Dear newbie writer type,
Word has it that maybe you’re a little concerned about running out of ideas one day. Well never fear, my friend. I have some advice for you that’s going to make it feel all better.
Shut up!
Not what you were looking for? Maybe you were hoping for something a little more . . . uplifting? You wanted someone to massage your ego as opposed to pistol whipping it? (more…)
For the first couple years I was in college, I spent the summers working at my hometown newspaper. It was a small weekly publication, and it introduced me to deadlines, editing, and how much I didn’t know about writing.
It was a great experience, and I seriously considered not going back to college after that first summer. I was addicted to being in the know, even if my sphere of knowledge was largely limited to the county around me. I also loved feeling like the words I wrote mattered to someone, and I held the belief that I was part of some larger fraternity of journalists, with whom I shared a code of ethics and a responsibility to the community I represented.
I was nothing if not an idealist.
During that first summer, I remember my mom asking me what I’d do if I had to report on something that involved a member of our family. Her question went something like this: If it was bad, you wouldn’t write about it would you? I think she was hoping for a different answer than the one I gave.
I’ve always liked watching my neighbors.
Not in a pervy kind of way. I mean, I know how that sounds. You’re immediately like, “Oh, he’s the guy who defiles himself behind the half-drawn curtain while the single mom next door sunbathes in her backyard.”
I’m not some kind of deviant. I just like to know what’s going on along my block. It’s always been a nice, quiet kind of place. It didn’t really start to go to hell until the clown moved in across the street.
Now I’m not prejudice against clowns as a whole, other than the fact that they’re evil incarnate and largely devoid of souls. In the pantheon of creepy-ass shit, clowns rank right up there with ice cream truck drivers, because you know something shady is always going on in the back of those things.
My family and I recently relocated to Virginia, and as a result, we’re working through a lot of necessary changes. One of those is the search for a local writing/critique group, so I don’t go crazy from lack of human contact.
(I work from home and easily lose track of time. So unless I have regularly scheduled events that take me outside, I’m going days without feeling the sun on my skin. It seems like this fact should bring me some level of shame, but honestly, it doesn’t. I am who I am.)
Anyway … as the search for local writers continues, I find myself dropping in on meetings and sitting in on critique groups to evaluate chapter 28 of some random person’s novel. This ongoing experience has really crystalized a couple things for me:
It probably goes without saying, but the search isn’t going well.
Stories like this are tricky. Ultimately, they’re subjective. All I can do is lay out the events as I see them, and you have to understand that I’m giving you a single point of view. This is my own admittedly biased experience, and others in this tale could take exception to my interpretation. Be that as it may, this is the event that I feel has done the most to shape me into the writer I am today.
Growing up, my brothers and I hit the daily double of childhood. We were both rural and poor, and from an early age we were taught to distrust authority. Most of our conversations with non-related adults consisted of the following phrases: “I don’t know,” and “they’re not here right now.” The tenants of our family were simple and observed like dogma: support it, defend it, and keep everything in house.
If you weren’t blood, our affairs were none of your damned business, and marrying in didn’t necessarily afford you with a right to know.
As a child, this sort of fierce loyalty appealed to me, and I saw something noble and good in its application. My brothers and I belonged to something greater than ourselves, and we thought it was something worth defending. I no longer feel that way.
I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: I am an attention whore. As such, it is hard for me to quit something that might garner me praise. It’s shallow, I know, but it works for me.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t times when I absolutely want to quit writing. I definitely have those moments of desperate frustration when, more than anything else, what I’m actually doing is running away from writing. I have a classic love/hate relationship with the creative process.
The meditative high you get when you’re on a roll and the words are flowing is an addictive feeling. At the same time, the dread of a deadline when you don’t feel like you have anything worth saying is equally devastating. And those times when you lie in bed feeling guilty about the words you didn’t produce that day are just agony.
I freaking hate the way writing, or perhaps I should say the way not writing, makes me feel. At the same time, I crave that attention you get when you actually manage to do a good job. If even one person comments that they enjoyed something I wrote, I’m on cloud nine for the rest of the day.
Feed the monkey, people, and he will dance.
Jungle Room — 2010
I’ve never been much of an Elvis fan.
I had an uncle growing up, you can call him Dick because … well, that’s what he was. So Dick was coo coo for Cocoa Puffs when it came to all things Elvis. He collected figurines and costumes and those stupid little porcelain plates that only idiots and old ladies buy from shopping channels. He even bought a mantle-sized Velvet Elvis and had some local artist paint him into the picture with his arm around The King.
I’m telling you, Dick was not a well man. I’m pretty sure I caught him beating off to “Blue Christmas” one time, and he was referring to his little man as a “hunk of, hunk of burnin’ love.”
So, yeah, that’s a little piece of my innocence I’m never getting back.
I’ve thought a lot about this: why we write. Lord knows, there are easier ways to spend your day.
One of the dirty truths about writing is that it’s a hell of a lot of work. No matter what offerings I make (and there have been many), the words refuse to write themselves. They are selfish and lazy little bastards.
To be entirely honest, there are plenty of times I want to walk away and do almost anything other than write, but for some reason, I don’t. And a lot of my writer friends don’t either. Time after time, we find ourselves drawn back to the desk or the laptop or the pen and paper so we can hash out the things that are banging around inside our head.
Now you might be saying to yourself, “Wow, Larry. That sounds like a stubborn group of people who really have a thing for emotional agony.” I wouldn’t disagree with you. But I also admit that I proudly count myself among their numbers, and I think the answer to why we keep at this writing thing goes deeper than our being a collection of people whose particular kink is self-induced frustration.
The older I get, the more a particular piece of advice begins to resonate with me. It’s that well-worn writing chestnut: “Write what you know.”
I honestly have no idea who first said this, and I don’t have a clue as to the context in which it’s meant to be taken. All I can tell you is what it means to me, or what it has come to mean to me, which is maybe the same thing but still feels a little different in my mind.
Whenever I hear “write what you know,” I immediately think open your diary. Not that I have such a book. Nor is its cover adorned with winged unicorns. And no, it doesn’t feature a gold-filigreed lock that responds to a single key which I wear around my neck night and day. That would be ridiculous, and I am a serious sort of man. Seriously!
Getting back to the point, opening your diary means putting yourself in your stories. It doesn’t matter what genre you write or when and where your story is set, you’re going to be dealing with characters and situations about which you have an opinion. What better place to tell people what you think.