Category: writing process (Page 7 of 15)

Daily Blogging?

July 8, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Can I get back to daily blogging? Would it be worth it? There’s a part of me that thinks, “What’s the point?” since nobody really reads my website, and the time devoted to daily blogging might be better spent elsewhere (like soliciting new editing clients…), but then I think about the joy I get from hitting “publish” and seeing my blog post go live to the world. Sure, nobody will read it (except my husband, maybe), but there’s something satisfying about being able to write a few thoughts, ramble a bit without any direction, and then hit publish.

I have loved the act of blogging since I first discovered it more than fifteen years ago. I have always preferred blogs to any of the other social media that have sprung up afterwards. Yes, I do have a newsletter (I’m on Substack like everyone else), but the blog is a different kind of space. It’s more intimate, somehow. And it’s a lot more like a playground. I’m just doing whatever, no pressure or purpose other than to muck around. I’m not doing this blog to make money; no monetizing or ads or anything like that. I just want to write and explore and post it for other people to see. Even if no one sees.

Maybe daily blogging wouldn’t be worth it. Maybe I should be doing something else, something more “productive.” There’s an argument to be made that I should spend these fifteen or twenty minutes a day working on my fiction instead. That’s probably the most persuasive argument against daily blogging. I love to write fiction, and I should always be doing more of it if I can. I have novels and series that need finishing. I have readers who are waiting for new books.

But—

As much as I love writing fiction, blogging uses a different part of my brain, a different writing muscle, and I want to use that muscle. Blogging has a way of helping me with my fiction. It gives me a chance to get words down on paper, to open the floodgates so to speak, so that all of my writing — fiction, nonfiction, journaling, copy writing — becomes easier. There’s this weird phenomenon where words beget more words, and more words beget even more words, and if I’m writing on the blog, suddenly I’m writing more fiction, and if I’m writing more fiction, I suddenly have words I want to add to the blog. Instead of the blog taking away from my other writing, it almost ends up feeding it.

Time, of course, is the most precious commodity, and there will be days when I don’t have enough time to let all the words out that I have bubbling up inside, and so I guess on those days, one type of writing will be sacrificed for the other. Maybe some days I only blog or I only write fiction. But I gave up my teaching job precisely so I could have more time for writing, and even though time is still scarce (I have young children, after all), I have more freedom now to use my time as I will. Even if it’s just for five minutes, I can use that time for blogging.

It’s not really the time that matters anyway. It’s the desire, the will to do it. If I say I want to blog everyday, then I can do it. If I say I want to write fiction every day, then I can do it. Even one minute is enough.

I think that’s why I want to start blogging again. It’s another way to write, another way to get words on the page. And words beget more words, and more words, and more words. For a writer, that’s a good thing.

3d6, straight down the line

April 18, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Lately, I’ve been rolling up zero-level characters for DCC RPG. Not for any reason, really, just for the fun of it. It’s weirdly meditative. Roll 3d6, straight down the line,  and see what unbalanced, horrible/incredible stats ensue. Then roll for birth augur, occupation, random equipment, and copper pieces and bingo! Instant player character.

Why is this kind of character creation so satisfying? I think it’s due to the randomness of it. The character that begins to take shape, with her 16 strength and her 7 luck, her beggar bowl and her random candle, all leads to a low-pressure but satisfying imaginative exercise. I have to start making sense of this weird and sometimes contradictory amalgamation of numbers, stats, equipment, and info. Why was her birth augur “conceived on horseback”? What’s the story with that?! Why does she have such high strength and such low luck? Where did she get the candle and what was the last thing that someone dropped in her beggar bowl?

I’m not planning to use the character for anything, but even if I were going to run her through a funnel adventure, the whole thing is still very low-stakes. I can let my imagination drift through this hazy fictive world and spend a few moments dreaming up an entirely new  person. There’s no real purpose, it’s just me playing a game. And when I’m done, I feel both satisfied and energized. The combination of rolling dice, checking charts, and drawing the outlines of a fictional character all help me chill out and relax.

And yeah, I need to relax. Often, when I sit down to write or work on my fiction, I’m tense. “It’s getting late, I only have twenty minutes,” or, “I have no idea what to write and it’s gonna suck.” I sit down tense. Pressured.

I hate that.

I know Bradbury’s advice: “Relax. Don’t think. Work.” But I really struggle with the “relax” part. I can’t get past my perfectionism, and I’m always under the illusion that I’m running out of time.

So. I grab my 3d6, some percentage dice, a d24, a d30, and 5d12, a pencil and paper, and suddenly I’m in the midst of CHARACTER CREATION: such a simple process and yet the possibilities feel inexhaustible. It relaxes me, let’s me do something with my hands, let’s me explore a little corner of my imagination without worry or pressure.

