The Confabulator Cafe

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  • Obstacle or Excuse?

    The biggest obstacle that keeps me from writing is the same thing that enables me to write in the first place: my mind.

    My mind never stops. Even when I’m trying to sleep. Especially when I am trying to sleep. I worry and doubt and question and berate constantly. I have an idea, but as soon as I have an idea I have another idea. But then I worry that I should be doing something else. Or I really should be doing something else, so guilt keeps me from writing. Or my mind gets distracted. Shiny! Internet. Work. Friends. Family. Sleep. Eating. Chores. Errands.

    My mind constantly tries to prioritize all of the things going on in my life, and most days, writing ends up at the bottom of the list.

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  • Ignoring the Obstacles

    This week has been a difficult one for writing. I could share with you a tale of woe, lamenting the various obstacles that have kept me from my writing. But it would only be half true. You see, while there are a number of obstacles to writing, I alone allow them to distract me. I am my biggest obstacle.

    Bengal tigers at the Topeka Zoo
    Forget about the obstacles between you and your goal. They don't matter. Unless they're hungry.

    You know writers. We all have ADHD and are easily distracted by shiny objects. I’m no different.

    The truth is, I’ve been working for several months to simplify my life. I’ve tried to remove myself from every obligation that didn’t help me achieve my goals as a writer.

    I stopped writing film reviews. I ended my web design consulting. I curtailed my Facebook activity. And I’ve tried to cut down on my weekly consumption of television.

    So you’d think I’d have plenty of time for writing, right? Not so.

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  • Being Fear’s Bitch: A Guide to Not Writing

    Stop being a filthy, damned liar.  The only thing keeping you from writing is you.

    You don’t have the time? Make time. You’ve got a busy life? Then schedule it in. Either start being honest about the reason you’re not writing, or start being honest about the fact that you don’t want it enough to make it happen. Because if you did want to see this thing through, you’d start sacrificing to get there.

    The true reason you aren’t writing is because you’re afraid. You think you’re not good enough or smart enough or clever enough. You don’t value your own perspective. You think anything you had worth saying has probably already been written by someone else, and you bet they were a lot more talented than some coffee-shop hack with a laptop.

    You know why you write in restaurants? Because strangers feel less judgmental than family. Those people ordering lunch have no idea what you’re working on. They probably don’t give a good god damn about you anyway, and they sure as hell don’t have a clue about what you secretly hope to achieve. Anonymous is neutral and numbing and safe.

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  • Decisively, A Writer

    “But the cure for most obstacles is, Be decisive.” – George Weinberg

    Life has a tendency to step on its own toes. Our interests and pass-times are more diverse and numerous than ever in human history. Our own worst enemy is sometimes our success.

    Once upon a time, if you were a writer, you probably didn’t have many other hobbies or interests outside of reading and writing. Now, there is the Internet, our phones, the Internet on our phones. Any interest worth having is accessible by simply getting in a car and driving to it.

    There are times when I think we, as artists, were better off when we had nothing to do other than work on our craft. There are some amazing things available in the modern era. Writers can research nearly any topic without leaving their desks. It has never been easier for writers to network with one another, nor to get their work out there for people to see. Submissions are made instantaneously through email and responses come just the same.

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  • Obstacle Course (Week of 23 April 2012)

    In life there are thousands of obstacles that can run a writer’s best laid plans aground: meetings, power outages, illness, you know, the Sudden Things. Then there are the Things that we know about, the Potential Things: families, work, friends, pets, school. All these Things are somehow accounted for and yet we know that they’ll make us miss our writing time if we let them.

    Here at the Cafe, we do our best to cope with those Things. The best laid plans and better mousetraps and all the cliches that go along with the platitudes about the difficulties of life are part of the everyday for writers. This week the Confabulators are going to tell us how they deal with these things, how they overcome the problems that pop up to keep them from writing. These are many and varied and you may be surprised at what we say.

    So here’s your table. We’ll take your order when you’re ready. In the meantime, read up on our ideas of how life gets in the way of creating stories to keep you entertained.

     

  • How do you balance your busy life with time to write?

    Every year we all get the same amount of Time: 12 Months, 52 Weeks, 7 Days, 24 Hours. Everyone gets this, not just writers or athletes or the person behind the counter at your favorite bookstore. It’s what we do with that Time that differentiates us from one another. Some of us have families and significant others and day jobs and clubs and we can barely find Time to keep up with what we’re supposed to do let alone what we want to do.

    So it’s not really about having Time to do Things at all, is it? It’s more about taking the Time to do Things.

    This week, the Confabulators are pondering how they do it: how do they find the time to write when life  is so full? If there are tips in here that we can find useful, do you think we’ll take advantage of that? Or will we be too busy?

     

    Muriel Green

    I have found that no matter how important I say something is, waiting around for free time to do that thing will lead to it never happening. Instead of waiting for the moment to arise, I schedule time to write. I believe in scheduling things that are important to me and writing is important to me. If anyone reading this thinks “I wish! There is no free time!” I would strongly encourage trying out a month without cable tv,, netflix, etc. I thought I was busy before when I had those things, but cancelling them helped me find upwards of 2 extra hours per day.

