Although he looks rather similar, this isn’t actually Ralph. My camera was lost overboard when the ship got caught in a bad storm.
There was a time, many years ago, when I struck out on my own and went backpacking in the rainforests of South America. The heat was sweltering, and the humidity stuck in my lungs, making every breath an effort of will. The group I was with consisted of a bunch of tree-hugger college kids, a missionary, and our guide. We called him Ralph, because, since he was a native, there was no way our American mouths could recreate the sounds of his actual name.
One week into the trip, a python strangled Ralph in his sleep. We were on our own. We tried to find our way back to civilization, but with Ralph gone, we walked in circles for three days. Our rations ran out by then. There was plenty of water, but we didn’t have the training to feed ourselves. The missionary girl, I think her name was Grace, volunteered to try some berries we found, hoping they weren’t toxic. Turns out they weren’t. But one got stuck in her throat and she choked to death. The Heimlich maneuver doesn’t always work. (more…)
I believe that every experience a writer has shapes his or her writing. Everything we do informs and influences who we are, and therefore what we write. Some of the things are minor. If I read a really good book, maybe my writing sounds like that style for awhile. If I find something incredibly unjust, I get up on my soapbox and include that theme in a story. Writers are like sponges, soaking up what is all around them, and then wringing it out onto a page. We mimic real life so that it feels real when it’s being read, and the best way to do that is take what happens in our lives and re-purpose it for our writing (although this isn’t always a conscious process).
Then there are profound life events that can forever change the way we think and feel, which can drastically alter our writing. Marriage. Children. Divorce. Death. These experiences dig deep trenches within us which fill with pools of emotion. From these pools we have an even greater depth to pull from when we write.
When my Mom died after struggling with breast cancer on and off for almost a decade, I was profoundly changed as a person. My mom was the most important person in my life. There really are no words to describe what it was like to watch her die for years, and then lose her before I was even 30 years old. I wrote an entire novel for National Novel Writing Month in November trying to find the words, and they still seem inadequate.
This is how I like to imagine my wife and I when we write.
Seven years ago, I married my best friend.
I could tell you the story of how we met. I’ve told it a million times. I could tell you of our mutual love of all things Disney. I could tell you of our honeymoon at Disneyland, during the 50th anniversary of the park opening.
But I’d like to talk about a different aspect of our life together, and how she saved me.
You see, when Rachel came back into my life about eight years ago, we hadn’t seen each other in years. Despite being great friends, our lives had taken different paths. She was married, had kids, and traveled. I stayed here, working and trying to be a writer. And we both went through some rough times. She got divorced. I lost my parents. We both struggled for a while. But we each came through it stronger.
After a short engagement, we were married. And a few months later, when I told her I wanted to leave the information technology support position I had held for five years, she understood. She encouraged me to pursue my dream, whatever that may be.
The following years were rough. I tried teaching for short time, but that wasn’t for me. So I put our savings and my trust in a plan to build a home business on the Internet. I failed fast, and started looking for work. This was around 2006, just as the U.S. economy was starting to turn south. Finally, as the last of our savings was spent and we were paying for groceries with credit cards, she noticed an ad for a copywriting position.
I applied and was offered the job, which started my second life in the corporate world. For the past several years, I’ve been happy working as a copywriter for a digital marketing agency.
Once we had some solid ground under our feet, I started writing again. As I mentioned last week, it wasn’t really until 2010 that I began writing short stories and novels again. After more than a decade, the stories started to come back to me. Little by little, I started to remember how to use those tools in my writer’s toolbox. She dragged me to a local write-in for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Though I didn’t finish that first year, I finished the next one. And I haven’t looked back since.
The Confabulator Cafe has given me a great base of operations, forcing me to write something every week. It’s a nice departure from the marketing work I do all week at my job. Most importantly, it allows me to work alongside some wonderful local writers who amaze and inspire me.
I don’t know if I could pick the moment in my life when I decided to be a writer. I was likely still very young, pecking away at my mom’s typewriter and dreaming of stories to be told.
But I can tell you when I became a copywriter. And when I entered NaNoWriMo for the first time. And I can tell you that neither would have been possible without my writing partner.
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.
Sometimes, tears can be our greatest inspiration. They force us to react, and rise above ourselves.
Almost a year ago, I really kicked up my writing output. I wrote a lot. I read a lot. I started to find myself as an artist. Then, in December, my Grandpa Joe lay in hospice, dying of cancer.
This affected me in many ways. Perhaps the most direct is the blog I wrote while struggling with my feelings about his impending death: A Train Ride to an Unknown Stop
I wrote it in the middle of the night, right after finding out. I bought a domain name so that my blog would be easier to find, and then I posted it. My post had nearly six hundred views in December.
Few of us can separate our writing from our personal lives. The stress of life’s tragedies and the joys of life’s celebrations can affect the ability to write. Whether dealing with family problems or issues at work, it doesn’t take a lot to hurt creativity.
This week, we asked the writers in the Cafe which life events have affected their writing. What did they do to work past it? And how can creativity bloom in the garden of misery? We hope you learn something from their answers.
Artists are often associated with having horrible addictions to drugs and alcohol. Sadly, writers are no exception. We’ve got alcoholics and drug abusers (and even rumors of a particular horror writer drinking mouthwash) amongst our peers, so the big question that sometimes comes up is do artists have to have a substance abuse problem to be good at their art? This week we asked what substances our Confabulators need in order to write. Here’s what we admitted to, at least.
