Category: writing life (Page 8 of 18)

Reading Challenge (Day 10)

August 15, 2022 / / 0 Comments

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl is about theater and writing plays and motherhood, but I’m finding a lot of wisdom in Ruhl’s essays for my own work as a fiction writer.

One of the essays I read today, #37. “Conflict as drama?” proposes that it is actually dialectic — “a need for opposites that undermine each other” — that makes drama, not conflict.

I really like this idea. Ruhl also wonders why improvisation is all about agreeing (“yes and” is the rule of Improv and being a good Game Master), but with drama we say there must be conflict.

This quote on page 82 really made me reevaluate how I write fiction and tell stories:

“What if we borrowed from improvisation a proliferation of assent? A form of storytelling that used surprise as a tool rather than bickering.”

Storytelling as surprise. How can I say “yes and” in my creation of situations and stories? What would that change in my novels?

Really Wanting It

August 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I hadn’t written any fiction for several days — lack of time, lack of ideas, stress — but today, as part of my daily notebook writing, I started visualizing a future in which I made all my income through writing books. At first I just imagined a kind of ideal day: writing in the morning for several hours, doing publishing and marketing related stuff in the afternoon, reading books, taking a long walk, etc. But then I started to realize how my three hours of writing time in the morning could add up to some serious word count totals. Even if I struggled for the day and only managed 2,000 words in my three hours time, that would add up to hundreds of thousands of words if I stayed consistent and wrote six days a week for a whole year.

I was confronted — once again — with the reality that if I wanted to be a full-time author, I would need to commit to writing for several hours per day. Not anything exorbitant — not seven or eight hours — but simply two or three hours. An afternoon, perhaps. Or a couple of hours in the morning. Or at night after the kids are in bed. But I would need to be consistent. I would need to stay motivated.

I would need to really want it.

Yes, of course, I’d really wanted to be an author, from the time I was a kid, but what I was reminded of yesterday is that if I was going to be a full-time, making-money-from-my-books kind of author, I would have to write A LOT more books. A lot more. I would need to commit to those two or three hours per day.

Which means I would need to be desperate for it. Not just wanting it in that dreamy, wouldn’t-it-be-great sort of way, but in a visceral, my-kids’-lives-depend-on-it sort of way. Not that my kids’ lives depend on me writing 2,000 words per day. After all, I can always get a “regular” job (or go back to teaching… heh). But if I was serious about being full-time, I would need to write as if my kids’ lives depended on it.

What would I do if it meant my kids’ survival? I would sit my butt in that chair and write like my hair was on fire.

Maybe even then, maybe after ten or fifteen or twenty books I still wouldn’t be making a full-time (or part-time) income, but I would need to do it first — I would need to seriously try — to know if it could work. I would need to write with a kind of furious determination.

So after that little notebook reality check, I sat down at the computer and hammered out 1,500 words. It took me a little over an hour (and then I had to get dinner ready).

Can I keep this energy going? Can I sit for two hours every day and write with this same gusto?

If I want to make a living at this, I’ll have to. It’s as simple as that.

Reading Challenge Update:

Mostly Pachinko today, though I did read a few more essays from the Sarah Ruhl book. Even though Ruhl is writing about theater, I’m finding a lot to think about as a fiction writer. Good stuff about plot, structure, character, etc. Love the essay on Ovid and transformation! It speaks to the fantasy writer and fairy tale lover in me. Might write more about it for a future blog post or newsletter essay…

Reading Challenge (Day 6)

August 11, 2022 / / 0 Comments

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!)

Reading Challenge (Day 3)

August 8, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Challenges like this are good because they help me plow through some books that I otherwise would get bogged down in. Case in point: the Clark Ashton Smith collection I started reading a few months ago. The second story (“The Red World of Polaris”) has been a slog, and I’d been stuck on it forever, but today I finished it. The two-hour-a-day reading challenge has pushed me to read as much as I can in whatever spare moments I have, so I simply pushed myself to finish the “Polaris” story and rack up my minutes for the day.

Same goes with the Jonathan Hickman Avengers run. I’d been enjoying it, but kept getting stuck.  I couldn’t get into a rhythm with it. But this challenge has helped me stay focused and keep reading.

I think that’s been my problem with book reading lately.

Focus.

Internet reading has disrupted my ability to focus. I know everyone has experienced this — we all know that our attentions have been arrested by the web — but I can really feel it as I try to read for two hours each day. I can feel my attention flagging at times, and then I get the desire to put aside the book and pick up my phone. But having the challenge gives me motivation to resist the distractions and keep reading. It’s the same when Lent rolls around and I give up the internet totally (except for work stuff); the challenge of giving something up for Lent motivates me to keep going.

These kinds of challenges seem to work (so far) when it comes to giving something up or reading or studying or practicing or whatever, but the weird thing is they don’t seem to motivate me for writing. Challenges like NaNoWriMo were often a bummer because I just couldn’t get myself to stick to them. Maybe the task was too big. But reading books for two hours each day has been pretty big, even in just these first few days, and yet I have found a way to make it work.