    R.L. Naquin

    My busy life consists of staring at the dirty dishes and writing novels. I’m very lucky. Right now, writing is my job. If I’m not making an effort to track down that weird smell hiding somewhere in the house, I should be writing. My husband works to support my writing, sort of like when one partner puts the other through med school. If this all goes belly up, I’ll have to get a real job. But if everything falls into place, he can eventually stay home and write, too.

    Kevin Wohler

    There is no balance. My life (family and work) comes first. Any time that’s left over is what remains for writing. Of course, the nice thing about writing is that I can steal little bits of time (a car ride, a long shower, a few vacation days) to write. For me, writing has to be separate from my busy life, not a part of it.

    Jack Campbell, Jr.

    It is nearly impossible. There has to be a constant effort to make time for writing. It isn’t going to happen just when I have time. If I don’t work it in with a couple of hours here and there, nothing is ever going to get done. I think it is that way for most writers who don’t make their living just by writing. You have to get creative with your creativity.

    Jason Arnett

    I’m a Libra. My whole life is about balancing everything. I can try to schedule things but that gets blown up pretty quickly. Instead, I look for the moments: a few minutes here and there to do the things that need doing. I’m better about telling my wife that I need time to write and she’s good about letting me do that but if I never spoke up and said anything, I’d never have finished the draft of the novel that’s waiting to be edited on my hard drive. When I do that, though, I have to make sure she gets equal amounts of time, too. In a nutshell, speaking up is how I do it.

    Nancy Cayton Myers

    I don’t.  The busy life (read: kids)come first. Since it’s not my main livelihood, writing takes adistant backseat.  Partly because it just has to be that way, butalso because I’ve learned I’ll be too frustrated if I expect it to beany other way at this point in my life. Having said that, I know I’ll go crazyif I don’t write, so I’ve pushed down the guilt that I should betaking care of something else, joined writing groups for support ,and have forced myself to leave the house to carve out an hour or twoevery other day for writing, sometimes more in the form of retreatsand conferences.  It can be done!

  • Remixing in Writing

    For this week’s exploration [0] let us delve into my little used fiction writing side and talk about my flash fiction piece published on this very site just a few weeks ago.

    The thing with the mountain lion? Totally happened to some friends of mine. Every part of that story was stolen from somewhere else [1]. Mountain lion? Stolen. Location? Stolen. Early 1900s Girl Scout troop? The story was written on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Girl Scouts; you couldn’t trip over a verb that week without landing face first in some retrospective or other [2]. Plucky girl heroines? My library has a complete collection of Lucy Maude Montgomery. Even the assignment was based on theft; steal a photo from Flickr and write a story about it.

    That photo was f-ing awesome, by the way. Period dress? Sabre? Pirate hat? To someone who has worked renaissance festivals for 20+ years, that was practically a homecoming.

    From the photo I got the character of Jane, from Ms. Montgomery and Ms. Low [3] I got her plucky self reliance and adventurous spirit, and I developed a backstory based loosely on something I had once heard about William Allen White’s daughter [4].

    However, I had no story.

    Zip. Zilch. Nada. Character and situation, yes. Actual plot, no. In desperation and with a deadline looming [5] I pilfered the story of the mountain lion from a friend. Bam! Beginning, middle, end, and it clocked in right around 997 words.

    For some reason, as a kid I developed the idea that creativity meant making things up from nothing, developing something complete and unique [6]. The term “remixing” had yet to be invented. If I made something by following a pattern and was praised for it, I felt like an impostor. The creativity belonged to the pattern designer, not to me. As a grownup I’ve learned about how to adapt what went before into what is coming into being, but it still feels like craftsmanship, not creativity.

    But as a grownup I’ve also learned that life is about getting over myself.

    [0] Sounds better than “random babbling,” doesn’t it?
    [1] Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory.
    [2] Supposedly cookie sales are better business training than you can get in some well-reputed B-schools.
    [3] Founder of the Girl Scouts. Try to keep up.
    [4] At an age when most girls of her era were putting their hair up and becoming young ladies, she insisted on wearing plaits, because the younger she looked the more she could get away with.
    [5] Deadlines are my muse.
    [6] Which is almost impossible, of course, and almost nobody does it that way, and when they try it is largely inaccessible to the audience. But as a kid, everything in the world looks unique.

  • Influence

    W. Someset Maugham has been credited with stating “Write what you know.” He also has been quoted as say, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.”

    Sounds as if he might have had his good days and bad days in the creative process, too. And not only that, his edict to “write what you know” has been misused by many composition teachers and abused by their students who seem to prefer the second quote …

    Nevertheless, I write what I know. And then I slip into my “what if …?” mode, steal from every single author I’ve read and every person I’ve known, and assemble my stories out of bits and pieces, and what I end up with is a jigsaw-puzzle-like story of life.

