Writers Are Known For Their Writing

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I grew up with a man that can do anything. When I was little he was a bus mechanic, I got a little older and he started building houses, older still and he went back to college to become a science teacher. My dad knows way too much about politics, dietary health, and exercise. When other dads were buying their first computers my dad was bringing home the components so that he could build his.  

That same can do attitude has haunted me through much of my life. There's never been something that someone else can do that I looked at and didn't think, “Anything you can do I can do better.” Some might call that conceit, but I think it's a great attitude to have in life, just so long as you don't let it go to your head.

I honestly believe that anyone can do anything they put their minds to. It's not that I think I'm amazing, it's that I really don't think that there is much that separates two people in what they do aside from the time that they've spent working on it. And there in lies our problem. Time.

You see, each one of these new tasks that I take on requires an investment in time. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not the time spent learning something new would be better spent furthering progress in something you already know. Concert pianists don't learn their trade, get some diploma, and then stop learning and practicing.

If you want to be the best at something, or even noteworthy, you have to dedicate yourself to it. There is no special Jack-Of-All-Trades award presented every year. Thomas Jefferson might have been a great politician, architect, and thinker, but he only became recognized for the second two because of his dedication to the first.

So as you're getting ready to code and design your own website and blog, then quickly pick up Photo Shop so that you can design your book cover, and oh, while you're at it become a master at digital photography so that you can shoot all of your own photos, try to figure out how much of that time might be better spent on honing the craft of writing. You know, that thing on which all the others hinge upon.

If you have the money, it might be a wiser decision to find someone who has chosen one of those aforementioned fields and made it their own. Especially when it comes to marketing. Take it from a graphic designer turned carpenter turned writer turned. .  . okay, so I don't practice what a I preach. Sue me. But wait till after I take the Bar. (Kidding)  

Pitfalls Of Putting Yourself Into Your Characters

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Write what you know. Right? And what could you possibly know better, than yourself? Probably a lot of things. You see, I don’t think we really know ourselves as well as we think. We have issues and hang-ups that we haven’t even begun to discover yet. They are what holds us back, ties us down, and clouds our minds. And I don’t think anyone lets those things carry on knowingly. 

But here’s the thing, even when we don’t think we’re writing about ourselves, we are. And when we do so unknowingly, the writing gets harder. Sure, your character is more interesting because they’re actually dealing with real issues, but you have to be willing to deal with those issues yourself before you can get your character to.

Case in point: Spark, the infamous never finished but always mentioned short story. I finally realized why I’m having such a hard time moving forward with it and putting it to bed. I don’t have the issues that I had when I started it. Sounds pompous, right? Hear me out.

Spark came to me one night as I crept into bed after a long day’s work. I snuggled up to my wife, placed my hand on her belly and tried to feel my son dreaming away inside her. Like most writers, I had a dream of my own. That dream led to Spark, where a young man, too afraid of the commitment, challenges, and responsibilities of having a child causes the death of his unborn daughter. The story is his quest for retribution.

Here I am over a year and a half later working on a revision to the ending and I can’t think like that frightened father-to-be anymore. Not only am I Dad, I’m Stay-At-Home-Dad. I spend more time with my son than most moms get these days, let alone dads. And you can call me conceited on this one if you want, but I’m a damn good dad. At this very moment I’m watching a baby monitor while my boy sleeps and though he’s three rooms away, were he to pop up and make a move for the edge of the bed, I’d be there before he could fall. (LOL, he must have heard me thinking because he just woke up. Don’t worry, he’s fine, just needed to know I was nearby and went back to sleep.)

I’ll eventually be able to put myself into that frame of mind and playact what it was like, but I fear that it won’t be as powerful. But that's what's holding me back, fearing that I won't speak truth to the character any longer.  

And what about the other instance, the one where you don’t even realize you’re writing about yourself? You know your character’s problems, what holds them back, what they have to deal with, but you can’t write it. It could be that one of the reasons you can’t deal with your character’s issues is because yours and theirs are one in the same.

