Category: writing (page 1 of 3)

feel like quitting? you’re probably about to hit your stride

April 6, 2018 / / 1 Comment

I was ready to call it quits yesterday. I was frustrated and beginning to wonder if the things in my head are worth putting out into the world.

Names and titles are things that are hard to write around when they don’t exist yet, and I’m terrible at coming up with titles. Especially the further in I get, I don’t like writing without names for my characters. I would at least like to have placeholder names until I come up with the right ones, because having “father” and “girl” all over the page, knowing that I’ll have to replace them all later, is distracting. The genericness of it bothers me. I like writing with a distinct person in mind, and without a name they aren’t as real as I need them to be.

This time around I’m going to need to be able to live with a title and character names for an entire series. I can have working titles for each individual book, but once I have the series name and put the first one out there, that’s it. That’s the name it’s gonna be.

I was feeling a bit stuck, so instead of wallowing in it, I reached out to those in a writers group on Facebook. The encouragement I received from a couple of the writers there was enough to get me out of my funk. I hadn’t shared that I was ready to quit, but they assured me that this is something I have to finish because there are people out there who are dying to read it. And they offered their help with this mountain of a molehill that is coming up with a title.

Sometimes it sounds incredibly stupid to say ideas out loud, and it gets embarrassing to keep sharing the unrealized things in your brain. But with each imperfect reiteration of the goal, my vision becomes a bit more streamlined and I can cut out what the book and series are not as much as I can communicate what they are and what I want them to be.

But for a long time it didn’t feel like anything I could do would be worth doing. I had to get outside myself. Not to seek validation, but to know if I was serving a need. It felt good to know that someone was rooting for this thing to come into existence even when I wasn’t.

Now that I have a renewed sense of “well maybe this thing does deserve to exist,” I need to be careful to keep perfectionism from getting in the way and keeping me from getting to the finish line. I know I will need a whole lot of help from an editor, so the sooner I get it into the hands of a professional the better. I have to believe that it will be good enough for people to want to read, good enough to be on shelves more broadly than a tiny, dark corner of Amazon’s self-published e-books. I need to believe that it’s worthy of spending money on professional editing and marketing and cover design. And I believe in hiring professionals to do what they’re good at (and I’m not).

So now this begs the question: am I prepared for many rounds of rejection? How am I going to keep going after hearing “no” over and over? Maybe, like my heroine, I have to bravely take steps beyond what I think is the border of my world. I have to take a leap of faith and not be afraid to disappear into the abyss. There is no abyss, there’s just trying again and again until one of those attempts sticks.

I’m excited about that process. A little scared, but mostly optimistic. But I can’t get ahead of myself. I have to do the hard work of getting it written first. I have to fall in love with that process first. I’m longing to get into that state of flow, when the rhythm of the words takes over and my fingers trip trying to keep up with my brain. When I’ve gotten far enough into doing the work that I hit that point that I imagine is like a runner’s high, knowing I’ve plugged away enough to wear a groove in the process, leaving resistance in the dust and finding myself well and truly in my element.

That flow is always after the point that you’re ready to quit. You have to push through the most daunting part.

I remember that feeling. It hasn’t happened in a long time, but I know what it feels like. And it is sublime. There’s nothing like it. It’s that feeling of knowing that what you’re doing is what you’re born to do, that in spite of the rough road to that pocket of joy in the doing, that you have truly found your medium.

I’m neither a runner nor a mother, but I imagine it’s also a bit like childbirth. You carry this thing with you for months, not really knowing what it will turn out to be. Then you push through the labor, wondering if you’ll ever get through it. You have doubts all along the way about your abilities. But then you’ve pushed through the toughest part, and you are in love. You get a rush of endorphins and it brings you joy like you cannot begin to describe, a joy that makes you forget how hard the struggle was. A joy that makes it all worth it and makes you willing and able to do it all over again.

That’s how I know I love writing. As much as I doubt my abilities and fail at putting words to the page, I can’t imagine not writing.

