Category: writing process (Page 2 of 14)

Goal: Finish Norse City Limits

June 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

My top writing goal for 2024 is to finish my novel, Norse City Limits. Inspired by both my love for Icelandic sagas and my love for film noir, NCL mixes elements from Grettir’s Saga and Norse mythology with some of my favorite noir tropes.

I started out writing it late last summer and made a lot of progress right out of the gate. I guess I was excited about starting something new. The idea for NCL has been rattling around my brain for years, so that build-up and energy just flowed right through me when I finally started drafting. I think I wrote roughly 15,000 words in those first few weeks.

Then the school year started and I began teaching again. That slowed things down considerably, and because I wasn’t outlining my chapters as I went, I ended up forgetting a bunch of stuff as my momentum stalled and I didn’t write everyday.

I wrote a short story, started another short story, started a novella, and then went back through and reread all of the NCL manuscript thus far, taking notes and outlining each chapter.

After that process, I finally resumed drafting the novel, but with a bit of a twist. The school year started with me wanting to experiment with having the students draft by hand. Basically do all their writing in notebooks and on pads of paper. This was my way of resisting AI, I guess. Of getting us all to think more intentionally about our bodies and how doing things by hand shapes how we think.

I realized that while I do a lot of writing by hand, mostly in my writer’s notebook, I was still drafting all my fiction at the computer. I can type faster than I can handwrite, and typing just made sense. Saves times, right?

But that meant that I could only write when I had access to my computer, to the desktop that sits in our basement. That meant that my writing time was limited to those moments when I was home and could steal away to the basement to write.

Translation: I didn’t get a lot of writing done once school started because I didn’t have access to my computer. And even when I did have access to it, sometimes I didn’t feel like holing myself up in the dank, cold basement. Sometimes I wanted to sit on the couch with my husband in the evening, just to be near him, to spend quiet time together.

After watching this video on Neil Gaiman’s writing routine, I realized that I really love writing in my writer’s notebook, and writing by hand has always made me feel more experimental and loose, AND I was asking my students to draft their writing by hand, but I was still shackled to my computer, so the answer seemed obvious.

I needed to start drafting my stories by hand.

I took out the lovely leather notebook case my husband got me a few years ago, stuck a couple of Moleskine softcover journals in it, and started drafting NCL and my short fiction by hand. I started bringing the notebook with me to work, drafting in spare moments at lunch or after school. I sat on the couch in the evenings and drafted while my husband worked on his grad classes.

Basically, I got back into the groove with the novel.

At this point, I’m on chapter ten but not quite sure how many words because I’ve drafted the last chapter by hand. Probably getting close to 30k words. Which is admittedly not a lot. I’m thinking this book will be roughly 100k words, but that’s always hard to say until I get closer to the end. I don’t outline, so I’m simply going by the vague impressions I’ve generated for where the story might go and the scenes I have floating around my head.

Right now, my protagonist is stumbling and fumbling along, trying to be proactive but getting swatted down at every turn by the cruel forces at work in the city. It’s weird writing noir because it’s such a dark genre/style that calls for bad luck and evil fate to circumvent the hero’s actions. I want to be careful that my main guy gets some feeling of progress going even as the net squeezes tighter and tighter around him.

To finish the novel in seven months, I must write roughly 10k words per month. Very doable… except I also have the goal to finish another novel (Ysbaddaden) and even more stories besides. So 10k a month for NCL, but that won’t be all I’m writing each month.

As always, I’m hoping to “fail to success,” so no matter where I am by next month, I’ll be further along than I am now.

A Ridiculous Amount of Goals (that I probably won’t achieve)

June 7, 2024 / / 2 Comments

This might be another one of those “I’m gonna blog everyday” type of promises that I make and never fulfill.

But you know what? Having an ambitious goal that I don’t achieve often turns out better than weaksauce goals or no goals at all. Why? Because even if I don’t achieve my lofty ambitions, I still achieve something, and something is better than nothing.

This is the “fail to success” model of thinking. I think this model is better for me than being all, “Not hitting my goals just makes me feel bad, man,” kind of attitude that I sometimes convince myself is true (for myself). (This whole thing should have a giant caveat that says I’m really working out my own methods and not prescribing anything to anyone.)

I also firmly believe in the “establish your practice” model too (again, for myself… but this one I do get a bit prescriptive about with my students). Establishing your artistic practice means developing habits (often daily, though not necessarily) that allow you to do your art, making it a regular part of your life.