I can’t say I’ve every used anything to enhance my writing, except a memory that goes back before the age of three. Any substances that I ingest are more for relief of physical twinges – tea or some kind of fruit drink over crushed ice, rice snack cakes, an apple cut into eighths and dusted with cinnamon, a couple of sections of dark chocolate. Never alcohol or any drugs, even aspirin. I need all my sense at 100% efficiency when I’m creating.
I am not pleasant to be around if I haven’t met my caffeine and sugar quota for the day. So, while it doesn’t necessarily help me write better, having coffee or Mountain Dew keeps me from snapping my laptop in half and throwing the pieces across the room in a Hulk-like rage.
When I was a bass player running around town trying to make it in an industry as fickle as music, I would sometimes play under the influence of beer. My performances then were always okay, not great. I did much better with just one beer in me before we went on. I never felt in control. By the same token, I don’t often work at writing under the influence of alcohol. Everyone who knows me (and now you, dear readers) know that I’m a whisky drinker. Scotch. Bourbon. Depends on my mood. Generally I don’t drink while I’m writing unless I’m drafting a long work. The writing while drinking is okay but not great. It’s pretty easy to tell when I’ve been drinking and writing. Now coffee, coffee’s another matter entirely.
When writing, I’ll drink coffee. Often too much, to the point that I start get twitchy.That’s fairly normal, I think. I am a social drinker — often an embarrassingly excessive social drinker — but I can’t write while drunk. I’m clumsy when drunk, and my netbook keyboard can’t take that. Also: after the loud part is over I stumble pretty quickly into sleeping.
I don’t necessarily need anything to enhance my writing ability, but the words flow more easily if I can relax with a glass of wine or pep myself up with a delicious espresso beverage. I left the harder drug experimentation behind way back in my college days, but I honestly don’t think any of that would have been even remotely helpful to my writing. Probably detrimental, if anything.
I’ve alway said that I have enough wrong with my body without messing up the wiring in my brain. For that reason, I’ve never taken drugs of the recreational variety and only moderately imbibed alcohol (except a rare night or two in my youth). The times I’ve been heavily medicated on doctors’ orders, I’ve had weird nightmarish dreams — but no good fodder for writing. To get the gates open and find my muse, I rely on relaxation and music.
I don’t like the feeling of being drunk, and I feel a revulsion towards recreational and even pharmaceutical drugs. I will drink, never more than one or two drinks, and rarely when writing. I’ll drink a lot of coffee during the day, but a lot of my writing is done in the evening or at night. I never saw the point of it all. I like being able to think clearly and experience the story fully.
I’ve never actively quit writing on the whole, in the sense that I actively made the decision to stop writing. I have, however, let life overwhelm my desire to write and stop me from going on. I’ve also quit writing fanfiction, which I love, because I thought it was the ‘more mature’ choice. (I’ve since started again.)
Both sucked.
Good news: neither was permanent. If you read nothing else in the big anecdotal love-fest that’s about to go down here, then take this: Just because you’ve stopped, doesn’t mean that you can’t start again. If you’re suffering from the lack of creative output, then stop suffering and start writing again.
This isn’t the exact car (this photo is borrowed from Wikimedia Commons) but this is what I remember it looked like.
When I was growing up, my dad had a great sportscar, a Triumph TR-4. It was white and a convertible and sat two, though my brother and I would shoehorn ourselves into the space behind the seats. This was a cool car, and it was only later that I discovered it was British and that made it even cooler.
The car had a manual transmission and Dad would flip a switch and it would go into overdrive. (Don’t ask me to explain overdrive unless we’re talking about guitar sounds. I never understood it beyond “it’s extra gears”.) When I was old enough to learn how to drive, the family car was a Datsun B210 (a car I later killed by dozing off behind the wheel but that’s another story) which also had a manual transmission. It was the car I learned to drive on. My parents cringed as I learned how to shift gears.
And who hasn’t gone through that? If you aren’t a parent, you won’t know how it feels on both sides, but that’s okay. Trust those of us that have that it can be the stuff of nightmares.
That sound of grinding gears is something that’s instantly recognizable. In cartoons, films, and comedies we know that there will be stoppage, that some of the gears may crack or pop off their axles, that there may be smoke and heat. (more…)
Do I ever think about quitting? Every week, particularly as I watch the deadline for these blog posts come roaring down on me like a runaway freight train [0].
The Plan [1] was to write the first draft of today’s blog yesterday. After all, I was going to be sitting mostly quietly in a room full of voting equipment for twelve hours, it was a primary so we wouldn’t be terribly busy, and what else was I going to do with myself? Heck, I’d write three and get all caught up! [2] I forgot a vital part of my process, which is that I cannot possibly get into the Flow of writing if there is somebody sitting next to me talking. Not necessarily talking to me, not necessarily talking about anything I need to know are am interested about, just talking. Sometimes just breathing loudly is sufficient to throw me off my game.
And yet I love Nanowrimo writeins. Probably because we spend good blocks of time where we Do Not Talk Just Write (called sprints). And as lovely as my co-election-ladies are, I could not possibly tell them, “OK, I’m going to do a writing sprint! You need to be quiet now!” [3]
The writing I do for the Cafe is totally voluntary. I don’t have to do it. I have no goals, nothing to prove. I’m not trying to sell myself as an author. If I quit, I doubt I’d so much as lose a friend [4].
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