    Most of my characters are assimilation and assemblages, but a few of them are directly based on one or two people I’ve known, at least at the beginning of their “lives” in my novels, until they take off on their own while I follow them and jot down their exploits in “What if …? Land”. What if I gave the sunny-faced girl I remember from my first period Junior English class more responsibility than she can handle? What if I dropped a black basketball player into a small town and forced him to play football? What if I placed a metal detector into the hands of a gay kid and sent him to the scene of a crime sixty years ago? What if I killed almost everyone off except for a teenager who has run away from home and manages to find a place of safety?

    Author influences on me are many and varied, but most of them are from the first books I read while growing up. Walter R. Brooks taught me how to generate humor in his “Freddy the Pig” series as did Hugh Lofting in the Dr. Dolittle novels. Nevil Shute showed me how to create happy endings that could be both satisfying and believable. Robert A. Heinlein was at least the first writer to create living, breathing creatures for me, and his contemporary, Arthur C. Clarke, taught me how to create settings that never existed out of what I knew, or at least suspected. Mackinlay Kantor and Jan de Hartog showed me how to create alternate histories and populate them with almost-real characters. And the list goes on.

    So – write what you know, but then be prepared to break any and all rules of writing. Works for me!

  • When Real Life & Fiction Collide

    I’m not the kind of writer who brandishes the threat, “You might be in my next novel.” It’s not that I have any problem with it — that Joe Buckley thing is hilarious — but it’s just not my thing. I feel weird appropriating the people and situations I know.

    I actively have trouble using real places, because then I feel an intense pressure to get everything right. I’ve got no trouble making details up on the fly. This town has an indoor pool! This town has a series of underground tunnels! These are cool when I’ve invented a town and there are no real-life rules to follow.

    Real world example!

    I was living in Manhattan, Kansas, when I was working on my first novel. Every day I used to drive home from work on Anderson, and I’d pass a street called “Edgerton.” I thought to myself That’s a cool name for a town. My main character should be from Edgerton, Wisconsin. Cool. I make up a town and set two chapters in it. I move on with my life. Good times.

    Fast forward several years later, because this is a blog post and blog time is like that. My husband and I are driving up visit my family in Wisconsin. I happen to be skimming the atlas while we’re driving, and what should I see?

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  • The Wild and the Innocent

    This is the edition of the book I got from the library
    Michael Moorcock was one of my favorite authors after I read this in my junior high school years. I read everything of his I could find.

    Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

    This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, places or things are unintentional or used fictionally.

    I’m telling you a true story, but I’ve changed things around to make it more believable.

    All these I’ve read or heard or seen in some form or fashion across books, magazines, films and television shows. You have, too. This is a writer’s attempt to say: “Hey, I wrote this thing that you may recognize yourself in, but I’m trying to reassure you that it’s not really you. Not really. I promise. Please don’t sue me. I don’t make enough money to make it worth your while, okay?”

    One of the books of my youth presented itself as a true story of time travel. Michael Moorcock presented The Land Leviathan as a true account from a distant relation, one Oswald Bastable. I was young and didn’t believe it or at least I didn’t believe it much. It lent the story an air of gravitas that certainly made quite an impression on my teenage mind.

    Looking back through the fog of decades, I believe that Moorcock based Bastable on someone he knew. He likely changed things like physical details, perhaps speech patterns and even little things like nervous habits. It’s entirely possible that Bastable was unrecognizable to the person who he was based on.

    Or maybe Bastable was real and so was the tale. I like to think it was real and that Moorcock cleverly disguised it as fiction to keep everyone guessing. A sort of double-blind, as it were.

    In my own work, I have used names of people I know as a kind of tribute. My comic book friends were in cryogenic sleep on a deep space mission to colonize a new world. A couple of my Twitter friends showed up as monster hunters in a chapter of the book I serialized on my website a couple of years ago. Some of the Confabulators will show up in a future work that I’m near to completing right now. In each case, I did it with no subterfuge and without doing anything that would damage them in any way. It’s fun to do.

    Even though there are people in my stories named after friends, they’re not real. They can’t be. Flesh and blood are not the same thing as words and phrases.

    As far as my own experiences, of course they inform my stories. When I travel I look for settings to use in stories, local color to include in them somewhere. Without fail I will change them to suit the tale because a shopkeeper is a shopkeeper whether in Colorado three years ago or on a distant planet in the far future. I will endeavor to make the story more true by changing everything I can to ensure the internal logic is solid, that it makes for a good read.

    So if you see your name in one of my stories, it’s not necessarily you. Maybe I thought of you when I was writing, but maybe not. Maybe I just lifted your name because I was struggling to come up with something. If that character is dressed like you, acts like you and seems to be you, relax: it’s not you. I promise.

    It’s not a true story. It’s a work of fiction. Names and places were changed. I don’t write biographies. Don’t sue me, okay?