Have you considered that? Have you looked at your character’s flaws and considered that they might be your own? Are you ready to deal with those flaws in your own life so that you can write your story? Maybe that’s not you, but it is definitely something to consider.

 

Behaviour & Communication:
How To Be The Best Dad In The Galaxy

One last thing. A little patting myself on the back. This marks my 100th post and come Friday this will be my 15th straight week without missing a post. So yay me. I shall celebrate by poring cement, preparing dinner, washing clothes, washing dishes, and writing another blog post. :) 

Novel in a Day

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My first drawings as a child were of zombies, but this was not by choice. I started out drawing the typical disproportionate to heads, limbs of varied length, each character with the same facial expression, eyes hollow and soulless. I did this because I didn't how to draw, not because I liked zombies. I moved to tracing for a while, mapping my pencil over the lines of professionals until I could eventually draw by sight, but still the lines I drew were not my own, they were second rate copies of someone else's imagination.  

I never inked or colored any of my drawings. I never did anything more with them because I was afraid of ruining them. Each one I signed and saved for fear that I would never be able to draw another picture of equal quality again.

I honestly don't know what I was so afraid of. My young mind could not grasp the concept that I was getting better. Yesterday's work might have been better than today's but last month's wasn't. So I stayed trapped at the same level of artistic ability because I refused to take chances.

One of my problems was not having a mentor. I looked at art and assumed that it came out just as I saw it. I thought this all the way up until art school, and even then I didn't really get it. Slowly, as I watched and learned. I started to realize things about these godlike figures and their ability to produce art that made me look like a hack; they were hacks too.

I'd been out of art school for about five years when this finally dawned on me. I was watching videos on YouTube of comic artists working at their craft. All around them were reference drawings. Facial expressions, hands, bodies from extreme points of view. These guys didn't sit down and have excellence spill from their pens. They brainstormed, sketched, narrowed their ideas down, then drew from reference materials. When they did produce a fantastic sketch on a whim it was of a character that they'd drawn a thousand times before in a position they'd drawn ten thousand times.

Every artist has reference material. If they get a character into a position that they can't remember how to draw, they look it up. When I'd get to that same point I'd throw up my hands in defeat and admit to myself that I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't an artist, I didn't know how to draw. I could mimic someone else's work, but couldn't create my own.  

Those videos helped me to realize that I was holding myself back with my own perception of how art was created. And just the other day I was watching the video included in this post. I watched how the artist repositioned the nose, drew and erased lines, added and tweaked, took away. I related it to my own writing, how I'll write out a story in one go, likened to a sketch, then have to go back and tweak it, polish it off. I'll jump around, reworking the beginning, then hopping to someplace just after the middle.

I think all artists have a tendency to forget this, especially writers. Writers can't look back over a sketchbook and say unequivocally that what we produced today is better than what came before it. We can't sit down and watch a video of another writer's process in hyper speed. We don't go to classes with other artists, set up our easels and write out stories that everyone around us can see taking shape as we go, with an instructor walking around the class and whispering over our shoulder compliments and suggestions.

I think that we too often assume that the words have to come out perfectly. If we can't achieve beauty in a single stroke then it's not art. If anything, I've found that art is not so much an expression of perfection, it's an experiment in patience and perseverance. It's hanging in there to make all the little corrections and changes necessary to make the end product look effortless. It has to do with that notion of not actually being an expert but making it look like you are. Remember this as you pull out something you shoved into a desk drawer long ago. We all have those stories, stories that we were so enthralled with until we realized that what we'd created was crap.

Unlike an oil painting that dries and can't be reworked after a certain point, our stories can always have life breathed back into them. We can always come back to those soulless eyes once we've learned how to draw them, once we've found reference material to pattern them after. So allow yourself to sketch and experiment and remember that writing is an experiment in patience and perseverance.

Images: 1) Zombie Tramp by toxiccandie, 2) terrible sight drawing done when I was 13, 3) Quick sketches I did during a literary criticism class back around 2002, I was not nearly as focused as the young lady I sketched :).

Writer Satisfaction and Self Sabotage

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Satisfaction is another way of saying, “I quit.” Or at least that’s what I’m going to be telling myself from here on out. 

