alone. Or a failure. Or a
freak. I was just a very green young writer with about enough skill
to keep my head above water, but lacking the strength to make the
swim for shore...or the wisdom to know which way to start kicking.
What
a bitch, then, following this enlivening reboot of perspective I now
find myself so hamstrung, bordering on clueless. Thanks to my
extensive world-building efforts I now have more potential starting
points than I know what to do with: I have a story in mind (I've
already reworked my 1000 word/day exercise into a trim prologue), a
handful of characters including a defined antagonist, numerous plot
points to propel the story along, and a solid idea for how to bring
the many disparate elements together in a way that sounds good in my
head and wouldn't bore the reader to tears. And I've started the
next phase of the story, to the tune of some 8,000 words already.
Progress, right? So why does it feel like I'm ripping off a bandage
made of liquid cement? It isn't that my writing has regressed, that
I've 'lost the spark' or that I'm trying too hard. I have become,
well, pussified. Like the proverbial child with the hot stove,
novel-writing has now burned me twice and I'm stark-terror stricken
that sticking my hand out yet again will not only burn me thrice but
burn me in the same spot, aggravating the old wound and making the
hurt that much harder to endure should I fail again. Intellectually
I know I need these failures to sharpen my wits and find the correct
path, just as I know I wouldn't benefit (much) from being an
overnight success, a bestseller-plus-contract right out of the gate.
So,
in an attempt to give a face to my fears (and contain the emotional
bleeding, which I'm now realizing I've done quit a bit in this post),
I settled on perspective as the chief woe this time out of the gate.
As always, an opening line was easy. My problem was that I came up
with about THIRTY of them because I couldn't figure out who should be
the one to start talking. Hell, those 8,000 words I mentioned have
waffled between 1st and 3rd person about five
times, and in the ultimate concession to what a lameass I've been
lately I actually made the first chapter a series of journal entries,
just so I'd have an excuse to keep the 1st person stuff in
should the rest of it all turn to crap.
In
the midst of it all, I find I'm asking myself: “How did the pieces
get so jumbled again?” Truly. I mean, I didn't have the puzzled
figured out yet – far from it – but I had enough pieces in place
that I could start to see the picture, maybe well enough so that
finishing the rest of the puzzle wouldn't be so hard or take quite as
long. But after a successful long-form exercise, an epic
world-building session, and some literary TLC courtesy of a candid
blogger who feels my pain, I look down at the table and find the
pieces scattered all to Hell again. Instead of feeling better I feel
more confused. No, maybe 'confused' isn't the correct word. I'm not
confused in the sense that I don't know what I have to do. I have to
write, that much is certain. 'Directionless', perhaps is the better
word, in the sense that I have innumerable directions in which I
might proceed but no idea which one to choose. If I blunder ahead
with this new place I've made will I break it like a child with a
cheap toy as soon as I try to step inside it? Am I dithering about
POV because I know I don't really have a story here, just a shadow
and a dream? Did Sullivan's war stories actually wound me on some
level, and I'm frozen in fear because I know the odds are so terribly
against me?
One
thing's for certain: at no point can I claim no one told me it was
going to be this way.
Getting Stuck
As
a writer, there is nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING worse than getting
stuck on a story. When when you see writing as more than just a
hobby – when it's a calling, a vocation, a daemon whose name you
learn, or just something you know you HAVE to do even if it kills you
– getting stuck isn't just frustrating; it's demoralizing,
maddening, horrifying and emasculating. And despite the night
classes and the writing clubs, advice from pros and the millions of
tips and primers out there offering sanitized, utterly impersonal
'help' on the topic, you can't do jack shit about anything when
you're stuck – not about your story, not about anything else having
to do with living life.
At
least, that's what it feels like.
I've
been stuck before. I'm stuck now on more than one project. It is
the most awful feeling I've ever known. And I once spent three weeks
in the hospital with a needle the size of a Roman gladius jammed in
my chest. Granted, while writer's block always seems
worse than it actually is, these projects to which I presently refer
are sources of particular woe, as they are TWO DIFFERENT NOVELS. On
the one I am more than 400 pages deep, on the other close to 200. I
started the second because I was jammed on the first, only to have
Effort Number Two suddenly turn black and harden like congealing
blood, refusing to yield up any more free genius. If I tried to
deconstruct all the reasons for this, to puzzle out the hows and whys
of these particular Edsels, I'd been penning a third book on the
subject right here on this blog. That isn't necessary.