Whether I play these characters or not doesn’t matter. They didn’t exist a couple of minutes ago, but now they do. A handful of random rolls and a new character came into being. Where once there was nothing, now there is something. It’s that simple, and it’s awesome. It might not seem very creative since the entire process is so formulaic and random, but I’m gonna go ahead and argue that it IS creative. As the dice fall and the stats gets filled, my brain starts to take over inventing and filling in the blanks. The numbers on the paper don’t really make the character; I do. Through my imagination, the character becomes a character and not just a series of game mechanics. This is what I love about randomization. It isn’t a substitute for creativity and invention: it’s a tool for creativity and invention. It allows the player to synthesize disparate elements, and in that act of synthesis, the player engages in the highest order of thinking and creation. All thanks to a roll of the dice.

A Book Within a Book

February 16, 2021 / / 0 Comments

In one of my current works-in-progress, Avalon Summer, the main character, a young girl named Sarah, finds a book that captures her imagination. She starts to see parallels between the book and things in her own life.

Anyway, as part of the story, I make reference to chapters from the book, as well as story-lines and characters. Today, I decided to come up with titles for each chapter in the book, just in case I wanted to use the chapter names in my story.

Well. Now that I’ve made the chapter names, I’m starting to get excited about this made-up book. It’s just supposed to be a plot device in my novella, Avalon Summer, but the chapter titles are so evocative that they make me want to write THIS story too.

Is it a good idea to write a book that will then play a role in another book’s plot? Does that even make sense?

Here are the chapter titles for the totally-non-existent novel, The Gates to Illvelion, which I created as a plot device for my in-progress novella, Avalon Summer:

Chapter 1: “Faerie Night”

Chapter 2: “A Heart Wrought with Spells”

Chapter 3: “Gwenhivar‘s Choice”

Chapter 4: “The Glass Pool of the Hidden West”

Chapter 5: “Oak Abode”

Chapter 6: “Gallien, the Unicorn”

Chapter 7: “The High Cliffs of the Mud Lord”

Chapter 8: “Agravaine’s Curse”

Chapter 9: “The Never-ending Melody of Night’s Enchantment”

Chapter 10: “The Blood Sword”

Chapter 11: “The Iron Key”

Chapter 12: “The Sea-foam Bird”

Is my desire to write The Gates to Illvelion a form of procrastination? Should I take a break from Avalon Summer until I finish writing The Gates to Illvelion? Should I write them both in tandem? Should I just keep The Gates to Illvelion as a plot point in Avalon Summer and leave off writing anything beyond these chapter titles?

I just came up with these chapter titles today, so maybe I need to give myself time to see if this is a real possibility or just my excitement overwhelming me right now.

A few words about my inner critic

February 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I just wrote a bunch of words for Avalon Summer (my work-in-progress novella that’s part-memoir, part-fantasy), and now I want to erase them all. Part of me is mad: mad at myself for writing such garbage, for wasting time, for not having enough good ideas. Part of me is trying to salvage them with unconvincing excuses: “Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe I’m just being a perfectionist. Maybe if I keep going, it’ll all work out fine.”

And then there’s the part of me that knows what needs to be done and is struggling to stay level-headed and cool about the whole thing. What needs to be done is this: I need to cut those words and start over. I need to rethink the scene and try something different. The calm, collected, level-headed part of me is saying, “Hey, no worries. It was an experiment. It was a bit of a ramble down an unbeaten path, but it didn’t work out. Time to turn around and go in a different direction.”

But then the angry, frustrated part of me is on the other shoulder whispering feverishly: “You suck, you suck, you suck, you suck!”

‘Cause the perfectionist, the doubter, the critic are all hidden away inside my head, and the critic loves nothing more than to point out my failures. Let’s face it, the words I wrote the other day are “failures.” They’re not good. They need to be cut. They’re not gonna end up in the book. And the critic doesn’t want me to forget. I wasted my time. I wrote something crappy. I’m a bad writer because only bad writers ever write anything bad.

And on and on and on goes the perfectionist, the doubter, the critic.

This is the struggle, right here. This is what makes it hard. I KNOW that this bit of bad writing is not a big deal. I know it. I know that it’s all part of the creative process. I almost always do better when I can ramble and sometimes get lost, because the other method, the planning everything out method, kills my creativity and energy. It stops me from writing because once I know where the story is going, I lose interest. I’m a “discovery writer,” which means I get to discover, and that means sometimes there will be wrong turns. I know this. My cool, level-headed self knows this.

