Category: observations/thoughts (Page 8 of 14)

Writing By Hand

My writing has been hampered lately by a fear-based mindset. Every time I sit down at the computer to work, I look at my work-in-progress and worry that whatever I write next will be garbage. I’ll ruin the whole story.

This fear is crippling. I know rationally that I can always write a sentence and then change it if I don’t like it. But this doesn’t solve all the insecurities and fears that aren’t rational. It doesn’t address all my doubts.

I sit at the computer and doubt my judgment: Will I have the necessary skill to recognize a bad sentence, a bad plot line, a bad detail? What if my judgment is faulty? What if I write badly and can’t see it? Then I’ll have ruined my whole story. No one will like it. No one will read it. I’ll embarrass myself.

I hate these thoughts. I hate having these insecurities. But it’s very difficult to suppress them. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of them. I’m looking for ways to overcome them, but I’m not sure what to do.

In the past, I’ve used 4thewords to help me get through these doldrums, but the more I used this online writing game, the more I felt like my stories became a means to an end. I wrote not because I wanted to spin a good yarn but because I wanted to earn points and level up in the game. This is an issue with gamification in general: extrinsic rewards supplant intrinsic ones. When I was using 4thewords to get my stories finished, I ended up thinking of my stories as vessels for earning points. What I wrote wasn’t important, it was just the amount that mattered. I needed enough words to defeat a bunch of monsters, not to tell a compelling story.

I stopped using 4thewords because I didn’t like that it was training my brain to write for points. But I can’t deny that it helped me get over a lot of my fears about the blank page. I’m sure it works very well for many writers, but for me, my brain was learning all the wrong lessons.

What I’d like to discover this time around is a way to get over my fears that doesn’t involve gamification or substituting extrinsic rewards for intrinsic ones.

(Side note: I know I probably need to work on figuring out why I have these fears in the first place and put effort into changing my mindset. I’ve tried addressing my mindset in the past, and while I’ve seen some progress in tamping down my perfectionism and imposter syndrome, I’ve not made enough progress to alleviate writer’s block entirely. One of the best strategies I’ve come across is to switch what I’m working on. I’m kinda doing that now, in fact… writing a blog post instead of working on a story. This old switcheroo is great for getting my fingers typing again, but it creates a problem when it comes to finishing things. If I’m always switching projects, I’m never finishing them. This strikes at the heart of the problem: I haven’t truly addressed my fears. Switching projects might help the initial block, but it doesn’t help my overall perfectionism and self-doubt.)

The only strategy I can think of at the moment is to leave my screen behind and switch to drafting on paper. I love writing by hand and do it everyday in my Writer’s Notebook, but when I’m working on an essay, newsletter, or fiction story, I tend to write on the computer. I can type much faster than I can handwrite. If the ideas are flowing quickly, my keyboard is the better tool for getting words down faster.

But the computer screen invites a kind of formality into the process. I don’t know why it does, it just does. I sit at the computer, stare at the screen, and feel like whatever words I type on the screen are THE words. They are weirdly hard to extricate from the story. I know deleting things on the computer is super easy. One strike of the keyboard and whole pages can be swept into nothingness. I know this, but yet my brain sees those words on the screen, existing with all the other words I’ve already written, and it starts to believe that those words are practically published, practically finished and ready for the reader to see.

Maybe I should blame blogging for this development in how my brain works. After all, I type the words into the text field on WordPress, and with one click of a button, they are published to the internet. How could my thinking not be affected after more than a decade of blogging, of composing words on the computer and expecting them to be published with one click?

But my Writer’s Notebook is different. In my WNB, I handwrite everything. I don’t show anyone my notebook. It’s not meant to be published. If I write something in the notebook that later becomes an essay or newsletter or story, I usually change things when I retype the handwritten words into the computer. A word here or there, adding things, cutting things, etc. The handwritten words are for me and me alone. Only when I type them up do I decide they might have merit for another reader.

Because of this habit, I know my brain associates handwriting with experimentation, privacy, and play. Typing is for “professional” stuff. Handwriting is for me. It’s where I go to enjoy myself. Just as typing up blog posts has trained my brain to associate typing with publishing, my WNB has trained my brain to associate handwriting with joy and relaxation.

What I need to rediscover is the intrinsic reward of writing a story just for the pleasure of writing a story. No more points or leveling up. No more typing on the computer always with an eye towards the “publish” button.

