I’ve been writing a lot of words this week — including finishing Gates to Illvelion — and I’ve been listening to a lot more music lately. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Music has always been — and continues to be — a major source of inspiration for my writing.
When I don’t listen to enough music, my writing well runs dry. When I’m saturated in good music, then my cup overflows. So simple, but sometimes I forget it.
I was experimenting the other day with drawing pictures of the structures of my two works-in-progress (Gates to Illvelion and Avalon Summer).
Avalon Summer was pretty easy. The drawing was like a bullseye target with my main character, Sarah, moving through each ring of the target until getting to the center. The novella is very much an interior journey for the characters. Each ring of the target is an experience or set of experiences that leads to insight, facing fears, internal change, etc. I could visualize what I was doing very clearly.
For Gates to Illvelion, however, my first attempt at drawing the structure was a mess. I had these venn diagram/concentric circles going around and then in the middle of it all I drew a “traditional” plot structure (the old linear up and down lines leading to a climax). Somehow I was trying to express the story’s circular nature as well as its linear progression. As a drawing, it was a mess.
Does that mean Gates to Illvelion is a mess too? I don’t think so.
I tried to draw the structure again.
This time, I drew two jagged lines, one on the left side of the page, one on the right. These lines weren’t slowly going up, though, they were going down to a point in the center. This point was the low-point for each of them, the characters of Gwenhivar and the Queen. They were on parallel but also crisscrossing journeys, and I realized that what I had drawn was a mirror image.
THAT is the structure of Gates to Illvelion. A mirror image. The young girl and the older woman are on mirror-like journeys, one going down into the depths and the other trying to find her way back to the surface. A much better image than my first attempt.
Why even do all this drawing anyway? What does this have to do with storytelling, with writing, etc.?
I guess I just wanted to have some fun. To see what my stories would look like visually instead of verbally. I suppose I also was hoping such drawings would help clarify things for me. What kind of stories I was telling, how my imagination should experience them. I don’t work from an outline (not anymore, anyway), so visualization is important. I need to see the movie unfolding, flickering into view from the darkness. But I also need to have some idea of the form my story is taking. This isn’t the same as an outline, but it is a way to “see” what I’m making. Outlines are too plot-focused for me. If I outline, then I get bored of the story when I actually sit down to write it.
But if I discover the story as I’m writing, the experience is thrilling and a lot of fun. No boredom.
However, at some point in the process, I need to have a feeling for the form the story is taking. I need to feel the shape of the story without necessarily knowing what will “happen next.” I don’t think it would be useful to draw a picture of the structure too early in the process; that would be too much like making an outline.
But once the story is a living, breathing organism, then a picture can help. It can show me what kind of organism I’m dealing with. I still don’t know what will happen next in the plot, but I know what kind of story I’m telling, and that lets the movie images flicker more clearly through my mind so I can transcribe them onto the page.
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…
A Year of Writing Dangerously by Barbara Abercrombie was okay as far as these kinds of writerly books go. I bookmarked a bunch of quotes (usually from other writers whom Abercrombie herself quotes), but what I really liked were the writing exercises at the back.
Fifty-two exercises, presumably one for each week of the year. I’m a bit of a sucker for writing prompts since I started giving my students a prompt every day for their notebook time. I couldn’t possibly make up a writing prompt every day for my students, so I started borrowing (stealing?) them from other sources.
I am no longer teaching, but I’ve gotten into the habit of seeking out new prompts to steal. Sometimes I use them myself, other times I don’t. If I don’t like a prompt from a book or article, I just ignore it. But more often than not, even a prompt that doesn’t instantly thrill me can be fruitful. If I force myself to write something for a prompt — even one I don’t find particularly inspiring — I often end up writing something interesting, maybe even good.
This is evidence of the theory that parameters and boundaries lead to creativity. Total freedom doesn’t always lead to the most creative art (though sometimes it can… I’m not a big believer in absolutes when it comes to creativity, writing, making art, etc. Sometimes total freedom can lead to something wildly creative, and other times not. And sometimes parameters and boundaries are stifling and kill creativity. There are no absolutes).
Anyway, these prompts from the Abercrombie book are pretty good. Short, simple in their directions, but pretty wide in their application and execution.
I started with the first one: “What is your own metaphor for fear of writing that first line? Imagine a landscape or animal or weather or music or whatever springs to mind.”
I did modify a bit. Instead of “fear of writing that first line,” I changed it to “fear of writing that next line,” because for me, first lines are easy. Someone in a setting with a problem. Or something provocative. Or a question.
(Not a literal question, like a rhetorical question or something, but a line that raises a question, i.e.: “The dung heaps were always spouting poetry,” and then the reader is like, “Huh?” and they want to find out the answers, like how is it possible that dung heaps can even spout poetry, and then, furthermore, why would they spout poetry of all things? What kind of poetry? Is anyone listening to it? That sort of thing.)
Anyway, first lines are not my problem. It’s next lines. What comes next after that provocative statement or that someone in a setting with a problem. That’s where I struggle.
Because next lines mean you have to deliver. You have to answer the story questions in a satisfying way, in a way that makes readers oooh and aaah. That is ridiculously hard. And terrifying. All the promise of the first line and then you shit the bed. It’s my biggest weakness, this fear.
First lines are the open road, the horizon off in the distance. There’s the promise of adventure, of revelation, of greatness. But the line that comes after — the next line, always the next line — that’s like finding out the horizon you were heading toward is just one of those Looney Toons landscapes painted on the rock wall. It’s like finding out you’re Wile E. Coyote going splat.
All this time I think I know where I’m going, I’m excited for the journey, and then BLAM! I hit a wall. That feeling of promise, that endless horizon was all just a trick. I was really headed for an illusion, a vision of greatness that, in reality, was the side of a mountain. I’m worse than lost: I’m splattered like roadkill on the rock.
See, lost isn’t bad. Lost means you can find your way. The detour or digression could turn into a fun episode.
But the splat? That’s a total dead end. It’s embarrassment. I thought I knew what I was doing, but that next line is just waiting there to prove to myself and my audience that I suck. What happens when I write that next line and go splat? I slide down like a glob of jelly or a flattened pancake: defeated, ridiculous, a fool. We laugh at Wile E. Coyote, and that’s exactly what I fear. The embarrassment of failure.
Interestingly, the Coyote always runs full-throttle at that painted vista. Time after time after time. He never learns. It’s like he’s immune to embarrassment. Or has short-term memory loss. Either way, the splat doesn’t stop him. Every time, he’s right back at it, chasing the Road Runner down that endless road.
I’m not sure if this gives me comfort or not. But it’s a metaphor for something.
Reading Challenge Update:
Day 7, did more morning reading than evening/night reading today. Maybe this is the start of a trend. Reading at breakfast, before I start my journey downstairs to write and edit. In the past I’ve resisted morning reading because I feared that reading someone else’s work would interfere with ideas for my own work. But if I’m honest with myself, my mind is pretty blank in the morning. I’m often an empty vessel. So maybe morning reading is good: It’s a way to fill up the tank.
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.
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.
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