Category: writing process (Page 7 of 14)

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.

How to Feed the Ysbaddaden Muse

January 27, 2021 / / 0 Comments

It’s no secret that I’ve been working on side projects lately instead of writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. I explained part of my anxieties already, but the other annoying thing about being away from a novel-in-progress is that everything’s been forgotten. I can’t remember what’s happened in the story or what I wanted to write about next.

I probably should keep a notepad nearby and record major events, arcs, settings, etc. (and proper names), but so far, I haven’t used that strategy.

So now, as I hope to reembark on my journey into the novel, I have to go back and reread at least the last three or four chapters. It’s not the end of the world, but all that rereading time is time spent NOT writing. And what I most desperately want is to be writing this novel, getting words on paper, and finishing it.

Maybe as I reread, I’ll do the notepad thing. If nothing else, it’ll save me time rereading next time I get in this situation.

Another thought I just had — unrelated to rereading my manuscript, but related to my slow-going with Ysbaddaden: Perhaps I haven’t been taking in the right input. I’ve been reading the pope’s new book, The Golem and the Jinni, C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, and I’m about to start reading Nella Larsen’s Passing (for my teaching work).

But maybe I need to mix things up and read/watch/listen to stuff that’ll feed my muse specifically for the Ysbaddaden story. Stuff like medieval Arthurian romances, Appendix N books, 80s fantasy movies, old school heavy metal and prog rock, The Smiths, comic books like The Sandman series. These are all influences on my Merlin’s Last Magic world, so maybe I need to go back to those influences and draw more sustenance from them. If nothing else, it’ll be a change of pace and that might shake something loose in my imagination.

Here are some lines

January 19, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I’m in a stuck moment with my latest short story, “Things.” (This will hopefully not be its finished title, but it’s what I’ve got right now.)

When I get stuck, I sometimes try to write a bunch of different “Next lines” to see if any of them get me unstuck. Here are the ones I wrote the other day:

  1. The fighting pit smelled like wet straw and blood.
  2.  The first drink was always the hardest.
  3. Only the nosebleed seats were sold to the public. The rest were reserved.
  4. The blood inside his body burned hot; his muscles hardened like tempered steel.
  5. Jora hated the streets during the Thing.
  6.  “Odin, All-Father, grant me a good defeat.”

I’m not sure if I like any of these, or if they’re the right “next line” in the story, but I think a few of them could be the start of other scenes/sequences in the narrative. If nothing else, this exercise allows me to see various paths for the story to take. Even if I take none of these particular paths, the very fact that these paths *could* exist is helpful for me. It lets me know that the story is fluid, and that there isn’t necessarily a wrong choice, just different choices.

Random Tables

January 18, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been stuck in a mire with my fiction writing lately. I’m almost finished with a short story, “The Wind Masters,” and I’ve started another story called “Things” (that’s a working title), but my imagination has been pretty dry recently. It’s been hard to conjure images in my mind.

So I’ve decided to practice a new habit: Creativity Hour. I’m pretty sure this comes from James Scott Bell in his book on plot structure; the basic idea is that a writer should spend some dedicated time each week coming up with ideas.

A few months ago, I made a list of activities that could help me with generating ideas and images (I’m like C.S. Lewis in that way: I start with a picture in my mind), and then when it’s “Creativity Hour” time, I can pick an activity or two to do for about an hour.

I usually work in my writer’s notebook for these sessions. Sometimes I’ll listen to evocative music and write down the images that come to mind. Sometimes I’ll do a “Try Ten” and makes lists. Other times I’ll just free-write, or ask myself, “What do I want to write about right now?” I might also look at cool artwork and get ideas from the images.

Today I tried using random tables from some of my RPG books to generate ideas. The fantastic Dungeon Alphabet, the Monster Alphabet, issue #2 of the Wormskin zine, the Lazy DM’s Cheat Sheet. After about 30 minutes of messing around, I ended up on the psychedelics table in Wormskin, and then the ideas started to flow. I thought about scenes for my Norse-inspired story, “Things,” and started the seedlings of other stories and characters (one that I particularly like is a dragon with piercing white eyes without pupils).

Anyway, it was neat seeing how these random tables for role-playing games could be used to inspire my fiction. I’m not particularly interested in using my homebrew DCC RPG campaign as fodder for a novel or anything; instead, it’s more about the randomness of the tables being a nice way to challenge my imagination, improvising and mixing together disparate elements. The randomness opens up my imagination, makes me think: How can I fit this into my current work-in-progress? How can I use this to tell a *new* story? How can I combine these two seemingly unrelated things into something whole?

Random tables serve as a kind of tonic for the imagination. They can give a jolt of energy to an over-tired, dulled mind.

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