I have to remember to write what I would want to read. I think about that when I’m watching a movie or trailer or TV show: “I wish it went like this instead.” I often imagine where I think the story will go or what decisions the characters will make. (“Downsizing,” for example, was an entirely different story than I expected. It wasn’t what the trailer presented at all. The high concept of the story wasn’t exploited in the tone that was advertised. It became a hugely character driven, humanitarian story about a Vietnamese activist. She was a character I fell in love with, but it was a direction I could not have imagined the story taking.) A fun exercise is to watch the beginning of a show or film that I haven’t seen before and know little about, and write the rest of the story. Here’s the problem presented, now what are the characters going to do about it?

So I must ask, how am I beginning my story? We’re in the middle of things. I don’t need to explain how we got there. There can be backstory later, but I don’t have to (and shouldn’t) explain everything about how the world we find ourselves in got the way it is. We watched “A Quiet Place” last night. There’s no explanation of what the creatures are or how they got there. We’re just in it with this family, dealing with the problems currently at hand.

Most good stories don’t explain too much. The audience just needs to feel like they’re in a world they can believe to be real for as long as they’re in it, and to care about the characters making the decisions. And the problem needs to be clear, compelling, and urgent. And they need to know in the first ten minutes what the problem is and what’s at stake. It needs to be love at first sight: they need to know at the introduction that these are people and a world they want to get to know better. They need a reason to be invested. They need a reason to care. Most stories that don’t work for me haven’t given me enough of a reason to care about the characters. The stakes may be very high (the survival of the human race, for example), but if I’m not crying when another character is crying, or if their struggle seems inconsequential, I’m not invested in their journey.

I will also say that it’s difficult creating a dystopian world when reality isn’t that much less crazy. The world I’m attempting to create is one in which the written word no longer exists. This feels a bit like creating a hell in which I have to put people I care about and make them live in it. Anything my imagination can come up with is really not that fantastic by comparison anymore. Good literature reflects truths about the climate in which it exists, though. I guess that’s the silver lining.

And the biggest silver lining of all in writing is that you can create any world you want. Unlike reality, you can take that bonkers situation and create your desired outcome. You wield absolute power with the written word, and that is both thrilling and daunting. The trick is to not let that freak you out and to enjoy the act of creation. If the creation of it is exciting enough to keep you going, if you’re writing something that you would want to read, then there’s hope that someone else will, too.  So don’t quit. Push through another mile, because the flow state on the other side of that struggle is so worth it. You might be about to hit your stride.

publicly recommitting to the muse

November 1, 2017 / / 0 Comments

It’s that time again–when the dog days of summer have finally ended and you want to put on some socks and sit at your computer with a nice cup of hot tea. I’m talking about National Novel Writing Month! In November, many writers spur each other on to complete a novel in thirty days with local and virtual write-ins and events. I have participated two other times, but have yet to come out the other side with an honest-to-goodness complete novel, or even one I cared to keep working on beyond November 30th. This year I have a much more solid plan for the first in a series of young adult novels that I’m very excited to write.

My long-term plan, in a nutshell, is to create books and book-related products for children and parents who want more from their children’s education so they can:

  • foster a love of reading,
  • learn not to be afraid of big ideas,
  • think critically, and
  • dive deeper into important primary texts.

This introductory novel is the first of many things to come within that mission. In each subsequent book in this series, our heroine will resurrect a great thinker from history who will help her piece together truths about how to overcome tyranny, what makes a just society, how to be an ideal citizen of the world, and how to start rebuilding the world she lives in.

Here’s a brief synopsis of what I’ll be working on for NaNoWriMo:

A young girl lives in a police state in which books no longer exist. Her parents were the last of a generation of people who knew how to farm the traditional way, with soil and seeds. And they were the last of the literates. They secretly passed down to their daughter the knowledge of every book they could remember by telling stories connected to animal characters that they had crocheted.