The thought occurred to me as I watched the analytics for the blog climb. More and more people are making their way here, far more than I honestly anticipated. Sure, I started the blog with the idea that it would be a way to reach out to others and make connections in the world of writing, but deep down I expected it to be a failure like so many other projects I’ve half started.

In fact, along the way I’ve tried to sabotage myself by saying things like “Oh, well those are just people I know who are nice enough to stop by.” Or, “Mom must have found a way to drive up page views.” And then there’s the, “Well those people aren’t really hanging around, they stop in for a second, think it’s a bunch of rubbish, and then leave.” But the numbers keep going up, and I’m finding fewer and fewer ways to dismiss them, (and trust me, I’ve tried).

So I went and found a new way to try and sabotage myself. “The blog is doing so well, why do I really need to keep worrying about getting my work published? It’s such a hassle. Why not be satisfied with what I’ve already accomplished?”

I stopped myself. Realized what I was doing. I was trying to get out of taking a chance, to turn something else into a non starter. After all, as an old soccer shirt of mine once said, “You can’t score if you don’t shoot.” And if you score, well, people might expect you to score again. Or what if you don’t score the next time? What will they say? It was just a hat trick. Nothing really special about that guy.

Then again, if we never shoot, never score, never try, we can never be told that we are not great. We can always fall back on, “Well, I could have gone places if it hadn’t of been for that knee injury.” And you know what, no one can say, “No you wouldn’t have.” And therein lies the beauty of never really trying.

“If I just wouldn’t have waited to the last minute to do that paper, it would have been great.”

“If I would have left on time for that interview I would have landed that job.”

“If I just would have gotten enough sleep the night before I could have won that race.”

Admittedly, being satisfied is a good thing. It brings a great deal of peace to our lives. We just have to be careful with what we decide to be satisfied with, or more aptly, why we choose to be satisfied. If you decided to be satisfied with the amount of money you earn because frankly the extra hours to make more would take you away from your family, I’d say that’s a good reason.

It’s hard to believe, but sometimes small successes stand in the way of the big ones. My small success senior year of high school was breaking the school record for the 400 yard dash. I grew cocky. Let my grades slip, dropped a class that I thought was too easy for me and then mid way through track season found myself cut from the team because of poor grades. I was able to get my physics teacher to change my grade for me after a few weeks of dedication to his class and being outright pathetic in everyone’s presence. But by the time I got back on the track I was weeks behind in training. The night before league I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning working on a Spanish presentation that I should have done earlier in the week.

The next day I broke the school record again. It was the fastest I had ever run. But it wasn’t fast enough. To this day I still hold the school record for the 400, but that doesn’t get your name on the gym wall, winning at league does. Not sabotaging yourself so that you have excuses gets your name on the wall.

Maybe there was some part of me that thought that having an excuse would help. Honestly, it doesn’t. At the time it did. Oh the excuses I made: “the other runner was a year older than me because he was held back,” “I heard they oxygenate their blood before they run,” “I didn’t get enough sleep,” “I didn’t get to train as much.” While those excuses helped at the time, looking back on it, I see it for what it was, an embarrassment.

I can even remember being disgusted with the other runner for not showing up at subsections a week later as the top two spots always do. Third place got to run in his stead. First place didn’t show because he was sleeping off a hangover that he earned from a wild night of partying at their Jumping Frog Jubilee the night before. Maybe he was sabotaging himself too. Who knows. What I do know is this, he already proved what he needed to, I didn’t.

I’ll never know what would have happened that day if I’d given it my all, if I’d come prepared. And frankly, that hurts more than the losing, because you know what, I lost anyway. Better to lose but know that you gave it your all than to always have to wonder about “what if.”  

So I ask, are you standing in your own way? Are you doing things in your own life that amount to self sabotage? If so, be wary of it. Because in the end, we all want our names on the wall but we have to write them there ourselves.