What
is necessary for me at this point is simply to give name to the
Muse's animus toward me or, for lack of a proper name, at least try
to understand that what I'm experiencing right now is logical, sane,
and, hateful as it is to admit, as much a part of the writing process
as picking a font.
Novel
One was the 'how hard could it be?' novel. It took 400 pages for me
to arrive at the answer: plenty damn hard. Hard enough, at least, to
demand more time and planning than I gave it. I should emphasize
'planning' on that one, since 400 pages is certainly nothing to
sneeze at in terms of productivity, and Lordy lord did I have a fun
time getting there! But I failed to balance that manic tac-tac
of the keyboard with a reasonable approach to the finished product,
namely a definitive antagonist, solid motivations for everyone, and a
basic outline of the overall story. I was in full-on Stephen King
mode for this one, 100% devoted to his 'situational' style: think of
a character and then think of a situation for him/her to have to get
through. This I did. Again and again for 400 pages. But I reached
an event horizon where the situations became arbitrary and the
endgame an unholy mess. At roughly page 401 I could all but
literally HEAR the gears in my head suddenly start to grind together,
a cog or spoke somewhere hopelessly out of place, shearing off
precious narrative elements like so many metallic shavings, producing
friction and heat and smoke and...nothing more.
Worse,
I couldn't tell you with the proverbial gun to my head where exactly
it went off the rails. I suspect it happened slowly by miniscule
degrees, undetectable in any one scene or chapter, but accumulating
over the reams into an un-proverbial clusterfuck nonetheless. This
happened, I should hasten to add, after many, MANY narrow escapes
when I successfully (with crateloads of swollen pride) navigated
through other tricky parts of the manuscript up to that point. I had
weathered every storm starting with Page One, so it was agony to beat
my head against my laptop for days on end, awash in denial, only to
arrive at the inescapable conclusion that I'd screwed up bad. The
well was dry on this one, and nothing less than a total retrenching
of the plot was going to salvage a Draft Two.
It
was only a few weeks later, following a dramatic renewal of purpose
that consisted primarily of video games and old, old literature, that
I began my road to recovery: Novel Two. If my freshman effort was
'How hard could it be?', this one was definitely 'Where could I go
wrong??'. I'd fallen on my face with the first try, but I'd taken
careful stock of every stumble and noted where the tripwires and
punji pits were along the way. Too ambitious the first time; my goal
exceeded my reach and my story exceeded my skill. Fewer characters,
smaller focus, a definitive voice and memorable traits for all.
Don't clutter the pages with esoteric crap...readers don't want to be
made to feel stupid and no one likes a showoff anyway.
This
I did. Again and again. For almost 200 pages. Problem was, I was
writing a story that was primarily a mystery and I had never before
tried a mystery. I had a killer, motives, clues, suspects, twists,
red herrings, and an old-fashioned fistfight all lined up and ready.
Things went swimmingly for pages and pages, chapters and chapters.
But not long ago at all as I write this, Novel Two woke up to find
the bed was completely covered in shit. I know Agatha Christie looks
small in the photographs and the temptation is to think “I could
kick her ass on my worst day,” but believe me, that lady used to be
a spy and she could murder you with that enchanted pen of hers in
more ways than one.
This
wasn't a case of writing myself into a corner. Quite the opposite,
in fact. I had done so well with my little character-driven piece
that I made it a little bigger, a little fatter, a tad more
ambitious, and before long the killer wasn't just one man but a cabal
of conspirators, and their motives weren't simple, they were
multi-faceted, and the explanation for why they were doing
what they were doing wasn't half so fuckin' complicated as trying to
invent ways my hero was going to figure it all out that didn't
involve clairvoyance and a time machine. Even then I did not admit
defeat, but rather worked a furrow into my deck while I finagled out
solutions to this crimp and that hole. I substituted pure
inspiration for plain hard work, something that does not and had
never come easily to me. Alas, the impetus to take a BIG step back
and rethink arrived later, when I came to a horrifying revelation,
one I am intensely grateful to have had, even though it was
excruciating at the time: I had reached a point in my story where my
protagonist no longer behaved like himself. Somewhere along the way I
had made the story bigger than he was, shoehorning him into a
situation where he did nothing but react to the stimuli I threw his
way. I'd hamstrung my hero, withered his personality and reduced him
to a caricature, a talking head with nothing to say.