Her mom was killed in the resistance, and her dad tries to teach the girl everything he knows before the year’s end, before they’re caught, and before his daughter starts to remember that he was killed in the resistance, too.

You see, the little girl has the power to resurrect one person from the dead for one year. She had wished for them to come back, but didn’t know her own gift. Now she must make the most of her power. Now that her parents are truly gone, who can she bring back? Who can guide her? Who can help bring about the change her world desperately needs?

It sounds cheezy to condense it down like that, but there’s a whole world left to unpack. I’m excited to see what unfolds when I commit to writing an average of 1,660 words per day over the next thirty days. In the words of Kevin McCallister in Home Alone, “This is it. Don’t get scared now.”

baby steps

September 14, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Slow and steady wins the race. Action beats inaction. Taking small steps is so much more important than thinking about big steps. Sometimes I have to remind myself that tiny positive things add up and that’s so much better than stressing about making big progress (which adds up in a negative way).

I think of it like driving veeeerrrry slowly in your car: eventually you’ll get further than just sitting there revving the engine and wasting gasoline.

I have a huge project ahead of me, and it’s daunting. It’s so big that sometimes it’s paralyzing. But I know that I need to chip away at it a little bit at a time.

So I am making a bit of a pivot in the content of this blog, and I want you to know what you can expect in the future. I will still be writing about creative resistance, but it will be more along the lines of what I’m specifically encountering in my current creative projects.

First of all, if you aren’t familiar with the idea of overlapping (working a day job for financial stability while you work on what you’re passionate about on the side until it can support you), I highly recommend the book Overlap by Sean McCabe.

My passion is to make big ideas accessible to young people. I believe that the ability to think critically is one of the greatest gifts we can bestow on future generations. I’m writing and illustrating a series of young adult and children’s books making the ideas of the Great Books (Plato, Dante, Augustine, et al) super digestible. I want to normalize what used to be a standard education but has unfortunately become very rare. Everyone is capable of learning big things and no one should be scared or ashamed to be exposed to “smart people things.”

I want to get kids excited about reading through book related products, as well. Hand-lettered bookmarks, handmade book bags, and crocheted animal plushie characters that introduce kids great literary characters and their authors.

I’m making myself publicly accountable for making this vision a reality, and documenting the process. I invite you to follow along, to sign up for updates on the book release, to join the conversation in whatever way you’d like and ask questions about what makes actually doing creative things so dang hard sometimes.

It will be messy. Most things are before you get to the finished product. And that’s okay, because perfect is an illusion that keeps you from doing the important, messy things. Thanks to those who have stuck with me thus far, and thank you/welcome to those who are newly jumping in.

I invite you to make messes and take baby steps with me. 🙂

your inner editor

January 12, 2017 / / 2 Comments

A favorite exercise of those who want to get over the mental block of writing and just get words on the page is to pretend there is no backspace key on your keyboard. The goal is to just write like you should, to type as you’re thinking and get into a flow state to get lots of words on the page. You’ll write much faster by turning off your inner editor. Just keep typing.

For those like myself who just can’t help but use that backspace key, there are apps that completely eliminate that temptation:

  • First, there’s nope.press. Any time you try to use the backspace key, you’ll be greeted by an audible “nope” instead.
  • If you need a little more incentive to keep getting those words on the page, “the most dangerous writing app” takes it a step further by deleting your work if you don’t keep typing.
  • Then there’s write or die. This is for the truly masochistic writer. Not only will it delete your progress if you don’t keep going, but it’s as evil as you want to make it beyond that. You set a timer and a word count goal. Then it’s up to you if you want a pleasant auditory or visual reward for continuing to type (such as nature sounds or kittens in the background), or an unpleasant consequence (like spiders crawling across your screen).

It’s such an ingrained habit to use the backspace key. I hate seeing mistakes on the page because I hate the idea of having to go back later to fix them. That’s me in a nutshell: I’d rather get unpleasant tasks out of the way right freaking now so I don’t have to remember to do them later. But perhaps I’m sabotaging myself more than I realize with this kind of mindset.