The Great Pretender: Or dealing with Self Doubt

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I’m involved in a new project at home. I’m building a garage onto the house. Last week in 104 degrees of wonderfulness, I sweated my way through framing up the longest wall. My wife was very impressed, to which I responded, “Eh, it’s okay.”

You see I know what I did wrong, and that it took me longer than it would have taken a professional. Those things eat at me. And yet, to my wife, step mother, and others not involved in the trade, the job looks just fine.

During a moment of quiet reflection while up on a ladder a few days later, I thought about that and about something an old friend of mine once said, “You don’t actually have to know what you’re doing, you just have to make it look like you know what you’re doing.”

I wonder if sometimes we’re a little too hard on ourselves as writers, artists, and just people in general. Maybe we bottle things up, don’t try as hard or put ourselves out there on the line because we know what right is supposed to look like and what we’re producing just isn’t it. But for all anyone else knows, we’re professionals.

So there’s your thought for the day. Are you being a little too critical when it comes to your writing or other areas in your life? Would people notice the imperfections if you weren’t constantly pointing them out? And are you more likely to let a minor mistake slide when a “professional” makes it? If so, let your own mistakes slide. Learn from them, but don’t let them hold you back. 

Hitting Bottom

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What? Monday funny? Sorry, you'll have to scroll down for that. Had you tuned in yesterday you'd know why. For shame.

There’s some religious idea about reincarnation and choice. I heard it from my dad many years ago when he was on his spiritual kick. The idea was that people continue down the same path until such time as they hit rock bottom and realize that the only place left to go is up.

This can be seen in drug rehab, political revolutions, weight loss, just about every bad or destructive trait seems to have a breaking point. The same can be said for writing. I suppose this blog could be considered my own rehab journal with regards to writing. Anyone paying attention can tell when I fall off the wagon. Posts grow sparse. Those little word count bars to the right don’t move. I make no references to a recent revelation attained while writing.

For me, bottom is realizing that I’m running out of time. Don’t worry; I don’t have a terminal illness or anything. As some of you know, I’ve been a stay at home dad for the last nine or so months. I love it, who wouldn’t, but with all of the wonderful budget cuts in California I could be back in the work force sooner than expected. That’s a worst case scenario but one that I’ve had in the back of my mind as of late.

In the doomsday scenario, there are two options that I see played out by the ghost of finance future. The first finds me doing any number of my past jobs, sign making, design, construction, waiting tables, whatever the job market will provide. Along with that comes a touch of misery and dreaming of “what if.” The second option has me sitting at home in front of my computer or perhaps at a café somewhere with my laptop writing away.

Yeah, that’s it, just writing. “But how does that solve the financial problem? You’re just going to bet it all on a pipe dream?”

That’s the thing, I can’t bet on pipe dreams in this scenario. There are hungry mouths to be fed, bills to be paid. But in the first option I ended up there because I squandered the time that I have right now. In the second option I capitalized on my free time, got into the world of writing in all of its veins, not just escapism. By the time doomsday arrived, I simply needed to ramp up the work I was already doing.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m projecting rock bottom. The real bottom would be waking up at 3:30 every morning to be at the shop by 4:00 so that we could load up the work truck and be on the road by 4:30, my head leaning against a cold window as my coworker drove us to our destination some two to three hours away (maybe more) slipping in and out of sleep as we drove by city after city, cutting off car after car until finally we arrived, groggy and cranky and ready to start the day’s work of “skilled” manual labor, “supers” harping about things out of our control, a boss calling because he’s staring at his computer screen that has the bottom line blazing in red, and us breaking ourselves, not for the super or our boss or even because we’re good workers that try not to drain the clock, but because we just want to be done and gone, in hopes that we can on the road in another eight to ten hours at which point I’d drive, eyes red and waning while my coworker slept only to get home too tired to do anything, with another day of the same crap doing something else in a different city, waiting for me hours before the horizon, and the best part would be that I’d never know what was next because there is no schedule, no vacations, no warning, no planning, not for us anyway, “Next week you guys will be staying in Red Bluff,” “Where’s Red Bluff?” “About four hours away. You’re putting up tack wall.” “I hate tack wall.” “Well you’ll be there for two weeks.” “What?” “It’s the whole school. We’ve rented you a room in a crumby motel.” “But my wife is eight months pregnant.” “You’ll be home on the weekend. Sorry.” “Me too.”