I guess reading is simply an easier task for me than writing. I guess with reading there is no perfectionism to deal with. I can’t really “fail” at reading unless I don’t read for my two hours each day. But with writing, even if I write for two hours, there’s the chance of failure. There’s the chance that what I write will be shitty. I think this is what makes writing challenges too hard for me. Fear of doing it badly. I can definitely write for many hours in a day; my writer’s notebook is proof of that. But the writer’s notebook is private, it’s just me mucking around. It’s not meant to “be” anything other than a place to experiment. I can write pages upon pages in my notebook each day without a second thought. There’s no real “failure” with the notebook because there are no expectations.

But writing a story, or an essay, or even a blog post like this means there are expectations. There is good and there is bad. And when I start to think of my expectations for a story or essay or blog post, then I start to freeze up. Then there’s a chance for failure. Fear rears its ugly head.

Giving up the internet for Lent isn’t really something I can do “badly.” I either stay off the internet or I don’t, so as long as I stay off, I win. Same for my two-hour reading challenge. As long as I read for the requisite amount of time, I can’t do it badly.

But writing for an audience can turn out badly. It can suck. Somehow I need to get over these fears and do a writing challenge.

I suppose I could do a time-related challenge, i.e.: sit at my computer for two hours with my manuscript in front of me. Or I could do a word count challenge that’s manageable (like 500 words per day). Or a story-per-day challenge. I was doing a word count challenge earlier in the year, but as life stuff happened, I fell off the wagon and gave up. And by “life stuff” I don’t mean anything major; just the normal ups and downs of life with kids and work and responsibilities.

I think the best kind of writing challenge for me is to have a “writing time” and sit down at that time every day. Even if I don’t get very many words written, there’s something about the regularity of the appointment that works. All I have to do to win the challenge is sit down at my desk at the appointed time.

Maybe I can modify/combine the writing time challenge with the time-amount challenge. Once per day — any time that presents itself during my hectic day — I sit down at my desk with my WIP open and try to write for fifteen minutes. Set the timer, sit for fifteen. If writing happens, great. If no writing happens, I still meet the challenge for that day.

It’s worth a shot.

Zesty

August 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Have been reading Lawrence Block’s A Writer Prepares and loving it so far. It’s about his earliest days as a writer in New York in the 1950s, writing a bunch of stuff under pseudonyms. What I love the most — besides Block’s very funny conversational style — is the way he describes his writing process and the sheer energy he brought to his work at the time. It’s inspirational to me. I realize that I very much want to be a pulp-style writer who writes quickly and with gusto. I’m reminded of Bradbury’s working habits too, his furious energy and joy. Bradbury calls it “zest” in Zen in the Art of Writing.

The question I keep coming back to is this: How do I write with more zest? How do I sit down in the morning and by the afternoon have an entire short story written? How do I write 4,000 words per day (or more) like Block and Bradbury and the rest of these pulpsters?

Of course, the simplest answer is, “Sit down for four hours and write four thousand words.” But I don’t have four hours, not really, most days. I could probably piece together that time if I took every spare minute I wasn’t working as an editor or taking care of my kids or my home, but most of my free hours are after the kids are in bed — when I am a living zombie and my brain can’t string more than three words together — or in drips and drabs throughout the day (also, a girl has got to eat sometime).

Unfortunately for me, my brain can’t sit down for only five minutes and start writing fiction. I need a bit more time to gather myself, to clear my head, to reenter my manuscript (this last one is the most important… I need at least five minutes to reread what I wrote previously before I can get back into the story). Maybe this is my fatal flaw, I don’t know. But my brain just doesn’t work that quickly.

So if I have, let’s say, ten minutes free time (this is the average length of time between the fights my kids have over toys or whatever). I sit down at the computer, reread what I wrote. That’s five minutes of the ten. Then I start writing for five minutes. Cool, I get about fifty words written, one hundred if I’m lucky. But then I’m called away by my kids or a household chore. I might not have another ten minutes again for the rest of the day. Having little kids means not having a set time when I can sit down to write. Little kids means a life of flux.

It’s not a great plan for finishing a short story in one day (unless it’s super-duper flash fiction). And it’s not a great plan for writing a novel at pulp speed. Sure, I can write one hundred words a day and eventually finish something. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. Maybe that’s what I have to do. I have done that before.

But I long for the Lawrence Block/Ray Bradbury life of writing entire stories in one day, of writing at a furious speed.

I can try to get up early, before the kids wake up. But due to several issues (one of which is that I’d like to spend time with my husband in the evening before bed, so I can’t go to bed before 10:30/11:00 p.m. if I want to see him and talk to him; my kids have a rather late bedtime of 9:00 p.m.), I can’t get up too early. 6:30 a.m. is probably my earliest wake up time. So from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m., if I can peel myself off the bed sheets, I can write without distraction. Not exactly four hours, but it’s something.