I still think having an artistic practice is important. I’m building a life, and I want that life to include making my art. I want that life to include making my art everyday (if possible).

So yeah, establish a practice. Live it everyday if you can.

But I also think setting goals for myself — goals I often fail to achieve — helps a lot. I need to have lots of irons in the fire. No such thing as “writer’s block” only “project block” is an ethos I stand by. Learning this habit of mind has been CRUCIAL for my work as a writer. As soon as I realized that I could write anything I wanted when I sat down to write (and not just write the thing I was supposed to write), I was free. Free from thinking I was “stuck.” Free from thinking I wasn’t “in the mood.” If I have fingers to type or hands to write, and I have some paper nearby, I can write. No “block” at all. If I didn’t feel like writing the current “work in progress,” no prob. I could work on a blog post. Wasn’t feeling like that novel at the moment? No biggie, just work on a short story.

Having numerous goals is how I can stave off blockage. Having lots of writing projects, as Matthew Dicks mentions on his blog, is what gives me the freedom to keep writing.

I just finished Dicks’s Someday Is Today, which was fabulous, and in it, he encourages creators to have lots of goals and work on lots of projects, switching between them as necessary. This is often how I’ve worked in the past. Having side projects just makes sense for how my brain works.

But as I read Dicks’s book the other day, I was reminded not only to have more side projects, but that even if I don’t fully complete them all by my self-imposed deadlines, just by having the goals, I’ll accomplish more.

Take my embarrassingly unfulfilled “blog everyday” goals. On the one hand, I did not meet those goals, which means I’m a failure. But on the other hand, just by setting such a goal for myself, I blogged way more than I otherwise would have. The lofty goal propelled me to get my butt in the chair and write.

I wonder if I’m being too timid in my goals lately. Let’s say I set the goal to write a short story every week for a year. And let’s go on to say that I fail miserably at that goal. Let’s say I only manage to write three short stories that whole year.

Guess what?

That’s THREE more short stories than I had before. And if I hadn’t set the goal, I might have written none.

So what’s better? Setting no goal and getting little-to-nothing done, or setting a goal, failing at it, but writing more than I would have otherwise?

This is how to achieve things.

In such a spirit, here are all the lofty goals I want to achieve in my creative work this year. I am almost 100% certain I will not hit these goals. I am also almost 100% certain that by articulating them here on my blog, I will achieve more than I thought possible for the remainder of 2024.

My creative goals:

Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel)

Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series)

Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world

Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son

Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe

Publish my short story collection

Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series

Blog everyday (this one again!! LOL!)

Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks

Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends

Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic

Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month

Make other zines

Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter)

Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son)

Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines)

Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year

Can I meet all these goals? Maybe. Probably not. But having lofty goals means making more progress than having none. If one side project is good, then sixteen side projects is better.

I’ll try to take a page out of Dicks’s blog and post updates on my progress. I can almost guarantee that I will not meet some of these goals. But having these irons in the fire means there’s absolutely no excuse for “writer’s block.” There is ALWAYS a project I can switch to and work on when BIC time comes.

Creative Writing: Week ???

May 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

“Take art seriously without going about it in a serious way.”

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act, p. 354

I’ve lost track of which week it is in the term. End of April and all of May are such a whirlwind when teaching high school. I feel like All the Things are happening. I can’t keep up.

Anyway, in one of my recent weeks of teaching Creative Writing, we spent a week dedicated to playing games and thinking about how making art is/can be/should be playful.

To help them along the way, we played a storytelling RPG where I and another student were the game masters, and the rest of the class were our players. I played with two different groups on two different days, and one of the groups was a real struggle to engage with.

There were some in the group who just could not take it seriously, and therefore they could not be playful.

I don’t mean they were being silly and I wanted them to be serious. My aim was quite the opposite, in fact. I wanted shenanigans. I wanted laughter and high jinks.

The first group I played with was generally able to do this. They committed to their ridiculous characters (the world we were playing in was a bit of a spoof of the Twilight series), and we all laughed a lot and had a fun time. They approached the game on its own terms and took it seriously, while at the same time, being playful.

But for the students in the second group who wouldn’t take the game seriously, there was neither laughter nor pathos nor anything in between. Only grim faces and boredom.

Now, maybe my GMing skills were subpar and that ruined things. Maybe I should have done a better job of crafting the world and the challenges. But I don’t think that was the case. The likelier culprit was that for some of the students in the group, the game was beneath them. They were embarrassed by the whole notion of playing an RPG. Of pretending to be a character. Of romping around in a fantasy world.