What if I told stories to myself, handwriting them on a yellow legal pad or in my Writer’s Notebook? What if I thought only about the fun and experimentation that comes with writing by hand? Will this free me from the pressure to be “good”? To escape the trap of perfectionism that always seems to creep up when I’m typing on the computer?

Whether this is a quick fix or a permanent solution, I can’t say. I do know that when I think about that yellow legal pad, when I imagine myself scribbling words onto it, I get excited. Handwriting means experimentation. Play. Joy. When I’m writing by hand, the pressure is off. Thinking about that yellow legal pad, about the movements of my fingers as the black ink streaks across the page, I suddenly want to start writing the next sentence of my story. I want to see where my hand will take me. The computer screen feels like a closed, sterile room. The handwritten page feels like a wild and winding path.

Reading Alan Jacob

I’ve subscribed to his newsletter for years(?), and for years I included his excellent book How to Think as assigned reading in my AP Language and Composition course, but I’m always surprised—and delighted—when I rediscover his wisdom and insight by reading his blog.

Thanks to a shout-out from Austin Kleon, I jumped over to Jacob’s blog this morning and read for about forty-five minutes, scrolling through and dipping into the posts that looked most interesting, and reading more than half a dozen fabulous ones, from his thoughts on technology to medicine to reading to writing to politics (“small p” politics), and now I’m on fire with my own ideas and thoughts. Which is what great blogging—heck, great writing in general—often does. It opens up new trails for us to follow, new vistas to see, new tonics to imbibe. These tonics quench dry throats, give us voices to sing again.

Anyway, I hate how I forget to read some of my favorite writers, but there’s such a joy in rediscovering them too. It’s like meeting an old friend in an unexpected place. It’s not a good thing to have lost touch with this old friend, but there’s something wonderfully fulfilling about finding them again. It almost makes up for having lost touch.

Now that I’ve rediscovered Jacob’s blog, I don’t want to lose touch again. The joy in re-finding his blog has given me surprising pleasure, but there’s also the ordinary pleasure that comes from reading a good writer every day. That’s what I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Missing Days and Poetry

The reading challenge ebbed and flowed. I don’t know if I really succeeded. Some days I read more than others. Some days I fell victim to my own addiction to surfing the internet. The addiction is deep. As soon as I think I’m master of my attention, something happens to draw me back to the “abyss of Total Noise” that is scrolling the web.

What a perfect metaphor. A web. Like flies, we’re caught.

It’s not that I think the internet is a bad thing. I literally would not have met my husband or developed a career as a professional writer and editor if the internet didn’t exist. I might have met another husband or made a career as a writer in some other way, but not in the way I did. I’m grateful for the internet.

But it is a web. A vast web. And that vastness has been a double-edged sword.

Anyway, the reading challenge was a bit “meh.” I wish I had been better about carving out my reading time. But life — always life — intervenes. Children with broken arms. Emergency room visits. Power outages. Deadlines. Exhaustion.

I suppose I can try again with a new challenge, but is that just setting myself up for another failure? I also made a pledge to blog (nearly) everyday, and that has been a bust as well. So many missing days. Weeks gone by and nothing posted.

Perhaps the better thing to focus on is my persistence. Despite all these setbacks and failures and inabilities to maintain a challenge, I have a stubborn inability to give up. Even as I fail at these challenges, I keep going. Maybe there’s merit in that (or some form of insanity!).

I used an old Austin Kleon prompt today in my writer’s notebook. I can’t find anything on his blog about it, but I know I first got the idea from his writings. Here’s a link to elsewhere that explains the prompt: Spine Poetry.

So, these are the book titles sitting on my desk right now: The Sleeping Dragon, The Broken Lands, The Tolkien Reader, Maps of the Imagination, The Summer Book, The Fall of Arthur, The Once and Future King, The Lore of the Land, The Book of Idle Pleasures, Listen to the Echoes.

And here is my poem made from the titles along the spines:

 

Listen to the echoes:

the lore of the land,

the fall of Arthur (the once and future king),

the broken lands,

the sleeping dragon.

 

Maps of the imagination:

the Tolkien reader,

the summer book.

 

The book of idle pleasures.

Reading Challenge (Day 6)

I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to keep blogging about my reading challenge each day. There’s not much to say. I read some books. Two hours (give or take). The end.

