Category: writing life (Page 5 of 17)

Pretending to be Prolific

April 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Been thinking a lot today about my fears and the critical voice that constantly tries to stop me from writing. I wrote quite a bit in my WNB this morning, trying to figure out what my fears really are and brainstorming ways to combat them.

I’ve always admired prolific writers. Ray Bradbury. Neil Gaiman. All the old pulp guys like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith (and so many others). And there are women too, like Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, and Ursula Le Guin, who were incredibly prolific in their lifetimes. Jane Yolen is a writer today who is incredibly prolific and one I admire.

So, if I admire all these prolific writers, how do I combat my fears and get more writing done?

While writing in my notebook today, I decided to try a technique that will hopefully kill my critical voice and get me into the right headspace for writing.

That technique is visualization. If I can visualize myself as a pulp writer, as someone like Andre Norton, who loves to tell stories and doesn’t care what anyone thinks, then maybe I can let go of my perfectionism and fear of writing something “wrong” and just let the words flow.

You might be wondering, why the need for visualization? Why not just force myself to write more?

But this is where my critical brain is so deadly. The negative thoughts and fears keep me from “just writing.” I get hung up on worrying what people will think. I’ve tried “just writing more,” but critical voice always sneaks in and stops me.

Not necessarily in the moment of writing, but in the off-hours, when I’m thinking about what I wrote and start questioning everything. It’s in the in-between times when my critical voice is most ascendant, when it starts judging my writing and making me doubt myself. These off-hours ruin my energy and enthusiasm for the story. They make it harder and harder to sit down at the computer and write. I’ll force myself to do it, but critical voice has sucked all the fun out of it.

But the prolific SFF writers? I don’t know if they really didn’t care what others thought of their work, but I suspect they had a healthy dose of “don’t give a fuck.” And that’s the attitude I need to channel.

So my solution is visualization.

I like pretending. That’s why I like writing stories in the first place. It’s all make-believe. Like when I was a kid. Telling myself stories while I ran around the backyard. My kids do this too, all the time, and they are so engrossed in their make-believe epics, they have zero time for worrying what others will think. That is the key.

Since I like to pretend, since playing make-believe is where it all started for me, I’m going play make-believe now. I’m going to pretend I’m a prolific writer. I’m going to pretend to be an Andre Norton-esque fantasy writer who writes fearlessly and doesn’t care what people think.

Dean Wesley Smith often talks about how writing should be fun. His advice: “Make it play.”

Well, this is part of my play. I’m pretending to be prolific. Playing make-believe as I sit to write. I’m playing around in the story world even as I’m playing a part at my desk. And if I pretend enough — if I visualize myself as a prolific writer — then perhaps the make-believe will bleed into reality.

Visualization is one of those popular techniques for achieving goals and establishing new habits, and there’s a bit of a hippy-dippy quality to it, but I remember a teacher training we did at my old school several years ago, and the instructor was a professor of psychology, and he told us about the studies they did with students who visualized themselves taking a test and doing well, and he said that students who visualized themselves being successful on the test before they studied did better than the students who just studied. And there’s a bunch of research on how visualization coupled with practice can help basketball players improve their free throw shooting. It’s not unusual for performers, athletes, and others to imagine themselves on stage or on the field doing their thing and having success.

So why not visualize myself as a prolific pulpster who is having a blast writing all the stories of her imagination? To some, this might seem like a crutch, but to me, it’s just an extension of the fun to be had writing stories in the first place. If I can make-believe a story and write it down, why can’t I make-believe I’m someone who has a prolific career and writes with abandon every day?

The visualization has to be coupled with practice, of course. Which means I still need to sit at my desk and write. But when I sit down, I’ll imagine I’m a pulp writer, bursting with stories, fearless, ready to spin a yarn. It’s the fun of the masquerade, of playing dress-up, of pretending. I don’t write under a pen name (well, most of the time I don’t), but I can see how a pseudonym gives one the freedom to be someone else for a little while. If I pretend to be someone else when I’m at my writing desk, perhaps I’ll unlock some of that freedom.

What I hope will happen is that over time, I won’t need the visualization exercise. I hope I’ll simply BE a prolific writer who doesn’t care what others think and who has banished her critical voice. Until then, I’ll use my imagination and pretend.

It’s what writers do.

Early Morning Writer

April 21, 2023 / / 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to start this habit for AGES. Everyone who works and has kids seems to swear by waking up in the wee hours of the morning and getting their writing done before anyone else is up. They make the sacrifice to go to bed earlier, or simply give up some of their sleep, so they can devote time to their writing.

It sounds like a good solution, right? If life is busy and there’s no time for pursuing one’s creative work during the day or evening, then get up before dawn and do the work then. Simple. Effective. Before you know it, you’ve written a novel in your little early morning productivity hour.