The
second I realized this I knew something major had to change.
I'm
still working on it. I'm capable of writing a crime story, I think,
but I was steaming toward a false horizon on this one.
So
what did I learn from my second Titanic in as many years, speaking of
false horizons? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Novel Two is
certainly not unsalvageable. In fact, two things from this effort
stand out as considerable progress compared to my primus experiri.
First,
in an exercise that was both cathartic and oddly rewarding, I traced
my error back to what I THINK is the moment when the story went off
the rails; the actual line, believe it or not, when everything just
started coming up Ewoks. I wasn't surprised in the slightest when I
found it – I had already been struggling with that particular scene
and my attempt to power through the wool, coupled with an ill-advised
effort to make the pace more Guy Ritchie-esque, created a domino
effect of bad material. The good news on that front is that fully
half the novel or more from that spot is still good.
Second,
my writing is better compared to Novel One. Much better, in fact.
Though it's a shorter work with a more limited scope, I took my time
with the words and gave the scenes more depth. The characters, too,
and the things they have to say to one another, are considerably
improved. I take this as encouraging news. I have to. The second I
utter the phrase “all for nothing”, I am lost.
In
a move that is, I'm sure, predictable to those successful
novelist who have come before me, I've spent many nights (and quite a
few days) now pouring over ol' Novel One again. Like tornado
survivors combing through the wreckage of their destroyed homes, I've
been scouring my manuscript and notes for recoverables. And like
those framed photos and family heirlooms yanked from the rubble, most
of what I've salvaged has been small but extremely important:
concepts that work, characters I've come to love, a set-up here, a
description there. Not a total loss. But the rebuilding will be
meticulous and protracted.
But
I'm gonna do it if it kills me.
In
the meantime I must struggle to find some sense of worth in this
life, and stay vigilant for Novel Three. The daemon isn't going
away, and I have yet to learn his name.
Habits
I'm a writer, which means I am a creature of many habits large and small, most of them compulsive, most of them highly necessary to the ritual of writing. It took me a long time to learn and understand that all writers are, by their nature, compulsive individuals; it took me even longer to accept such things about myself. I found that when I finally did the complete opposite of what I HAD been doing and simply rode out my fixations like a pleasant ocean swell I was a happier person and a much better writer.
When I was younger I associated the finicky rites and customs of other writers with a lack of panache or drive or talent. A writer, I'd convinced myself, should be able to put pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard at a second's notice and bang out the proverbial ditty regardless of circumstance. S/He should be a mouthpiece for the Muse, a Muse who (naturally!) perched on all 'real' writer's shoulders from dawn to dusk, handing out genius to those who deserved it. I was supremely arrogant, frighteningly dim, and thoroughly wrong.
Funny thing: I was also really, really unproductive. Spontaneity is a sexy thing, and we'd all love to believe we're good at it. How awesome does it look in a movie or TV show when the shy protagonist or seemingly talentless underdog spontaneously bursts into song, belts out some bluegrass on a harmonica, or produces a camera - a REAL camera - and takes a hundred shots of something fun or dangerous or history-making to the wonder of all? Doesn't it look freakin' great?? Certainly if they are characters in a work of fiction it's a perfect way to quickly add dimension to someone. Wow, you do that all the time? You must really be passionate.
Ugh.
Writers can't do spontaneity. Don't mistake me: many writers write very fast, or don't edit, or do nothing but free associate. None of that counts as truly spontaneous, though, and it often results in a lot of profoundly shitty writing (which nevertheless gets published). And as much as we writers would live to think that carrying around that pocket moleskine and a mechanical pencil everywhere we go is the same as lugging a camera or a harmonica...it ain't. Writing is a product of ritual and habit.
