Brainstorming Week Six

[Yep. Still at the brainstorming stage. I had a business trip and then got a cold, okay? At least I'm being transparent about this...]

Some of my favorite stories feature scenarios that may have actually happened or may just be in the character's head, but more important than "was it real or wasn't it?" is what they experience and how that changes them: Calvin and Hobbes, The Chronicles of Narnia, Angels in America, The Life of Pi, and probably dozens of others that have shaped me in some way. Where the Wild Things Are. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lilo and Stitch, kinda.

That's the kind of story I want to write. Maybe not a literal journey into the "psyche" but a fantastic journey that is a metaphor of some kind for what our intrepid heroes struggle with. Did it happen or didn't it? Doesn't matter.

Writing advice from Ray Bradbury

Via Open Culture, some Friday afternoon inspirational viewing for you: A master class from the late Ray Bradbury.

I'd never seen Bradbury speak before, and I was struck by what an educator he was. He really wanted young people to benefit from what he had learned. Also he swore a lot. I have a new hero.

It turns out, too, that I've been unwittingly following his advice with this blog:

"The best hygiene for a beginning writer or an intermediate writer is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week, doesn't matter what the quality is to start, but at least you're practicing; and at the end of a year you have 52 short stories, and I defy to you write 52 bad ones. It can't be done."

Lots of great stuff in here—check it out!

Writerly bedrooms

Behold! From Apartment Therapy: 15 writers' bedrooms.

I'd love to have Virginia Woolf's or Ernest Hemingway's, but if past trends predict future results, mine will pretty much always look like Alexander Masters's.

(Minus the mounted alligator skin. Not that I wouldn't; it's just that no one's ever offered.)

Writers' block is a myth

Along the lines of what John August says about writers' block, some useful perspective from Working Writers:

Beginning a new story is difficult. The first three chapters are a notorious pain in the rear and many writers – professional or not – wrestle with these beasts more than any other portion of the book. This is completely natural and the only way through it is to write and keep on writing, even if you don’t like what you’re typing. There’s nothing you can mess up in the first draft that isn’t fixable in revisions and there will be revisions a plenty!

and also

Writing is mentally exhausting, take breaks. When my brain feels like goo and I fear it’ll run out my ears, I get away from my desk and do something to refresh. Walk in the garden, do the dishes or laundry. Whatever you decide to do make sure it’s relaxing, relatively brainless and not distracting like, say, chatting on the phone.

Check out the rest here.

Instructions for the proper care and feeding of writers

From David Farland's Daily Kick in the Pants:

When I was young and newly married, I used to sit down to write, and my wife would immediately think that “since you’re not doing anything, let’s have a conversation.” That’s a frequent problem for those who work from home. It might not look like I’m busy, but sometimes I really am busy. 

In order to write, I have to get into what I call my “writer’s trance,” a state where I’m vividly dreaming about my world (with my right brain) while composing and analyzing my prose (with my left brain). So I have to work with full mental capacity, and it can take about ½ of an hour to get into that state deeply enough to get some good work done. So, if I’m in the groove, don’t bother me. I need time to focus completely on my work.

I've found that having a discreet but limited amount of time to write is perfect. If I have all day, I will definitely not spend all day writing, even if that's what I've been craving for weeks, months. Instead, I'll read some things, watch some things, play some things. Whereas if I have only, say, an hour before I have to be somewhere, so long as there's no distraction I can get into the writerly headspace pretty efficiently. However:

Your writer is insane. Remember that your writer spends a great deal of time in a dream world, talking to imaginary people, visiting places that don’t exist. Shakespeare often lamented about his poor mental health, wondering if he was a genius or a nut. He was obviously both. I once heard a psychologist say that “most writers are provably borderline schizophrenics.” I know that I am. I’m a science fiction writer, and being spacy is a job hazard. 

...Getting back out of the writerly headspace can be a challenge. I tend to miss train stops and spill things on my pants. How about you?

Link to the rest here.

Week Six: Write a novella about the journey into the psyche

I remember this one very well.