I find that if I write without a backspace key, I write slower so as to avoid mistakes. That defeats the point of the exercise. I’m supposed to turn off my inner editor. Mistakes aren’t the enemy. Failing to get words on the page is the enemy. Mistakes are a part of practice.

Your internal editor can disguise itself as your friend but really be a form of resistance that can go unnoticed for years. I’m realizing now for the first time that that inner editor goes deeper than with writing. I want to fix things as they arise, which may be taking time from what I really need to be focusing on. I need to get the bulk of the work done first, to get in the flow of doing it to get my best work out. You get your best work out on the first try when your thoughts are raw, not by editing them as they come out. Get out the good work onto the page as it exists in your mind now, in its most purest, freshest form. You can fix it up later. The important thing is to preserve the original thoughts. If you compile all of the time that you would have used backspacing or erasing or otherwise fixing little mistakes along the way (or doing things peripheral to, but ultimately distracting from, the task at hand), it will probably add up to a lot more time than you would like to admit.

There may be thoughts in your head that don’t get a chance to make it onto the page because you focused your attention to editing or something else, to something like writing down another idea as it pops into your head. Now your focus is on your to-do list rather than the subject you were initially writing about. Now you’ve broken your momentum. There were thoughts in your head about the subject you had started a flow of writing on, but you broke that stream of consciousness and aborted something that might have turned into a good bit of writing.

Just keep going. That is the important thing. You did the hard work of showing up, now you have to do the hard work of keeping solid focus and finding your flow state. You’ve sat down to do the work, you’ve eliminated distractions, now the really hard part is undoing that thing that has become such a habit in your creative life and every other part of your life. You have to turn off the part that wants to “fix it now.” If you’re a perfectionist like me, this is a deep-seated habit. But your work with will thank you for it if you just let yourself get into that flow state. Dive into the work distraction-free, without the pressure to be perfect, and you’ll be surprised what comes out of you. You could have pages and pages that would have remained in your head if you were editing along the way. You could make something much more beautiful than your editing hands normally allow if you can force yourself to turn off your editor brain, to let your brain go where it wants to go, unencumbered by the pursuit of perfection. Perfection is not the goal. Perfection is the enemy of done. Ge get the important work done. Edit later. So what if you waste a canvas? It’s a first draft of an idea. You can paint it again better if you want to. The important thing was that you tried it on the page. You tried it on the canvas. You brought it into existence. There is absolutely nothing wasted if you write a super messy first draft. You do, however, risk wasting an awful lot if you edit as you go and don’t get all of the gems in your mind onto the page.

I imagine someone panning for gold. You can’t find all the gold out there. Know that going in. But if you want to find the quality gold, you don’t walk along the river bank hoping to find one perfect nugget of gold. You grab a ton of sand and sift through it. You take a pan full of dirt and let the current take it. You let the river do the work until you’re left with lots of little bits of gold to sift through later. Then you compile all those tiny flecks into something valuable. But you can’t find the flecks unless you sift through the sand, and you’ll never see them if your only goal is to find perfectly formed nuggets on the bank.

Similarly, if wheat harvesters walked through the field and gathered individual grains, at the end of the day they will not have even gathered enough usable grain to feed themselves. Instead, they glean whole stalks at a time. Later, they separate out the usable grain by allowing the wind to blow away the unusable chaff.

First you think bigger and just go forward. Go with the flow without worrying about precision. Later, you can pick and choose what you want use and what you want to throw away. You are a gleaner and a gold miner, but only if you don’t waste your time expecting a perfect end product to fall in your lap. It’s important to get the crud out of the way to uncover the good stuff. Send your inner editor on vacation so you can just WRITE WRITE WRITE (or draw, or paint, or whatever it is you’re passionate about doing). That flow state is where you want to be.

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