A picture of what our hotel looked like (in the 70's), and

what they're still using as a promotion.

What the hotel actually looks like care of Google Maps. Our rooms

were the ones straight ahead on the bottom floor of that two story

building in the back. The crackheads that lived there were in the

adjacent building behind the country diner to the left. Ah, memories.

That just gave me the chills. But that’s what I need to think about the next time I say to myself, “I can look at markets for stories later, Facebook is calling my name.” That’s what we all need to do.

So if you haven’t hit rock bottom yet, imagine it. You are a writer after all. If writing is something that you really want to do, then you have to figure out how to make money at it. More importantly, you have to figure out how to keep yourself on task. There’s no boss poking his greasy head in, beady little eyes filled with dollar signs scrutinizing your productivity. There’s just you. And if you let yourself take vacations whenever you want, then the business fails and everyone gets a pink slip. But that pink slip might lead to a crumby motel in Red Bluff, a sore back, sleep deprivation, and an aching heart.

And on that uplifting note! That’s today’s exercise, write your doomsday and post it in the comments, or post it on your blog if you have one and post a link to it down in the comments so that we can all share in a collective catharsis of sorts.

Perfectionistas

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Today’s writerly thought comes straight from my own self limiting behaviors: Perfectionism. This is how it works,

“I’ve really got to get the rewrite done on this story but the only time that I have available to work on it is late at night when everyone is asleep. Then, just when I start to write, the baby wakes up and needs to be rocked back to sleep. When I finally get back to the computer I’ve managed to lull myself into a state of near sleep as well. The words don’t flow the way I want them to, they don’t sing, they’re not perfect. I’ll just see what’s up on FaceBook, and MySpace, and in G-Mail, … and maybe I’ll catch that last episode of ‘Legend of the Seeker,’ and now I’ve got an hour before bed and what can I really get done in an hour that will come out good? I should just put off writing until tomorrow. Hopefully life will be ideal then.”

Of course, it doesn’t stop there; it crops up in just about everything. Creating a website, drawing, working in the vegetable garden, or even putting together the blog finds me fighting my own inner critic to the point where I often don’t get things done. Or at least, that’s the way it was. (Keeping fingers crossed).

You see, perfectionism is great because what it allows you to do is say, “I won’t do anything unless I can put forward my best effort.” So when you don’t have the time, energy, money, materials or any other of a long list of limiters, you allow yourself to not do anything at all. By not doing anything you always have the chance to say, “I could be great, but because I refuse to try, you can’t say that I don’t have that potential.” It’s a sort of catch twenty-two. In reality, the reason we perfectionists don’t try is because we are afraid both of failure and also of success.

Yes, I said success. Has to do with that whole lowered expectations thing. If you succeed and do a good job, people might expect more out of you. And what if you can’t deliver? What if you can’t string the right words together next time? What will they say?

I think that a lot of writers are like this. We want everything to be perfect, so we wait and wait and wait, and never get anything done. We outline things to death, we start first draft after first draft, or edit over and over, never submitting, never finishing, and why? Because we’re afraid.

Today, I invite you to face your fears with me and put aside the quest for perfection. Allow yourself to write towards something. I’m starting by putting up this far from perfect post. What are you going to work on?

Your Own Worst Enemy

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Here is what will hopefully be a quick but helpful post. To begin, I’m finally back in my office. Albeit, I’m battling the tiny bloodsuckers that the cats left behind when I moved them out to their “sanctuary”, but it’s a battle that I am slowly winning. It’s nice to be able to retreat into my cave again, rather than sit in the kitchen.

I’ve added a bit of ceremony to my writing as well. I went out and bought some nice candle holders, one in the shape of a Japanese styled lantern and the other an interesting vine thingy. When it’s time to write, all the lights go out, I turn my music on over the stereo, and light my candles. Other than the constant feeling of having fleas crawling on you even when they’re not there, and you’ve vacuumed the room four times that day alone, it’s quite the nice bit of ambiance.