Except, I have always struggled with this strategy. I can train myself to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier (or, as often happens, sacrifice my sleep), but what I cannot do is form coherent, interesting, or evocative sentences in the pre-dawn hours. I just can’t. My brain doesn’t have any thoughts or ideas that early in the morning. 6:00 a.m. is for shaking the fuzz out of my head, not for making up stories.

And if I wasn’t going to be an early morning writer, then I’d have to be a night time writer, slinking down to the computer after putting the kids to bed and trying to plunk out a few plot points before exhaustion claimed me. But that’s just it: by the time night rolls around I’m EXHAUSTED and cannot form many coherent thoughts either.

I know this sounds like a lot of whining, but there’s a somewhat happy ending here. You see, today, I tried again with the morning writing thing. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and headed down to the writing computer, and I told myself I wasn’t going to do anything else but write fiction. No writer’s notebook. No reading. No nothing. Just plunk those keys to make some sentences and write the next line in the story. I was going to force myself to write, and by some kind of miracle, I did! I wrote about 800 words in a little less than an hour.

Now, this was just one day, and one day doesn’t make a pattern or a habit. But I figure if I keep doing this every day, if I keep forcing myself to write (even if the writing is crap-ay), then over time, my mind and body will be trained to associate early morning wake ups with heading down to the computer to write.

This kind of pattern/habit building happened to me recently with my back injuring in late December. I was in so much pain (mostly down my leg due to my nerve being pinched) that the only relief I could get was to walk slowly around the house. I had to do — I mean I HAD to do it or I would be in excruciating pain — and because I did it every day without fail when I woke up in the morning, I started doing it automatically. Alarm goes off, do some stretches, roll out of bed, start walking. I used that walking time to listen the the Liturgy of the Hour, so that became part of my daily ritual as well.

And after fourteen weeks of waking up and walking around the house every dang morning, I find that I simply cannot start the day without doing it. My brain doesn’t even make the conscious decision anymore. I get out of bed and start walking. That’s just what I do.

I’m hoping to develop the same pattern/habit with my writing in the morning. Just like my walking, I don’t have to do it perfectly. Most of my morning walks are me hobbling along at a snail’s pace just to get my back and legs feeling normal again. It’s not pretty. But it doesn’t have to be pretty. The walking is what’s important, and the repetition that builds the habit.

So tomorrow, after I wake up and walk, I’ll head downstairs to the computer and start typing. I’ll write anything — a new short story, the continuation of an old one, the prologue to a novel, a random sentence in the middle of my work-in-progress — and I won’t think too hard or too much about it. I’ll just force myself to write, just like I had to force myself to walk despite the agonizing pain.

Knowing that I have to be a little hard on myself to keep the pattern going, it will be worth it if I can change this aspect of my writing process and work habits.

Today’s only the first day. Maybe after I’ve been at it for a week or two, I’ll revisit how this experiment is shaping up. I hope I can make it stick this time.

Keeping the Streak Alive

April 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

The title of this post is not referring to my blogging challenge. This is only my third (?) day of consecutive blogging, so it’s hardly a streak at this point.

The streak I’m referring to is my fiction writing streak. I’m now at 46 consecutive days of writing at least one sentence of fiction every day. Most days I write more than one sentence, but the one sentence bar is low enough that I can do it even on days (like today), where I can’t get to my fiction until the very end of the day and my brain is utter mush. Even in a state of utter mush, I can wrangle a few words together to make a sentence.

And thus the streak continues.

One thing I’ve discovered over the past several years is that I’m a creature of habit, and if I can keep a streak going and do a little bit of something every day, then I’m much more likely to be happy and feel successful. This is an idea taken from James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the idea that small, incremental habits can build up over time and lead to something greater. Even if I only write one sentence, I’m still keeping in touch with my work in progress. I’m still contributing something to the story. And like the proverbial snowball running down the hill, I can feel momentum building with each day.

So, today’s writing was limited. I managed about 84 words. But those 84 words are more than what I had yesterday. And they got me to connect with my story again and keep it fresh in mind. Now I can fall asleep thinking about it. And tomorrow, when I sit down to write again, I’ll have forward momentum. It’s a lot easier to keep the snowball rolling than to try and restart it every week or so. So I just keep rolling it a little further down the hill every day.

Keep rolling and keep the streak alive.

Notebook at the Dining Room Table

April 17, 2023 / / 0 Comments

One thing I’ve noticed lately is that my focus during my writer’s notebook (WNB) time has been getting a bit scattered. I usually write in my WNB at my work desk in the mornings, and my computer is right nearby (it’s an L-shaped desk), so as I’ve started writing in the notebook, my brain will get the itch to check some email or internet-y thing, and before I know it, I’m toggling between the WNB and the computer.