And that’s fine. Not everyone digs that kind of fun.

But I think their overall attitude to the game illustrates Rubin’s point quoted above: Games, like art, should be taken seriously without going about it in a serious way. The first group, who DID meet the game on its own terms, ended up having a blast. They weren’t playing in an overly-serious, solemn way. They were light. They were silly. But they accepted the game on its own terms and committed to what the game was trying to do.

The second group could not do that. They didn’t see the value in the game, nor could they approach it with any sort of commitment. And thus, they couldn’t have fun.

Or maybe they thought they HAD to approach the game in a serious way, and therefore they were blocked from having fun. Because they thought they had to be serious, they disengaged entirely.

Either way, their experience illustrates Rubin’s point. We have to take what we’re doing seriously, whether it’s playing an RPG or writing a story or illustrating a comic or directing a film or whatever. We have to believe that the thing we’re making is worth making. That our commitment to the project is worth our time and effort. That we’re doing something worthwhile.

Because this is the paradox: If we don’t have that commitment, that seriousness about the enterprise, then we can’t be playful about the making of it either.

In order to do good work, we have to go about it without seriousness. We can’t make the work “important” because then we’ll freeze or play it too safe. So in order to be light and playful, we must believe in the seriousness of what we’re doing. But in order to not get bogged down, we can’t approach our work with a grim-faced sense that we’re taking our medicine or doing what we’ve been told. We have to be playful.

For my grim-faced, bored students playing the RPG, they were being told to play. And they couldn’t be bothered to. Playing an imaginative role-playing game was beneath them, I guess. So they slogged through it and never got to experience the lightness and playfulness of taking something seriously without going about it in a serious way.

Creative Writing: Week Two

April 9, 2024 / / 2 Comments

I told them that input could be whatever they wanted, so I have to refrain from being judgy about their choices, but after looking over their input logs from the first week, I think it might be time to talk about high-quality input versus low-quality input.

It’s a tricky subject because it reminds me too much of the snobbish position that certain kinds of literature are better than others, that comic books and video games are worthless, that pulp literature and Hollywood movies are for the unwashed masses, etc. etc. All that elitist crap.

I’m a “more/and” kind of person. A “yes” person. I like liking things, to quote Abed. And for too long, science fiction and fantasy were looked down on as “lesser-than” by the literary establishment, and I don’t want to contribute to that kind of judgment, a judgment more often born out of snobbery and cliquishness than actual merit and quality.

But. But, but, but…

There are certainly artistic avenues and byways my students could be exploring that they aren’t, and if they did explore those byways, they might find them rewarding and much more satisfying than what they are reading/watching/listening to right now.

I’m tempted, therefore, to maybe give them more required reading/viewing/listening/etc. Not a lot, but a few assignments each week that they have to engage with. “Read X by Wednesday and we’ll talk about it in class.” That kind of thing.

Yeah, I’m backtracking a little from what I said at the beginning of the term, but I think/hope it will help them see that it’s not about which art is “good” and which is “bad” so much as it’s a question of whether the art I’m inputting is expanding my life as a writer or limiting it. If it’s limiting/narrowing/same-old-same-old, then what’s the point? A kind of familiar numbness? The comfort of hearing my old notions parroted back to me? Inertia?

Or is it that they don’t know what else is out there? If I’m going to assign better input experiences for them, then I need to meet them where they are. Maybe something like the book recommendations John Warner does? They give me a list of their last five input experiences and I put together a list of five more to explore that are of a potentially better quality. It’s worth a shot.

We’ll be watching Richard Linklater’s School of Rock in Week Three, partially because I want to introduce the concept of going back and exploring the influences of those who influence you.

I feel like I’m only in Week Two and the year is almost over. These quarter-long classes we do at my school just don’t feel like enough time, especially this fourth quarter with senioritis hitting hard and Easter and all the random days off and schedule changes. There’s SO MUCH we could be doing in this Creative Writing class. If I am going to teach it next year, I’ll need to scale back my ambitions for the class considerably. At the moment, there’s too much I want to do and no time in which to do it.

I need to repeat my mantra from the beginning of the year: “Slow learning.”

We don’t have to do it all. We can leave a few chips on the table. We can do less. We can go deeper on the things that matter for us right now, not some predetermined schedule.

I need to remember that. I’m building a space for them to write creatively and develop ideas and skills. It takes time to build that space, and maybe we only start to build it together, and it’s up to each student to finish building it on her own (or with each other, after the last bell has rung on the school year).