And yet it’s hard to kill the critic. It’s hard to block out the pessimistic voice that says, “You just wasted all that time writing to a dead-end. What a failure! What a fool!”

I know I need to silence that critic. Problem is: I’m not sure HOW to silence that critic.

When the Music’s Over

February 11, 2021 / / 0 Comments

After my sojourn through the realms of Dungeon Synth, I finally figured out why my writing sessions have been so “blah” lately. My routine has been to write after putting my kids to bed, but for the last several weeks, my mind has been foggy, my imagination has been feeble, and the words have come slowly. I wondered why. Was it just because I was writing at night, drained of energy by the long days? Or was I not reading enough? Not enough input?

Well, in a way, that was exactly my problem. But it wasn’t a problem of not enough reading. I’ve actually been reading more books lately than I have since winter began. The input problem wasn’t a literary one: it was a musical one.

I realized the other day that I haven’t been listening to enough music. My days are filled with kids yelling and causing a ruckus, with podcasts, with NPR, with students discussing novels and poetry, with conversation and talk. Most of these are good (minus the yelling children), but they aren’t music.

I have been living a musically-deficient life for awhile, and I think it’s having a detrimental effect on my writing.

Ever since I was a teenager, music and my creative process have been intrinsically linked. Songs would inspire stories, lyrics would generate images, melodies would create moods and feelings that led to ideas. The novella I’m working on right now — Avalon Summer — wouldn’t exist without the music of R.E.M. The Merlin’s Last Magic series owes its existence to The Smiths, 80s New Wave, and Loreena McKennitt . And my Icelandic-Sagas-Meet-Film-Noir world (the one where my short story “Things” takes place) wouldn’t have been conjured if I hadn’t been going through a Franz Ferdinand/garage rock phase in my late twenties.

Whether it’s Led Zeppelin or the Grateful Dead or Miracle Legion, music has been the seed from which so much of my creative work has grown.

And why am I struggling right now? Because I’m not listening to my music!

The forays into dungeon synth helped me realize that I NEED music to give me ideas and conjure images. Without images in my head, I can’t write. Without the moods and feelings that come from music, I have trouble generating the spark that gives my ideas life.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is what I’ll do for Lent. It’s coming up soon, and I think the right answer for me is to give up the internet (with exceptions for my teaching work and this blog). I’ve done this kind of sacrifice before, but this time, I want to make sure I fill the space with something good. Prayer, of course, is the best thing to do in place of my doomscrolling, but maybe I can also use that time to listen to music. Grab the ol’ ipod and some earbuds and go on a sonic journey. Maybe the more I immerse myself in music again, the more I’ll be bursting with ideas for my writing.

Writing Out Loud

February 4, 2021 / / 0 Comments

This week in class, I had my students do an exercise to practice writing imagery. After I went over the instructions, I pulled up a blank Google doc and began drafting a brief scene. I wanted to model the exercise for them.

It worked out great because not only was I doing my teaching work, but I ended up writing a scene for my current short story, “Things.” “Things” is a kind of hard-boiled film noir story mixed with Norse mythology/Icelandic saga motifs.

Anyway, I think my modeling of the exercise was helpful for the students. I hope it was.

I try to do this kind of modeling as often as possible. Whatever activity or writing exercise I give to my students I first model for them. I write alongside them to show that these activities have real merit, and that I — a working writer — use them for my own work as well. My modeling also shows them how my drafting process works.

It’s not about showing off. When I write in front of my students — talking as I write, narrating my thought process — I often make mistakes or write clunky sentences. Sometimes I don’t really know what to write or how to start, so I narrate those thoughts too. I tell my students that I’m having trouble starting, or that I can’t think of a good idea. I talk my thoughts out loud, and let them see how my brain approaches the task at hand. When I do start writing, sometimes it’s crappy, sometimes it’s uneven, and then sometimes, it’s pretty good.

But no matter what, I share with my students why I wrote what I did, or what I might change later in revision, or what strategies I used to craft the sentences. And I let them ask questions or offer suggestions: “How did you think of this?” or “Why did you delete that one sentence?” or “I think you should change that last word.”

(By the way, I did NOT invent this teaching strategy. I’m not nearly that clever. I stole it from Kelly Gallagher whose books on teaching are invaluable.)

What’s nice about “writing out loud” is that I show my students how writing gets done. I let them SEE the process instead of just telling them the process. And sometimes, when I happen to see the possibilities, I can end up writing something that isn’t just an exercise or a model, but a piece of writing that I can add to my own fiction.

The imagery activity from this week was one such time. Now, having written it in front of my students, I can take that short scene and add it to my current short story in-progress. Pretty cool.

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