Peter Corea's psychology class had a lot to do with the philosophy of the mind. Not just what we think, but why we think what we think. To give you a sampling of the things that struck a chord with me, here are a few lecture notes I took throughout the semester, all of them direct quotes from Dr. Corea:

"Just because we are able to describe something doesn't mean we are able to understand it."

"Change is the very essence of energy."

"Words are just symbols of reality."

"There is an unknown energy that is not space and time."

(Check out an older post I wrote for more about the late Dr. Corea.)

You may have gotten the impression by now that this was not your standard psychology class, and you would be correct. It was, however, structured like one, and so there was the matter of an end-of-term research project that we had to propose. I was champing at the bit to do something creative, and I landed on the idea you see above.

I wanted to investigate several areas of parapsychology (ESP, astral projection, etc.), reconcile them with some of the ideas Corea himself espoused, and compose a sci-fi novella about someone who abruptly discovers these abilities and what they mean for him/her.

He hated it. More to the point, he all but accused me of trying to repurpose some crap story I'd already written for some other teacher. (I was occasionally guilty of this later on in my academic career, but in this case I was entirely innocent.)

Anyway, I never did write it. If I had, I imagine it would have been somewhat dark and very melodramatic, for this was my disposition at the time. I still have this image of the nameless, faceless protagonist aflame with psychic energy as he rises above the SWAT team and National Guard members who all have automatic weapons trained on him. The boy is innocent, of course, but how else could this possibly end?

(So, okay, maybe not the best end-of-term paper for an aging professor.)

What to do with it now? Well, with apologies to the over-eager freshman year version of myself, Week Six is not going to be a novella-length work. The subject area still intrigues me, though. Ultimately I would love to write a series of sci-fi/fantasy/literary-minded books, but apart from an audio drama project I co-wrote with fellow Emerson alums once upon a time, I don't think I've ever actually dipped my toes in that water. 

So then—time to give it a shot!

The Unwritten Word: Now with 100% more social media!

Some housekeeping: I added in Facebook and Twitter widgets to each post so you can declare your love of me to all the internets. If you enjoy anything you find herein, please do share—these things are a creepily efficient way to spread the word. 

In deference to a friend's critique of the site's (lack of) navigability, you can now view posts directly related to each week's challenge via the Categories sidebar. And also, though it terrifies me to do so, each post now has a time and date stamp, so everyone will know forever when and for how long I fell off the face of the earth. Hopefully, with this increased accountability, it won't happen again.

(If they ever release a Mass Effect 4, though, all bets are off.)

Finally, I removed the Comments RSS feed and added in a feed that will give you just each week's completed challenges. Because I guess people are enjoying those or something...

Let me know what you think of the new and/or improved site!

Reflections on Week Five

[Read the completed challenge here!]

Because the readership of this blog is still so small, I'm tempted to breeze right past the fact that I posted Week Five's challenge in April and only posted the final piece now, June 17th. Future readers wouldn't even have to know that I was a crappy blogger for three entire months! Well, I'm going to fess up because I admire earnestness and honesty in the blogs of other people, and maybe my struggle with this will help others.

So. You may have noticed that the things I posted between then and now dealt mostly with writers' block, but that wasn't the whole reason this took so long.

The reason was this: I wasn't having fun.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess here too that the mind-blowing Mass Effect 3 played a not-insignificant role, but that was a symptom more than it was the disease, okay?]

I've been thinking a lot about writing in general and this blog specifically these past months, and through many conversations with like-minded creative folk I came around to the understanding that, in addition to using writing prompts I thought of in college, I have also been pressuring myself to write the kinds of things I felt I had to write in college. Namely: Literary Fiction, which I do enjoy reading but find torturous to write.

I talked a little bit about this while I was brainstorming Week Five's story—I wrote that I thought it would be "exhausting" to have a career writing meditative literary fiction. Whatever your feelings about genre fiction, I believe that the many authors of it are able to write often several books a year not because the writing is necessarily awful, but because they enjoy what they are writing and can't wait to see what happens next. Before I went to college for it, I felt this way about every creative thing I wrote. So what happened?