For me, seeing the light involved recognizing the habits I already had, embracing them, and combining them with new habits that I should have developed years ago. I'm a night person, I'm a non-cigarette tobacco smoker, and I'm a pacer who finds it hard to sit still. Odds are I wrote this late at night while sucking Latakia (that's a kind of tobacco) through an Irish Second (that's a kind of pipe) after wearing a rut somewhere on my floor. Now my feet are tired, the inside of my mouth tastes like a spice rack jammed in a chimney fire, and I should've been in bed an hour ago.
But l wrote something, muthafugga'. Counts for something. How'd I do it? Well, I don't know this for sure, but I'd like to think it's because I did the same thing I do before every single writing session: paced, smoked, and stayed up late. The brain loves repetition. Jeezus it took me a long time to realize that! A set time every night is invaluable to the creative process (massive emphasis on 'every night'. something about which I'm still far from perfect). It lets the brain know it has permission to start cooking every night, and once it gets set in its way, the brain is apt to start even without that permission.
I still have moleskines, of course. I remain hopeful their glossy, hardened covers will one day stop a bullet to some vital organ of mine, nestled as they so often are next to my chest.
Patience
As a writer I feel I have accumulated many virtues. Some were inborn, resting under my surface and gradually unearthed like Homer's Troy. Others I didn't get naturally but learned over time. They have helped me along the path of doing this, the most difficult and rewarding, gut-wrenching and enriching of all vocations.
Patience
is not one of them. At least not yet.
Call
me restless or over-eager, a product of my generation or just a
spazz, but one thing I struggle with every time the Sacred Page is
before me is a pathological inability to slow down and take my time
with it. I know it isn't logical or mature but some part of me still
feels that the mere striking up of a conversation with the Muse
should be enough to open up an eight-lane highway of inspiration from
which genius will flow at a breakneck pace. In my head I am always
flying over the keyboard, the clumsiness of my fingers the only thing
slowing my implacable advance into narrative greatness, a new
masterwork at every turn. I observed the rituals, after all, spent
all of 15 minutes(!) collecting my thoughts and have even managed to
belt out three masterful opening paragraphs. So, like Calvin of
'Calvin and Hobbes' fame said after doing a single push-up: “Reward,
please!”
I
don't like to think of it as arrogance, but perhaps it
really is. I've known from an early age that I was good at writing,
probably better than most of my peers in school, and I made the
conscious decision when I left for college that I would take the
classes, hone my skills, and do what was necessary to make my dream
of becoming a full-fledged (and financially independent) scribe a
reality. For the longest time I really thought that was enough to
get the spigot turned to maximum output and start making bestsellers.
I realize now how shamefully ignorant I was assuming such a thing.
Writing takes a tremendous amount of work in addition to (or in spite
of) innate talent. Stephen King helped me realize that when his book
'On Writing' drove home in no uncertain terms that talent means squat
unless you're out there, or in there, or wedged into the corner of
the laundry room, clacking away at the word box every single
night, churning out text that
runs the gamut from gold to dreck.
So
I did that. I developed a routine and started pushing out my
thousand a night. When it got easier I pumped my minimum up to 1300,
or as much as 2000 on an especially productive evening. I made
countless mistakes, I backtracked and got better, I wrote shit and
rewrote shiny, I learned a thousand lessons, applied them
judiciously, and by slow and painful degrees I made (some) things
work.
It's
not enough. I know my best efforts are still not enough because I
sit here clacking away some 18 months after I stopped screwing around
and started 'writing seriously' (whatever that means) and
remain unpublished, undiscovered and my works fester largely
unfinished. I know it's a process, I know overnight success is a
myth, and I am prepared for the long haul.
Yet
still my inner Calvin still cries out “Reward, please!”
How
juvenile is that? After all this time writing and reading and
reading about writing do I really think it's fair to scream to the Muse
“what more do you want!?!”. Part of me says yes...yes, goddammit,
I want some return on my investment! I did my thousand a night, I
killed my babies and hacked off the parts that didn't work even if
they were beautifully
written, I neglected sleep and friends and girls and money so I could
revise chapter 20 for the tenth time.
And I want to see some payback!!
And I want to see some payback!!
Oh,
vanity, thy name is jdp815. It's not enough. Not enough by half.
You'd think I would have known that going in. And I do know it, in
that pain-in-the-ass reasonable, educated part of me that remembers
all the primers and cautionary tales and exacting stories of
long-withheld success I've read from a hundred now-famous writers.