Maybe if I was finishing a book every other day or so, but I’m not a fast reader, so I’ll be reading Pachinko and The Door to Saturn for several more weeks at least.

I did start a new book today: 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl. Good so far, but I only read the first essay. Very relatable. Ruhl is a playwright and mother of three kids. I too am the mother of three kids who writes stuff. So, yeah, it’s in my wheelhouse.

But really, what more is there to say about my reading today? Not much.

The reading challenge posts are good because they make me blog everyday, but I’m not sure the “reading” part should be emphasized as much, unless I read something that I want to review or whatever. The “challenge” part can be emphasized, I guess, if I ever had anything insightful to say about sticking with or completing a challenge, but alas, I can’t even go five days without flaking out.

I do like blogging everyday, so maybe I mention the challenge in my daily blog posts but don’t make a big deal out of it.  The book-reading challenge is still a thing, just chillin’ in the background.

I will say, James Clear’s book for developing daily habits is still the best thing I’ve read on forming habits, and even though I failed to meet my challenge yesterday, knowing that all I needed to do was accept it and make sure not to miss two days in a row was enough to get me motivated again. In the past, when I would miss doing something I promised to do daily (i.e.: not say my Lenten rosary), I would beat myself up about it. I would get ridiculously discouraged, and basically, give up on the whole thing.

Clear’s advice — to just let yourself miss that day and make sure not to miss more than two in a row — was mind-altering. Here was a productivity guru guy telling me it was okay to miss a day, that it didn’t mean I was a failure, and all I needed to do was just make sure to get back to my habit the next day. It sounds so obvious, but Clear gave me permission to accept that sometimes I would mess up, and messing up doesn’t mean the habit is destroyed. Also, better to read for five minutes if that’s all you can do than to not read anything because you didn’t have the perfect two hours of reading time all laid out.

I’ve learned this lesson with my writing too. I wish I could write for four hours a day, but realistically, that doesn’t ever happen. Instead, I write when I can with the time that is given to me. I try to keep my regular morning writing time, but even if I don’t, one sentence in my manuscript is better than none. Amazingly, one sentence every day can add up to a novel.

(Luckily, I’m able to write more than one sentence a day… most days!)

Guilty/Not Guilty

I sat down to work on my fiction this morning, but I ended up doing a lot of writing in my notebook instead. Some fragments/thoughts about the morning walk with my daughter (something that’s becoming our daily ritual), some thoughts about plot structures (and the manuscript I am editing for a client), some thoughts about my own works in progress and what plot structures they follow, and then I took a bunch of notes on the Michael Moorcock system for writing a novel in three days.

I’d read about Moorcock’s system before, but today I felt like copying it down into my writer’s notebook so I could internalize it. Not that I’m planning to write a novel in three days, but I appreciate the way Moorcock breaks down how to structure and think about narrative. I especially love his idea of generating a list of fantastical images that employ paradox as a way to make something memorable and interesting (ex. “The City of Screaming Statues”).

Anyway, I didn’t work on my fiction at all during my morning “writing time.” There’s a part of me that says, “Wasted time!” and beats myself up for not adding words to my manuscript. But there’s the other part of me — the idler and reveler — who thinks mucking about in the notebook is both fun and necessary to my creative life. All the things I wrote in the notebook will help me later on — whether it’s later today or tomorrow or next week — giving me food for thought regarding my fiction work. Not “productive” in the strictest sense, but productive nevertheless. Sometimes I need to approach my writing “sideways” — not head-on but through the alleyways of my writer’s notebook. These alleys and byways set the stage for my later productivity in the manuscript. So it feels like I’m slacking, but really, I’m turning over the compost heap and making the fertilizer.

Notebook Fragment

Even now, I still worry that I’m being followed by the bee. It’s in my hair, just waiting to come out.

(This fragment was occasioned by the morning walk I took with my daughter. A bee or strange fly followed us from our driveway all around the block, past the wild blackberry bushes, around the school yard, and even down the sidewalk as we ran furiously from it. It kept wanting to nest in our hair. Maybe it liked our shampoo. To get back into the house, I lured the bee into the backyard while my daughter dashed through the front door. Then, she opened the sliding glass door in the back and I rushed in. Despite being inside again for two hours, I keep thinking the bee is with me.)

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