Well. This is my blog after all, and I should write whatever I wanna. So, after a false start about one paragraph long in which I did indeed try to continue the fraught yet meditative literary adventures of Week Three's nameless protagonist, I found myself on a bus with a notepad and a pen. I had, before this, been looking for a Father's Day card that would be suitable to give to my mother, who, after all, had to be both mother and father for my sister and me. So all of this was in the soup when I wrote the following, still thinking I was going to continue with my idea from Week Three:

What happened to the mother as best-parent stereotype? Nothing did. They have biology on their side. More interesting is how men have to study how to be a man. We've softened a bit, which is good, but now we have to find our role models.

Two things here: I regularly read Esquire magazine because it's the first real instruction manual I've found for being a man. Seriously, basic shit like the best way to shave, what to drink, and that you should use a face moisturizer with SPF 15. Who else will tell me this? Second, that male children of divorce must go in search of father figures is an idea that's surfaced a few times in comedian Marc Maron's WTF Podcast, which I listen to religiously.

So in jotting down just this, I realized that I wanted to write something in the style of Esquire (direct, earnest, often wry) and that I wanted to explore a little bit my own complex relationship with my father.

And there you have it. I wrote a paragraph or so on the bus, the rest of it over two hours the next morning, typed it up and picked at the words for two more hours tonight, and blammo. I'm terribly proud of it—it's in a style that I enjoy and suits me well. I love mixing earnestness with humor with punch-in-the-gut sentiment. The end result is a cross between something you would find in Esquire and Cheryl Strayed's Dear Sugar column. And, having posted it on Father's Day, the timing was perfect.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. Next up, Week Six!

Writer's block, according to John August

From John August, screenwriter (Big Fish, Corpse Bride, Go):

“Writer’s block” is an overused term. When a writer claims to be suffering from it, he is usually wrestling with some combination of three common problems: procrastination, perfectionism, and fear. “Writer’s block” is a romanticized catch-all that distracts from these real issues.

Screenwriters can use a range [of] techniques to get over the hump, from setting a kitchen timer, to breaking work down into manageable chunks, to writing in an order that makes sense for the way you work.

The rest is here, along with an episode of John August and Craig Mazin's Scriptnotes podcast.

I think this is probably true—I've suffered from all three of these problems for as long as I can remember. In my case, the perfectionism (and fear that whatever I create will not meet these impossible standards) leads to procrastination, which later becomes either a last-minute rush job that actually turns out okay (but burns me out) or abandonment. 

If only I could have overcome this during my college years instead of continuing to rely on deadlines (self imposed now, and not nearly as scary) to motivate me. But I am trying not to be too hard on myself. August's suggestions here are good, and I'm looking forward to listening to the podcast to see if he has any others. 

Rejected, blocked, published

[...A writing-centric prequel to Eat, Pray, Love?]

From a fantastic blog post about rejection and writer's block by Kamala Nair—author of the lyrical debut novel The Girl in the Garden (and a friend of mine):

“But I don’t want to ruin the magic of the childhood story,” I said.

“Forget about the magic,” she shot back. “Who do you want Rakhee to be as an adult?”

“I want her to be a strong woman who overcame adversity but is still struggling with her pain.”

“So put that in there,” my friend advised. “Just write ‘I am strong and struggling with pain.’ Meaning for the first few drafts just free-associate and write all the things that you want her to be in a very direct way…just accept that the first ten drafts will be shitty.”

Receiving that permission to write a stack of shitty drafts was freeing. I took my friend’s advice and within a matter of days, everything became perfectly clear, and I was able to write, the words gushing forth, without getting in my own way.

“I think you’ve got it this time,” my agent said when I sent her the final product. She was right. Within a few days, she found a loving home for my novel, and I was on my way.

Read more here.

As big an advocate I am of Anne Lamott and her inspirational yet addictive (I've read it probably five times) Bird by Bird, I still have a really hard time putting pen to paper and telling my critical mind to go screw. But clearly it works, and Kamala's eventual triumph is proof.