Writing takes talent, it takes hard work, and it takes a rigid and
unchanging routine of weary nights and anxious days and it takes the
ceaseless fall of fingertips on keyboards to get it right. The
Golden Fleece may not yet be in my grasp but I've at least navigated
the straits long enough to learn those ironclad lessons.
But
dear God, writing takes patience, too.
And
when I say 'patience' I don't mean with waiting for a phone call, or
languishing while an editor dithers or an agent forgets to follow up.
I mean patience with the fundamentals of the creative process, that
odious word I hate so much, 'planning'. Alternately called
'outlining' or 'strategizing' or a hundred other monikers, it refers
simply to the process of laying out one's story, first in broad
strokes, then in the finer details. I loathe the idea even though I
know I will never be truly successful without it. My conceit has
always been that my talent should allow me to dive in to the deep end
of a tale with an Olympic-level degree of skill queued up and ready
to set the page on fire. That, combined with my hot-shit new work
ethic and heroic concession to the Muse's necessary cousin Hard Work,
will carry the day every time, right?
Right??
No,
you idiot.
Which
brings me to where I am now. Twice in the last year and a half I
have dived into the deep end only to realize that I can barely keep
my head above water and that, by neglecting to plan adequately, have
deprived myself of anything so much as a pair of waders or a
paddleboard on which to cling when the water
slips up over my head. I have, to put it bluntly, written myself
into a corner.
That
this happened first with a story that stands at 400+ pages and again
with another that currently tops off at 150+ is vexing in the
extreme. Neither one of these manuscripts is beyond hope – far
from it – but they are both in fragile disrepair as a result of me
beginning the assembly without having read the instructions. And
speaking of fragile, there is nothing the gelds you quite so fast as
a writer than to admit you were wrong, realize where you went wrong,
suck in a fresh lungful and try again once more from the top and
suddenly realize your whole randy affair with the story is over. The
spark has fizzled; routine replaces excitement, obligation supplants
lust. The story isn't dead and you don't want it to be, but in all
the furious backpeddaling and triage you do to force feed thrill
where there is thrill no more you find yourself wishing
you'd never started it in the first place.
So
I'm doing the only thing I can do: taking a step away, giving my Big
Stories the space they need as badly as I need space from them. To
do anything else would be to risk damaging our friendship.
Oh,
but I am impatient. I just want them to be done.
And while they're getting done,
would they mind too much being good
while they're at it?
That's what I want. And that's really stupid of me, isn't it?
But
how do I continue? How do I reconcile this obvious need to draw a
blueprint in my head with the wisdom of Mr. King himself who lit a
fire in me when he described his laughably simple technique for
writing a novel: he creates a character, invents a situation for him
or her to work through, then sits back and lets the action happen?
This 'situational writing' method really spoke to me and my
impatience: sitting back and letting a story write itself is
appealing in the extreme to a guy like me. It must appeal to Mr.
King, too, who makes it look ridiculously easy even as he hawks
methods that at times seem Herculean to emulate. Can a writer be a
casual planner? A meticulous free spirit? A laid back fussbudget?
Or can we as writers only belong to one school or another?
A
moot point, maybe. Because I suspect whichever approach I take I
will need an abundance of that most slippery of assets, patience. I
say this as a man who has been known to wait at a long traffic light
by observing the 90 second delay as “a minute and a half closer to
death” (this is something I've done a great deal more since I
turned 30). Because whether I write well or not, the rewards won't
come until I do more than one push-up.
Stigma
I
write this with trepidation because I've read this sort of thing a
million times before. But what is writing if not custom-tailored
retreading?
I'm
only an apprentice when it comes to the plight of the professional
writer. I have not done it long enough nor have I made enough money
off the gig to claim it as anything more than a fledgling industry
for myself. But I'm learning. Certain things I've taken to rather
well, better than I ever expected – odd hours, irregular pay,
abandoning one's pride of authorship, leaving one's mind open to any
job so long as it involves putting some words on pages better than
other blokes – but I have yet to get used to the stigma of being a
writer in a world full of normals.