The next change that I’ve made is a much more personal one. I recently turned thirty-one. While I haven’t had any crisis related to it, it has given me chance for pause. That pause led me to pick up a book that is in desperate need of finishing. A receipt from Quizno’s that I used as a bookmark during my first attempt at reading it dates back to August 8 of 2005.

Now, here comes the personal part, it’s a self help book, Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Under-Achievment. There is a part of me that doesn’t want to share this with anyone who might happen upon it, but the entire purpose of this blog is to share the ups and downs of writing, ALL of the process in hopes of helping others with their own pitfalls. In order to do that there has to be full disclosure on my part.

So here you go, I have an amazing amount of talent that I squander. That might come across as a bit conceded, but I can promise you that it’s not intended to be. A great many people have talent that they squander. And if you really think about it that might be why we are all stuck on revisions that never get done, or wade through excuses as to why we can’t do what we want. We have the talent, we know that we do, but we find reasons to avoid it.

Back when I first got the book I made great strides to bettering myself. I made it most of the way through the book with much diligence, but somewhere along the way I puttered out. I had too much going on and decided that the author would much rather I capitalize on what was presented before me rather than put it off while using the book as an excuse. Well, that eventually led to a relapse of my self-limiting behaviors. Here I am, four years later, a bit better off than I was before but still not realizing my potential.

I’m back to reading from the book everyday again and working through its lessons. I’m pretty well convinced at this point that it’s these self-limiting behaviors (SLB) that are keeping me from completing all that I should. I also see some of my own SLB’s in those I know. That’s why I’m sharing this with you.

See if any of these types sound familiar:

• Floater/Coasters: Floaters are aware of their capacities, see opportunities, and often are even pursued by others, but they rarely act on their possibilities. Some are temperamentally hesitant and slow to join in, while others can appear to be emotionally withdrawn or indolent and lacking in ambition. But the chief characteristics of floater/coasters are their passivity or lack of initiative and their disengagement.
  
• Delayers: Delayers make postponing major decisions and commitments their central life theme. Rather than avoiding actions with long term consequences, delayers indiscriminately delay all choices and commitments, great and small. Their lives come to revolve around actions they prefer to put off until later, so that they procrastinate, miss deadlines, and accumulate stacks of things they have not dispatched.
  
• Stop-shorts: Stop-shorts are aware of their abilities, entertain ambitions, and make significant progress, but firmly hold back from fully reaching their goals. Their arrested progress is often related to a fear of completing a life step or of taking on some role or responsibility that will be the outcome of fully realizing an aim toward which they have long striven.
  
• Self-Doubters/Self-Attackers: Self-doubters/self-attackers block their success by holding high standards they feel they can never possibly meet and for which they therefore seldom strive. But rather than rationalizing or blaming others for their lack of effort, they selectively attend to and mercilessly emphasize their own faults and failings to such an extent that they do not appreciate what they do accomplish. They are actually highly ambitious, but because they cannot tolerate anything but an idealized kind of perfection, they do not allow them-selves to enjoy partial success, thus reducing their incentives to try.
  

Whew! And that’s just some of the styles with descriptions lifted verbatim from the book. Sound like someone you know? Maybe your writer’s block isn’t just words bunching together in the traffic jam of your creativity. Maybe it’s actually you getting in your own way so that you can’t succeed. I think that is what my current problem is, and I for one intend to fix it.

I’ve added a new section to the right of the blog where I can place books that I discuss on the blog with direct links back to Amazon. If you’re interested in picking up the book and do order stuff through Amazon, use the sidebar link and Amazon will actually send me a tiny pittance of a thank you for sending them business. If you don’t use the link and just go directly to Amazon and then find the book, they’ll just make more money. So the choice is yours.

As of right now there are three books in the Amazon bar, the other two are writing books that I can’t do without. I think I might have even mentioned them before. If I haven’t mentioned them, rest assured that I eventually will.

Now then, back to the business of writing.