In fact, I did that today. Got up at 6:45ish and headed down to the computer by 7:15. Did I work on my manuscript? Yes.

I wrote one sentence. One.

My brain just wasn’t functioning. I didn’t have the zest.

How can I get the zest? How can I cultivate it? This is why I can’t seem to be a Block/Bradbury-style pulpster writer. I had thirty minutes to write fiction, and I could only manage one sentence. My brain is pretty useless in the morning, apparently. It sucks that my ideal writing time is neither early in the morning nor later at night, but right smack dab in the middle of the day when I need to take care of my kids and get my freelance work done.

But what this morning’s one-sentence affair shows is that time isn’t really the issue. Yes, I was tired this morning, and yes, I couldn’t manage more than a sentence. But what really stops me from writing swiftly and with wild abandon like Block and Bradbury is fear. I can’t be zesty and write with gusto if I’m afraid. That’s the real problem. Fear.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to let go of the fear. Should be easy, right? (This is sarcasm.)

What am I afraid of? Fear of writing something bad, which is almost always the fear for writers. Bad can come in different flavors: using the wrong words, writing a stupid idea, sounding like a fool. Bad can mean writing something totally derivative and unoriginal. Bad can mean boring (the worst crime of all). Bad can mean incoherence or a canyon of plot holes or one-dimensional characters. That’s the fear. Fear that I’ll write something bad and be judged for it. And that judgment can come from others or it can come from myself. I can hate it or others can hate it, but either way, I’m afraid to be judged.

This is where the process mindset stuff comes in. Focus on process not product. Who cares if the finished product is terrible, what matters is the process. Enjoy the process!

I keep telling myself this. Because I do enjoy the process. I love the process. I love thinking up stories and images and characters and writing down what’s in my head. I can’t think of anything I love more (except maybe reading books, but reading books and writing books are like two sides of the same coin).

But my process, despite my best efforts, is a slow process. I need time to get back into my story. I need time to think and ponder and daydream and let stuff simmer, and maybe all of that is just my way of dealing with my fear, but I don’t think it is. I think that’s just how my brain works. Or not. I don’t know.

I do know that it really helps to be thinking about my story all day long, to be listening to music, to be daydreaming while washing dishes or making lunches. What gets me stuck is when I let my story drift into the background and all the other anxieties and responsibilities of the day take over. I can’t be zesty on command, when my butt hits the chair for ten minutes a day. I need to stay zesty all day long. I need to make the whole day part of my process, even as I’m doing other stuff, all the survival stuff like feeding my kids and making money from my day job. I still need to keep my story in mind, still need to let my imagination wander.

I want to restart my morning writing habit, my 6:30-7:30 butt-in-chair time, but in order to write more than one sentence, I need to be thinking about my story all day long. If I’m caught up in my story — in the process of making stuff up — then hopefully I won’t have time for fear. If I’m having fun all day using my imagination, then the anxieties about judgment can’t creep in. Zesty is a state of mind, but it’s also a habit of being. I need to stay zesty all day by living in my imagination all day. Then, when 6:30 a.m. rolls around — or those ten minutes of free time — my brain will be ready.

That’s the theory, anyway.

No More Vacation

July 12, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Since summer began, I feel like I’ve been busier than ever. Should summer be this busy? When I retired from teaching in June, I hadn’t realized that I would need to start work right away, and that my usual “summer vacation” was a thing of the past. How foolish! Of course I’ll have to work in summer from now on, and not just work on my fiction, but work on my freelance career. Summers will be like any other season.

But perhaps this summer has been busier than I expected simply because I’m not used to it, and once I get used to the rhythm of my new work life, I’ll find summers can still be a respite from the hurly-burly. Maybe. It’s all uncharted territory, isn’t it?

I think that’s what’s making this summer so stressful: I’m in uncharted territory. I’m fearful. I’m worried. Maybe I’m not actually that much busier than normal, it’s just that everything has taken on an added weight of importance. No longer is freelance editing something I do on the side; now, it’s something I must do to eat and pay the mortgage. Summer’s freedom is weighed down by this new responsibility. Perhaps, after a few months, this uncharted feeling will abate. I hope. I guess even if it doesn’t, I’ll get used to it. I don’t want to trade this new adventure for my old way of life, but I do have to start accepting that being on an adventure means a lot of discomfort. Like Bilbo going out his door with Gandalf and the dwarves. There’s that tension between the comfort of Bag End and the excitement (and fear) of the open road. I want both, just as Bilbo did.

Figuring out a daily schedule has been the hardest part. Between summer school for my eldest, and swimming lessons, and birthday parties, and fireworks, and all the rest of the summer stuff, I haven’t been able to find four or five hours each day to get my work done. Every day is different, every day is a jumble of activities. I need to figure out how to settle things down and find a schedule that works. I suppose this trial and error is part of the adventure too.

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