Not a great move for what’s supposed to be analog, handwritten, pen-and-paper time. I really value the act of handwriting in my notebook. It uses a different part of my brain; it generates ideas differently than my computer typing does. I sometimes do those mind-map things in my WNB, or I draw charts, so using pen and paper instead of a word processor is suitable. But generally, I just like writing by hand and keeping all my stuff in a notebook.

And yet, when I write at my work desk, the computer is always siren-songing, trying to get me to click on something, and I have little power to resist. The WNB writing becomes hectic and scattered and often truncated.

As things would have it, this morning I wrote in my WNB at the dining room table. And guess what? I wrote a good two and a half pages without interruption. I got deeply immersed in the topic I was writing about, and I felt a lot calmer and more thoughtful afterward. The complete opposite of the scatterbrained, divided self I’ve become at the work desk.

Austin Kleon has talked about his analog and digital workspaces, and I guess I thought I had those two spaces in the two lengths of my L-shaped desk. One side housed my computer (digital workspace), the other a clear, open desk (analog). But they’re not two separate desks, and the reality is that the digital workspace has a kind of foggy aura that creeps from the computer and envelopes the entire desk, both sides of the L. I’m not kidding that the computer is a kind of singing siren. Even if I try to focus on my WNB, the screen is just over my shoulder, a huge shiny-eyed overlord, watching and willing me to turn my focus toward its all-consuming gaze.

At the dining room table, I’m free of the screen’s glare. I can actually immerse myself in the blank page without feeling like some omnipresence is watching me.

That’s the thing about these screens, isn’t it? Even when we’re not using them, when we’ve got them turned off or in sleep mode, or the cover on the iPad is closed, their very presence in our proximity makes us itchy and anxious. Better click on that browser just to see what’s going on… Better open that app just to check…

This behavior is antithetical to what I want from my WNB. Being at the dining room table — surrounded by windows to the outside where the bird feeders are active with songbirds and squirrels — and away from any digital device, means I can focus deeply on the WNB.

Maybe I need to do my notebook writing at the dining room table every morning.

Blogging Every Day? (Again?)

April 16, 2023 / / 2 Comments

I don’t know if this is a worthwhile challenge for myself, but maybe I should try blogging every day again.

(To use the word “again” feels like a bit of a stretch. In late 2020/early 2021, I almost managed to blog every day… for a few weeks. But when March rolled around, I was back to sporadic posts and self-loathing. So, to say I’m doing this “again” feels misleading. Anyway. The point is, I’m gonna try blogging every day.)

The trouble with a challenge like this is that my life is filled with the ups and downs of raising young children, and there’s a reason Hollywood directors don’t like working with kids or animals. I can have the best intention of blogging every day, and then suddenly I’m taking care of three sick kids with a stomach bug, or someone’s broken their arm, or they’ve all declared war against each other over who gets to play with the big foam blocks.

I hate setting a challenge for myself and then not completing it. Story of my life, unfortunately.

But I’ve being doing a private challenge for the past several weeks, and that challenge is still going strong despite the hectic life I sometimes lead. Back in the beginning of March, I made a commitment to write at least one sentence of fiction every day (with Sundays being an optional day), and since March 6, I haven’t missed a single week. There are days when I can only write one sentence, but I still write it and count it as a day in my habit tracker

Maybe something similar can be applied to blogging. I might not write long, epic posts every day, but I’ll post something. I’ll write a quick missive about what I read or watched or listened to, or something I noticed the kids playing, or an update on how my writing is going. I don’t know. Kind of a “show your work” project.

I still want to write longer, more in-depth blog posts, but perhaps I can work on those slowly while also posting my shorter, day-to-day ones. A bit like how I write my newsletter.

I might fail this challenge, but I’m still gonna take it on. I’m nothing if not persistent, I guess.

Substack, Notes, Time, and Attention

April 14, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Substack — the platform I use to publish my monthly newsletter — has been introducing a range of different services lately, including a Chat option and now something called “Notes,” which is a bit like Twitter, minus the hellscape stuff.

(They also have an app which you can use to read newsletters, participate in chats, and now follow and read Notes. I guess an app was inevitable, but the whole “app” thing is just annoying to me. It’s another way to keep people in constrained ecosystems instead of allowing them the freedom of the entire internet. Whatever, I’m just old, I guess.)

I haven’t used Chat yet, and I’m not sure how I feel about Notes either, though I do welcome healthier alternatives to places like Twitter.

But that’s just the thing. Is Substack’s Notes going to be healthier for society, and for people individually? I suppose if Notes stays committed to Substack’s goal of being a place for quality writing, meaning they’ll avoid adding all the features that have made Twitter and Facebook and the rest of the major social media sites so damaging to our psyches, it’ll be fine. I guess. Maybe. Like I said, a healthier alternative to Twitter is generally a good thing.