I
won't belabor this point, as it has been plowed unto depletion by
countless scribes before me. I'm not here to talk about how hard
writing is; anyone who expects a clap on the back for doing this
should look to any other profession – seriously, ANY other
profession in the world – before they find it doing this. But it
seems a right of passage for a lot of bloggers with not enough to
talk about, i.e. ruminating ad nauseam about the 'perils' of doing
something that, if one is truly a writer, should be as natural as
breathing and no source of angst. But natural or not, the
Nine-to-Fivers have a tendency to look at folks like me with a kind
of jaundiced amusement. Though you may do a range of things to keep
afloat financially, that you would describe yourself first and always
as a writer is to invite an odd cocktail of scorn and humor,
skepticism and prejudice. Writing is a noble and lofty thing, but
unless your name is in lights at the local bookstore people tend to
look at you sideways, like maybe you've been putting pills in the
pies.
Why
is this? Much had been said of the snootiness of writers, suggesting
elitism, but I balk at that on grounds that anyone can be snooty
about anything. I've never met a wine snob snootier than some beer
drinkers I know and doubtless there are snooty bricklayers out there,
too. No, there are some more tangible things about writing that
cause the funny looks from the rest, easy enough to see when you
don't think on it too hard:
Writing
is many things but it sure as hell isn't stable. Even other jobs
that would fall under the broad category of the 'creative arts' tend
to be more reliable than writing: production, editing, proofing,
design, casting, technical support, even marketing to an extent. But
writing? No calling is more inscrutable to the uninitiated. It's
right up there with alchemy and falconry on the public perception
radar. That's fine with me. After all, what is writing really, if
not the mixing of disparate elements into a useful brew coupled with
the taming of dangerous beasts who hunt for choice morsels?
Also,
writing demands odd hours, and Lord we as a society hate odd hours.
America runs more like Nelson's navy than we'd ever care to admit; there is something slightly primitive about it. We rise with the sun
and work 'til the light reaches its zenith and then, like a ship of
dutiful sailors (or a assemblage of observant pagans), we celebrate a
repast before resuming work until gloaming when we return to shelter.
Sounds almost supernatural when you put it that way,
doesn't it? But that, we're told, is the 'cycle of the day'.
All
writers at some point in their lives realize this is horse hockey.
Hours are liquid that take shape according to their vessel; the
sun is that quiet foreign guy from down the hall you see in the mail
room twice a month. We raise the eyebrows of others when we stagger out of bed at
11:00 instead of 7:00, but for a lot of us, certainly me, 11:00 often
means I'm operating off 5 hours sleep (usually a daily best) and
I'm nine-tenths toward victory since pre-dawn hours are my most
fertile. This does nothing to stop the cavalcade of jokes about my
work ethic, which used to bug me but now it doesn't. My bathrobe is
my business suit and I wear my unshowered stank like armor.
Finally
as to the source of the stigma, the big one, which is the 'how hard
can it be?' mindset. Harlan Ellison rehashed an old quote a few
years back (the observation wasn't an Ellison original, but, as
usual, Harlan said it better than anyone): “There are three things
everyone is convinced they can do better than anyone else: drive a
car, fuck, and write.” It sounds easy until you try it, thus the
unspoken – or sometimes loudly spoken – sentiment of 'why don't
you just do that in your spare time?', sometimes followed by
the parenthetical mutterings of 'you shifty freeloader'.
Writers
don't have spare time. Not really. My brain is going constantly on
some level, firing every boiler at once trying to make this thing actually pan out. It is a source of pride and joy, but it's also
a ceaseless, slow-burn stress that erodes my emotional seawall like a pounding surf. It's psychological chafing, doubt clacking on my back teeth like a metronome. And it never
takes a break. “Leave your work at the office” we say to the
overworked. Writers have no office and 'overworked' is an abstract
concept that has little meaning to the starboard-brained. Even as I
sit here typing this wandering screed I have four other projects
jammed in the compass points of my brain bellowing for
recognition. That won't go away with the coming of dusk and it's
likely to keep me awake starting with my first bathroom break
sometime early this morning. I don't say this to bemoan my lot or
educate the ignorant or even to plead for understanding. I simply
say it because I'm awake right now and I need to write.
That's
the point.
So
the stigma from the rest of the Universe is normal, natural, and, for
a writer, even desired. I didn't think this at first.
But
I'm learning.
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