Whenever I want to do too much, I end up regretting it.

For now, we’re looking at input. Better quality. Exploring influences. Finding the good stuff that will expand your imagination. Leaving the stuff that limits you.

I’ll go down this road with the students until I feel like we’ve gotten what we need. Then we’ll move on. Maybe that’s by the end of Week Three, maybe it’s by the end of Week Four. Maybe we stay on this for the rest of the school year — IF it’s yielding fruit and helping us all grow.

Otherwise, we can keep going down the road: going slow, but going beyond the surface of things.

The “Morning Routine” is cliche at this point, but it still works

April 3, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I hesitate to write about morning routines because I feel like at this point, all the gurus have spoken (often annoyingly), it’s gotten cliche to spout off about how important one’s morning routine is, and we’ve heard the advice ad nauseam so what more is there to say?

And yet, I have been thinking once again about why I’ve been floundering since mid-December, and the answer is crystal clear: It’s my faltering morning routine.

From early August until the end of November, my morning routine had been relatively steady (I even managed a modified version of it while visiting family over the Thanksgiving holiday), and even though my writing output wasn’t huge in that span, I was writing consistently and enjoyably. Life was in balance.

Then December hit, Christmas prepping and end-of-semester-grading took over my life, and the morning routine was decimated. I tried to get back on track in January, but to no avail. I couldn’t get to bed on time, and in the morning, sleep felt more important than writing, so I would snooze until it was time to get my kids ready for school.

And now, here I am in April, and I’m grumbling about how out of sync I feel, how paltry my creative output has been, and how, frankly, depressed I’m getting.

It’s the lack of a morning routine!

I’ve known it the whole time, but for some reason I had convinced myself that perhaps my life was too unpredictable to commit to a regular morning routine and I’d be better off sneaking my writing in whenever I could, doing my art whenever the small snatches of time presented themselves. Planning didn’t seem to be working, so I would be more spontaneous.

But spontaneous is just another word for not getting shit done. Without a rhythm, without a routine, I never was able to find those snatches of time. My output nosedived.

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t that planning didn’t work. It was that I had given up on committing to the plan. I wanted my sleep (I still do, of course). And I figured it was too hard to get to bed at 10:00 p.m. My life wouldn’t let me. I had to face reality. Blah, blah, blah.

But what I was facing wasn’t reality. It was my own resignation in the face of a challenge. I had given up and soothed myself by saying it was pragmatism.

It wasn’t pragmatism. It was a reluctance to make changes. To turn off the screens and go to bed even if there were other things I wanted to do. The real reality is that we have to make choices, and from December to April, I had been making the choice to stay up later and not wake up early to do my morning routine. This was a choice I was making. I didn’t have to read one more online article after 9:00 p.m., but I did. I didn’t have to watch a second episode of that TV show, but I did. I didn’t have to put off my paper-grading all day so that I had a stack of them to grade at night, but I did.

These were choices. They still are choices I must face each and every day. But if I want to establish my morning routine again, then I must make different choices. Some things, yes, are always out of our control. I can’t control when my child has a nightmare and needs me to sit with him in his bedroom. I can’t control those nights when we get home late from visiting family and I have to stay up late to make the lunches and wash dishes.

But on typical nights, those normal nights when I have more control over my choices and time, I can start making the choice for the morning routine — the routine that gives my life balance and structure and health — over the choice for one more episode, one more article, one more paper to grade.

If it’s at all interesting to others, my morning routine consists of waking up at 6:00 a.m. and immediately doing stretches in bed to help with my back problems and muscle stiffness. Then I get up, drink a glass of water and take vitamins, and then begin walking around the house for exercise. While I walk, I usually pray. If it’s light enough outside, I might walk outside, but usually it’s too dark for that.

After my walk and prayer time, I do my Julia Cameron-style morning pages in my notebook, and then I do some creative writing, either fiction or nonfiction or poetry, whatever feels right and I’m most excited about.

By this time, I have to get ready for work, so I shower, pack the kids’ lunches, eat breakfast, and head to work with enough time to grade papers for thirty minutes before my first class period starts.

This is the ideal morning routine for me. In this three-hour span, I’m able to exercise, pray, reflect, write creatively, eat breakfast, and make progress on my teaching job, so that by 9:00 a.m., I have accomplished all the important things I need to accomplish for the day related to my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job.

After 9:00 a.m., if I’ve done my morning routine, whatever else gets accomplished throughout the day, I can feel good knowing I did the things I needed to do to make myself feel whole.