But does being healthier than Twitter mean actually healthy and good? Twitter (and other social media sites) have business models that incentivize bad behaviors and content. No doubt about that. But even if they reformed their ways to be less toxic, does it really benefit society overall to have everybody jawing away on the internet, scrolling through feeds and threads and all the rest of it, commenting on other people’s posts, and generally spending huge chunks of time online consuming media?

I say this as someone who has spent a huge chunk of her life since her early twenties scrolling through feeds and threads and consuming media. I know the allure. I have found much worthwhile and beneficial content by scrolling through threads. I used to love the old Twitter when it was mostly me following a bunch of old movie fans and critics who wrote about arts and culture, and I learned a lot and met cool people.

But I can’t help feeling like we’re still trading away our attention and our time to activities that are not as enriching or as sustaining as other things. I’ve long been a fan of blogs, and I’m a fan of newsletters now, because these are usually longer and more sustained forms of communication. They’re more like reading the newspaper or a magazine. There might be a conversation in the comments section, and that’s great. But the comments are always there, at the bottom of the post, waiting to be discovered by any reader at any time now or in the future, and I can choose to engage with those comments or not based on my own time and attention. Both the blog post and the comments are in a fixed place within the internet ecosystem. They are there for me to discover weeks, months, or even years from now.

But social media sites — even better ones like Substack’s Notes — are still social media sites. They still operate on a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) basis. The conversation is on-going, and if you don’t keep up with it everyday, and devote lots of time to scrolling and commenting (or maybe just lurking), then you will miss out on… well, on something. We all celebrate the “conversations” that happen on these sites, but a conversation happens in real-time; it’s a temporal experience.

(Yes, okay, I can always go back and read an old Twitter thread or whatever. I understand that. But to really optimize what Twitter, and now Notes, is all about, you need to join the conversation as it’s happening, not months from now. A comments section on a blog or newsletter is similar, but a good comments section becomes a text unto itself, and I can read through one without feeling a need to comment or participate. And also, due to the more permanent nature of newsletters and blogs, we understand that the conversation that might stretch for days, and even if I write a comment months later, someone might still read it because those posts are waiting in the archives for anyone to read at anytime. Social media sites, on the other hand, move too quickly, and they are meant to be interacted with on the daily, so going back to an old Twitter thread and leaving a reply is pretty pointless. No one’s going to see it. You might say no one’s going to see a comment on a year-old blog post, and perhaps in most cases that’s true, but I can tell you that many, MANY times I have stumbled upon someone’s blog from years ago, and I’ve read those comments, and many of them have been helpful. That really never happens with a social media site unless I already know the post and the thread I’m looking for.)

Anyway, I don’t want to be too Debbie Downer about Substack’s Notes platform, but I’m not ready to race over and give it my time and attention. It’s the new, flashy thing on the block and everyone appreciates Substack’s subscription-based business model, so we’re all eager to support this Notes thing too.

(And for the record, I think the subscription model is great, though I’m not sure how sustainable Substack’s version of it is in the long run, because there are many newsletters I read for free only because I can’t afford to pay $35 to $50 per year for twenty different newsletters. If Substack would let us lower the subscription fee to $5 per year for our newsletters, I’d probably become a paid subscriber to nearly all the free newsletters I get now. But with a yearly subscription being at minimum $30, it’s just impossible for me to give money to all the writers whose work I enjoy.)

But I avoid social media sites precisely because they are time-sucks for me. They’re the reading equivalent of sugar — tasty and fun, but not very filling — and when time and attention are limited, I don’t want to consume these empty calories. I want something substantial. There are times when a post and thread on Reddit are really great reading with useful information (these are usually the RPG/OSR posts, because people are there to share ideas), and there are times when someone on Twitter (and now Notes) will post a link to a great article. But you know what? I can post links to articles here on my blog too. And so can everyone else. We don’t need a social media app to share links to cool articles. So if Notes is just about sharing links, then why don’t we share links in our newsletters? I mean, many of us already do this!

I don’t see the benefit to Notes (for me personally), other than it’s a “nicer,” “safer” social media space. Again, that’s good, as far as it goes, but it’s not something I really need in my life. I know as a writer and indie publisher, I’m shooting myself in the foot AGAIN by not jumping on the discoverability/marketing bandwagon of social media, but I just can’t bring myself to spend my time doing something that leaves me so unsatisfied. I don’t begrudge anyone using Notes or Substack’s Chat or anything else, but it’s just not for me. I like my blogs and my newsletter and my early 2000s iteration of the internet. And yeah, okay, I like my RPG/OSR subreddits.

But I gotta be picky when it comes to my time and attention. The older I get, the more precious these things become. And Substack’s new features don’t interest me. I’m cool with writing and reading newsletters, and I don’t feel much need to join in the latest “thing.” Especially when that thing takes my attention away from the other things I already like.

I guess I did feel a need to get this rant off my chest, though. Sorry about that!

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