Maybe some of the gurus would say my routine is too ambitious, and that’s why I fell off the wagon.

Maybe.

But over the years, I’ve trained myself to become more and more of a morning person, and as I get older, I know that by the time the afternoon hits, I’m too tired both physically and mentally to be effective at my creative work. The best time for me is the morning. Before the day has had a chance to drain me. So I need to get several things done in the morning because my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job are all things I need to keep in balance for an ordered, satisfying life.

And if that means I need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and go to bed at 9:30 p.m., then maybe I need to start making the choices that will allow me to do that. But it all comes down to choices, to what I value, and where I focus my time.

Not everything is under my control. Life will have bumps and setbacks.

But the morning routine — for me, at least — really does work as a tool and structure for making my art. I’ve noticed a huge plummet of happiness and artistic fulfillment since I floundered in my morning routine. And in just the past two days, since I’ve been trying to reestablish that routine, I’ve noticed a huge upswing in my mood and ability to get creative work done.

Reminding myself that the morning routine really does work, and that it’s worth making different choices at night, may be cliche to write about, but I wouldn’t have had the energy or time to write this blog post without my morning routine.

I’ll take the cliche every time if it means I get to make my art again and keep myself whole.

Creative Writing: Week One

March 24, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m teaching a Creative Writing class for the first time in several years, and this week was our first week. I’ve got fourteen students — high school kids — and we started the week watching a movie, coloring, and eating candy (an idea I blatantly stole from Lynda Barry... sorry for being a thief, Professor Lynda!).

It was great, though. Super chill. Fun and relaxing. A big part of this class is about having fun and being playful, so watching a movie and coloring felt very playful and kid-like. These are teenagers, so sometimes they want to act grown-up and mature and be sophisticated adults, but there’s also this yearning for childhood and play and fun (something often sorely missing from their busy, over-stuffed lives), so by giving them permission to have fun, to be a kid again, to be silly and do something “just because,” I’ve (hopefully) given them permission to also be creative.

We talked a bit about what it means to be creative, and my biggest message on this is that creative means “to create,” so any time they are making something, they are being creative. Doesn’t have to be “original” or “special” or even “good.” Just has to be making something.

What that something is, I’m leaving up to them.

(One student asked if she could make jam every week, and I said, “Um… okay? But maybe write, like, a poem and stick it on the label?” It is a creative WRITING class after all; I feel like some writing should be in there somewhere…)

We also spent some time decorating our writing notebooks and choosing “guardian spirits” (via Austin Kleon), and I told them they had to do some “input” every day and that a big chunk of their grade will be based on how much input they take in week after week.

Input includes reading poetry, fiction, non-fiction, essays, comics, watching movies/TV, listening to music, looking at art, and having new experiences. When I told them they had permission to watch a bunch of movies this week and count it as their “homework” for my class, they all got very excited and couldn’t believe their luck. I also got very excited. I can’t wait for them to spend their week watching movies and getting ideas and having fun.

I’m very big on fun these days. We take things too seriously, acting as if writing stories or reading books or making art is some kind of excruciating task that tortures us. If reading a book is torture, you’re doing it wrong. And if writing something that came out of your imagination is laborious and unfun, then also: doing it wrong. This is art, kiddos. Not work.

So, we spent some time talking about how to have fun, and then I tried to do things all week that were fun. We went on walks. We listened to Japanese soul music from the 1970s. We made blackout poetry. We spent an entire class period inputting things into our brains: some students watched a movie, others read novels and poetry. I too read a book during that time, and listened to some synthwave music.

Their assignment this weekend is to keep doing their input, everyday. I’ll check their input logs on Monday.

I also asked them to spend thirty minutes to an hour doing some idea-generating. I gave them a list of twenty different activities to try, including playing the “What If?” game, making a list of titles, and listening to music to see what images and ideas flow from the songs.

In some ways, you could look at this first week and say, “She didn’t teach them anything! They just goofed around!”

And you’d be right. We did goof around. We did silly things. Playful things. Fun things. I gave them some advice about writing, but mostly, we just played. Because if they’re going to be writing creatively, they must first be playful. They must first be given permission to have fun. It’s a permission they were craving.

This first week was the giving-permission week: “Yes, you can play. Yes, you can laugh. Yes, you can make jam.” (Just maybe make a poem or a clever line to go with it.)

Going forward, we’ll learn some craft; we’ll learn techniques. I’ll give them prompts and exercises. But I’ll also continue to give them space and time and permission to have fun.

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